I hate the state of chat right now. IRC is the kind of open standard and FOSS technology we need, but terribly outdated, Slack and Co. are shiny but inflexible and locked in.
Yeah, I really don't get how people feel like IRC is somehow the pinnacle of chat. Even if you think a lot of the features added by newer applications and protocols are unnecessary or even a negative, it's really hard to argue that IRC isn't a patchwork of incredible cruft built on top of something so barebones that it just did not survive contact with reality.
Disagree. 15+ years ago, people used IRC in real time, to chat and hangout online. Async chat sucks, plus we had forums for that kind of thing.
More recently, I've contributed to a number of open source projects that have live chat meetings on IRC. We kept logs of those meetings, but live chat is totally the point.
Slack, Teams, and Discord are proof that there are serious demands to have a chat system. It's just IRC as it is, is clearly outdated for the current market.
It's niche is as simple as it was way back when, you can create your own chat server for your community. Instead of having to use Discord, Slack, etc you can create your own and control it fully. While it's possible to do that to this day it's not to the same level it was back in the late 90s for example.
Personally I dislike this trend towards a plurality of chat "services" and "apps." Now each project I interact with has their own chat service. I have to maintain accounts on all of them and install several applications to interact with each. It's a pain to manage.
Not to mention that most of these services use Electron-based chat clients which exclude a bunch of people who cannot afford the kinds of machines required to use them or they have to suffer a poor experience on lower-end hardware. It also excludes people who use accessibility software or automation that doesn't integrate with web-based clients.
The user experience on IRC scales better. Anyone can write a rich, easy-to-use client or server. If you happen to be a programmer you can write your own tools to manage your own user experience. The drift from casual user to power user isn't stopped by a walled garden of a tightly-controlled user experience that doesn't integrate with anything.
I don't really understand the proliferation of group chat platforms. It's been around the since the dawn of the internet, and it already works great (IRC). Do we really need to keep smothering it in new web interfaces?
IRC kind of sucks. The experience is worse. That's why people keep making these different tools - Campfire, HipChat, Slack.
It's not just a technical thing. It's an experience thing. IRC is technically fine, just way too nerdy to be main line of business software these days.
+1 for IRC, the interface is clunky and the protocol hasn't aged particularly well (especially for mobile devices who may not be able to hold a connection forever). But the social aspect of easily accessible chatrooms and the plethora of clients/tools surrounding IRC is really second to none.
You can put a pretty skin on it (slack,discord) but at the end of the day it's going to take years to bring up the level of tooling and at the end you wind up in a closed loop on someone elses platform.
FWIW; I dream of electric sheep so I'm completely biased. I run an IRC network if anyone is interested in joining.
I haven't used IRC in a long time, but I'd be open to it, especially if it gave that "old internet" feel that I haven't been able to get from the tildaverse.
I dream of having my company use IRC for chat, and I used to fake it by using Slack through the awesome Emacs modes, but now that we're on Teams all hope is dead.
As far as I can tell IRC has stopped evolving; it has no provisions for people not always being connected, it has no answer to mobile, it has nothing for threaded conversations, it has nothing for video chat, it has no searchable scrollback.
IRC is legacy tech that kind of sucks, but all improvement has been done by startups rather than open source developers, so we have a fragmented mess. I mean, XMPP exists, but it's not that great either.
It turns out UX is more important than whether you need to convince people to install a new piece of software for the vast majority of people.
There's no reason that a web-based chat cannot also have a "thick" client which works as IRC currently does.
We can do both with a single service...
the true problem here is that IRC is long-forgotten by many, completely unknown by most, and those that remain remain because they have a strong attachment to IRC. That strong attachment will make driving a standard forward very difficult, because no two true IRC fans are going to have the same opinions on what a new version should look like.
It's the true fans of open source stuff that hold open source stuff back the most.
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