[HN Gopher] IRC technology news from the second half of 2021
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IRC technology news from the second half of 2021
Author : buovjaga
Score : 61 points
Date : 2022-01-08 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi)
| anthk wrote:
| I use catgirl for outgoing IRC servers and sic for bitlbee.
|
| Catgirl is much simpler than IRSSI but it doesn't support
| TLS'less connections.
|
| On the "Slack has superseded IRC" wrong supposition... IRC was
| already declining from the AIM/MSN days and then
| Whatsapp/Telegram nearly killed it.
|
| But, as Usenet, it's still widely used on geeky niches. it's the
| de facto medium for technical questions for programming or
| computer/networking stuff.
| [deleted]
| neom wrote:
| Gamja (gamja) is the Korean word for potato. Curious thing to
| call an IRC client.
| na85 wrote:
| Not much news at all, really. More of a roundup of popular
| clients and utilities.
|
| I suppose that's a reflection of the state of the IRC ecosystem,
| which is stagnant and slowly dying. The ircv3 project, while
| well-intentioned, will never result in the revitalization of IRC.
|
| I really like IRC but the ux story is pretty bad by modern
| standards. Users expect seamless multi device sync, for one. You
| can achieve a poor facsimile of this with a bnc and a shell
| account but it's not a great experience.
|
| It's little wonder to me that discord and slack have eaten IRC's
| lunch, sadly.
| Casteil wrote:
| >stagnant and slowly dying
|
| As Progval noted, this is more maturity than
| stagnation/death... Not all software needs to have more things
| continuously added to remain useful.
|
| > Users expect seamless multi device sync, for one. You can
| achieve a poor facsimile of this with a bnc and a shell account
| but it's not a great experience.
|
| I'd highly recommend TheLounge since it does this extremely
| well. For a given login (which can be connected to any number
| of IRC networks/channels), it'll have the same state across all
| sessions/devices (including private messages), without needing
| a special client for the device.
|
| Being a webapp, it can also be used on any work PC/device with
| a browser & internet connectivity.
|
| > It's little wonder to me that discord and slack have eaten
| IRC's lunch, sadly.
|
| Frankly, I've found Discord to be largely full of children and
| trolls.
| u801e wrote:
| > [IRC's] ux story is pretty bad by modern standards
|
| UX is entirely dependent on the client. And there are issues
| with modern UX standards that result in browser tabs using an
| entire core of CPU resources and/or allocating enough memory
| that the device becomes unresponsive.
|
| The other issue is the inconsistent UI. Automatic updates
| result in users having to learn a different way to accomplish
| what they need to do without prior warning or a way to opt out
| of the change. Slack did this a few years ago where markup no
| longer worked the way it had before[1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647
| progval wrote:
| > UX is entirely dependent on the client.
|
| Not entirely. Some features cannot be implemented without
| help from the protocol, like this extension to fetch history:
| https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I suppose that's a reflection of the state of the IRC
| ecosystem, which is stagnant and slowly dying.
|
| It's _stable_ , yes. Some of us like a slow-paced ecosystem.
|
| > I really like IRC but the ux story is pretty bad by modern
| standards. Users expect seamless multi device sync, for one.
| You can achieve a poor facsimile of this with a bnc and a shell
| account but it's not a great experience.
|
| Any bouncer will work, and there are even web clients that
| serve that role as well. Although, yes, it's higher friction
| than some alternatives.
|
| > It's little wonder to me that discord and slack have eaten
| IRC's lunch, sadly.
|
| Yes, the ease of use and feature differences do often favor
| alternatives; I'm hoping Matrix becomes the preferred
| replacement.
| progval wrote:
| > I suppose that's a reflection of the state of the IRC
| ecosystem, which is stagnant and slowly dying.
|
| I see it as mature rather than stagnant. I like my client to
| remain mostly the same over years so it doesn't disrupt me
| every time a developer changes something.
|
| > Users expect seamless multi device sync, for one. You can
| achieve a poor facsimile of this with a bnc and a shell account
| but it's not a great experience.
|
| Ergo (an IRC server) has it built-in:
| https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....
| na85 wrote:
| Awesome. Are any networks running ergo in production?
|
| My experience has been that most IRCops are very much of the
| change-averse nature.
| progval wrote:
| There is the flagship ergo.chat network, and a bunch of
| small networks. A total of 118 networks according to
| https://www.ircstats.org/servers (based on scanning the
| IPv4 address space on ports 6667 and 6697. Note that,
| despite being a census of servers, Ergo can't federated, so
| 1 server = 1 network for Ergo)
|
| > My experience has been that most IRCops are very much of
| the change-averse nature.
|
| True. Ergo in particular changes the IRC paradigm, so some
| old-timers don't like it very much. As far as I know, Ergo
| deployments are all brand-new networks
| tw04 wrote:
| > Ergo can't federated, so 1 server = 1 network for Ergo)
|
| I guess I qualify as an old timer even though I'm not
| that old then. If you can't federate servers I don't
| think it should be called IRC. It might be using the same
| protocol, but it's something else.
| progval wrote:
| Why? It doesn't make any difference for users.
|
| These days, IRC federation is only used to scale
| horizontally, and sadly, IRC networks doesn't need to
| scale over 100k concurrent users anymore.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| > It's little wonder to me that discord and slack have eaten
| IRC's lunch, sadly.
|
| Discord and Slack have the great advantage of being freemium
| proprietary software that don't have to inter-operate with any
| software not written by their own companies. They're paid more
| to hit a much easier target.
|
| I'll never be surprised when well-funded projects outperform
| volunteer-run projects. Even the Linux kernel is funded by
| different entities.
|
| How do you feel about Matrix and some of the other new-age FOSS
| chat systems?
| kingcharles wrote:
| It's crazy, I've been using IRC for practically 30 years. I was
| using IRC for months before I even checked out The Web because
| there was nothing on it back then.
| spydum wrote:
| literally my first foray into the "internet", was telnetting
| from a dialup BBS to an IRC port, and issuing the raw IRC
| commands (someone had given me enough info to join a channel
| and basically say hi.. ).
| [deleted]
| hprotagonist wrote:
| I updated irssi. Then i had to update a plug-in i haven't touched
| since 2011.
|
| that's about it
| eahm wrote:
| Where is Igloo for iOS?
| veltas wrote:
| What's wrong with irssi? Why's it not listed here?
|
| EDIT: disregard, this is a list of updates, and irssi had no
| updates
| buovjaga wrote:
| It's lacking a maintainer, so didn't have any changes to talk
| about. I pointed to an active fork called Neirssi instead:
| https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...
| veltas wrote:
| EDIT: disregard, I see this is a list of updates to clients,
| not a list of clients.
| guipsp wrote:
| What are you on about? Look at the git repo. There were
| literally no changes to talk about.
| buovjaga wrote:
| No source, just an observation.
| buovjaga wrote:
| > Neirssi is not yet working
|
| I think that is just a case of a non-native English speaker
| making a mistake. The full context is:
|
| "If you are stuck at any point, feel free to come to the
| IRC channel #irssi on the Libera Chat network and ask for
| assistance. While Neirssi is not yet working, you can use
| the Libera Chat Webchat."
|
| I read the last sentence as "If you can't get Neirssi to
| work for you whether due to a critical crasher or something
| else, join via web chat and ask for help".
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(page generated 2022-01-08 23:00 UTC)