[HN Gopher] IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)
Author : CHB0403085482
Score : 303 points
Date : 2023-07-29 10:12 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (koshka.love)
(TXT) w3m dump (koshka.love)
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Discord vs IRC is just another extension of the "open,
| decentralised vs proprietary, centralised social media" debate.
| It baffles me that even people who are aware of, and opposed to,
| the ongoing enshittification of Twitter and Reddit would so
| happily choose Discord.
|
| That said, I think privacy is a weak argument against Discord
| (or, rather, a weak argument for IRC). I have used IRC for many
| years and I never assumed that anything I put on there was
| private. Everything you post can be seen and trivially recorded
| by other users as well as the server operator.
|
| To me it's more about not having your access to social media
| entirely at the whim of a corporation whose incentives are not
| aligned with yours and who, sooner or later, is going to come
| under significant pressure to monetise you. So I guess, in a
| word, control is the main advantage. This includes control over
| _whether_ you can access the service, _how_ you access it, _what_
| you can access and on what _terms_ you can access it. IRC 's
| simplicity is a definite plus in that regard.
|
| And then you have the "average user", who ruthlessly selects for
| ease of use and cost and doesn't care about any of this stuff. I
| think that is a short-sighted position, but ultimately people
| will make their choice and the average user's preference for
| walled gardens built by VC-backed corporations is so strong I
| think it unlikely to be reversed by any amount of blogs or HN
| comments. I think these services (or their successors) will
| always continue to exist and will probably always be far more
| popular than the open alternatives, but it is still worth
| maintaining and promoting those alternatives, which can provide a
| sustainable platform for those of us who care about such things.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| I care about privacy and flexibility and the other things
| decentralization gets you, but I grew up with instant
| messengers (Yahoo, WLM, now Discord, which is the closest thing
| to WLM in feature completeness yet still not at parity since
| it's a thin client where every feature rent seeks). Not only
| could I barely figure out how to use IRC last time I tried, but
| it doesn't have things I've come to expect, like avatars,
| emoticons, file transfer with embedded previews, etc. D: That
| shit's in the Stone Age!
|
| I'm excited by projects like Element, which is Matrix protocol-
| powered Discord but open source, but, aside from network
| performance and feature parity, network effects rule social
| tech. You're doomed to use Discord if nobody uses Element.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| IRC has some advantages. You can use with without specialized
| software (and I have done many times when not having a IRC
| client), or you can write your own IRC client or use one of many.
| There may also be web interface if you want them.
|
| Note that you can make IRC server which makes logs of channels
| and could provide a link to access the file in the MOTD or HELP
| file, if desired. It can also be done by clients and link in the
| TOPIC message, which is more common.
|
| IRC is good for fast communication with short messages, but for
| slow communication with long form messages is also sometimes more
| useful and for that, NNTP would be better, I think.
| hengheng wrote:
| At its core, I agree that the bare-bones nature of IRC can be
| wonderful. But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and
| Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first
| priority. People leave their laptop, go to the bathroom, get
| their phone out and go on typing.
|
| I used IRC for a brief period even after we began to have
| multiple devices. It was always through some kind of proxy, or
| basically an ssh connection through GNU screen, just so that
| basic functionality like asynchronous messaging worked, and so
| that my setup would carry over. The whole protocol you would have
| to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably
| be more complex than IRC itself. To a point where any of the big
| players could introduce IRC-style channels as a fun retro
| feature. I'd bet more money on that feature becoming popular than
| on an IRC resurgence.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > have seamlessness between client devices as their first
| priority. People leave their laptop, go to the bathroom, get
| their phone out and go on typing.
|
| On IRC, I leave my desktop (quasselclient), go to the bathroom,
| get out my phone and go on typing (quassel app) (*)
|
| All functioning because I'm actually connected to Quassel.
|
| (*) actually I would _never_ do this.
| s0ss wrote:
| What you describe is basically this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software)
|
| Also, tangentially related to your first point; I am personally
| exploring more ways to disconnect. Even if it's just briefly,
| like not bringing my phone to the bathroom as you describe. I
| realize now that I hate being always connected. Vanilla irc
| sounds like a dream compared to the nightmare of constant
| connection.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| > But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord,
| have seamlessness between client devices as their first
| priority.
|
| Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss.
| Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages.
| Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen
| again. It mostly seems to happen on Android.
|
| In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been
| solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right
| around the time when the smart phone came around, but then,
| because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to
| phones, we had the same problem again in the mobile world:
| WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They
| added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true
| multi-device support.
|
| The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their
| protocols didn't require a persistent connection.
| Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC
| could have been extended to support this too, but it's always
| faster to just build something new and be first to market.
|
| If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device
| experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and
| Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a
| custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI
| (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across
| all devices, and work with flaky connections on mobile. It
| obviously requires you to run the core on some server so it's
| accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA
| calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern
| world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in
| termux on my phone.
|
| The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably
| The Lounge[2].
|
| [1] https://quassel-irc.org/
|
| [2] https://thelounge.chat/
| nottorp wrote:
| > But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord,
| have seamlessness between client devices as their first
| priority.
|
| First? Slack takes ages to sync lately (sometimes you have to
| explicitly refresh) and has a ... random ... idea of how to
| move unread counts around.
|
| Discord never notifies me of direct messages from my daughter
| but always notifies me of announcements in a gaming discord
| i've explicitly muted to hell and back.
| progval wrote:
| > The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to
| achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than
| IRC itself.
|
| You don't have to build a new protocol. The Ergo IRCd supports
| multiple clients connecting to the same account (and using the
| same nick) at the same time using the regular IRC protocol:
| https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....
| kyrofa wrote:
| > The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC
| [...]
|
| First off, I love IRC and always will. But boy, the author sure
| must have a stable internet connection. In my experience one blip
| means a lost message with no indication that it's been lost. That
| is not my definition of reliable.
| progval wrote:
| IRC uses persistent TCP connections as a transport. You can't
| lose a message in the middle of a stream without the whole
| connection being closed, and your client would tell you about
| that.
| kyrofa wrote:
| > You can't lose a message in the middle of a stream without
| the whole connection being closed, and your client would tell
| you about that.
|
| I don't know what to tell you other than "that doesn't mesh
| up with the reality of my experience" _shrug_. Even if they
| did tell me about a connection issue (which they often didn
| 't), those messages are still gone with no indication that I
| missed anything ("hey your connection blipped" != "here are
| the messages you missed while you were gone").
| progval wrote:
| What client do you use? I can try looking for why it would
| hide it from you.
| kaoD wrote:
| Well, I don't know what to tell you other than "that
| doesn't mesh up with the reality of TCP".
| kakwa_ wrote:
| This was not a really issue... as long as you had access to a
| shell on a reliable server to screen+irssi (or tmux+weechat if
| you felt fancy).
| kyrofa wrote:
| Well sure, I used a bouncer like everyone else because of
| this issue (and for persistent presence since I dealt with
| people in different timezones), but that is a workaround for
| a protocol that isn't actually reliable, which is sort of my
| point.
| ginko wrote:
| > The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC
| ultimately also means that there are a number of fancy modern
| features that Discord has that IRC lacks, a big one being the
| inability to view backlogs of conversations that transpired while
| one was not connected to an IRC server. Although IRC does not
| itself provide this functionality, the extremely simple nature of
| IRC allows for a couple of lightweight options for reliably
| remaining on IRC around the clock and not missing out on a word
| that anyone says.
|
| The article brushes over this, but IMO the lack of built-in
| backlog support is the main reason why IRC is essentially doomed.
| Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just run an
| always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it.
|
| Especially when there are open, federated chat protocols that
| don't have this problem.
| tharne wrote:
| > Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just
| run an always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it.
|
| If you want a full conversation history then use something like
| email/listservs. IRC is for real-time chat. We already have a
| plethora of async options.
| [deleted]
| qudat wrote:
| > the main reason why IRC is essentially doomed
|
| chat history is critical even for realtime chat.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| There are good reasons to not have a backlog in a chat system.
|
| For one it stops you from being lazy and not maintaining FAQs
| and documentation.
|
| It also forces you to stop treating the chat as something you
| need to keep up to date with. At work I see people commonly
| scrolling back for pages and pages to find the last read marker
| and continue reading from there. This seems unhealthy to me.
|
| I use a bouncer but I very rarely use the logs. For all the
| purposes for which I would use logs, there are normally bots in
| the channel which can compensate.
| j45 wrote:
| This is a good point.
|
| Using chat as a source of truth is not a good idea
|
| Over time it becomes more and more ridiculous to use it as
| your knowledge base.
| op00to wrote:
| I worked on a global team and conversation happens 24/7. When
| my bouncer dropped, I would miss out on critical stuff.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| That fair... but does that sound like a that called for a
| synchronous system?
|
| It seems someone chose the wrong thing, then you needed a
| history feature to bridge the gap.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| If discord had a blip and stopped working for your global
| team then you would have a more catastrophic problem
| surely?
|
| Regardless, what is your point? I never claimed that
| conversions can't happen when you are not online, just that
| you should design your conversations such that it doesn't
| matter if someone isn't online.
|
| The problem you just described was caused not by IRC and
| its lack of backlog but by you and your team and your
| misuse of a backlog-less chat system.
|
| Important announcements shouldn't be done on IRC. For that
| matter, neither should they be done on Teams, Slack,
| Discord, Matrix, XMPP, or Skype. Important announcements
| belong on a web page and a mailing list (both
| simultaneously) or alternatively on some other purpose
| built system which tracks who has seen an annoucement so
| that if important announcement is missed by a key player,
| someone is alerted and can reach out using an alternative
| method of communication.
|
| But even if you insist on misusing a chat protocol like IRC
| for this, ask someone who was there for their logs? I don't
| understand how nobody on your global team was able to even
| just summarize what you missed.
| j45 wrote:
| IRC bots literally maintained a history for anyone to
| catchup.
| jokoon wrote:
| Logging chat is really really expensive in terms of hardware
| and CPU.
|
| I don't really understand why people would need to log chat, it
| doesn't really make sense to me. Chat is meant to be ephemeral,
| short lived, and not leave trace. Chat is spontaneous.
|
| If users want to leave a trace, they use a database or email.
|
| Discord added threads and forums, and those should be logged,
| but not channels.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Logging chat is really really expensive in terms of
| hardware and CPU.
|
| I don't know what expense you're imagining, but my IRC logs
| took almost zero CPU to acquire and they add up to well under
| a gigabyte per year _before_ I apply transparent 4x
| compression.
| stefandesu wrote:
| It's very interesting how different people's definition of
| "chat" is. The comment above yours (at the time of reading
| this) says "Chat without history is such a waste", so the
| opposite of what you are saying.
|
| I think when I was a teenager, I did a lot of chatting online
| in the sense you are talking about, and I didn't really care
| about the backlog. But nowadays, there's no room for "chat
| without log" because it's way too involved. I don't do
| synchronous chatting anymore at all, basically. After reading
| your comment, it seems like "chat" in general is just not for
| me anymore. Asynchronous messaging, however, still has a big
| part in my life.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I somehow fail to see how you cannot implement an IRC server
| that does logging and offers search/download of them on the
| side.
|
| That existing IRC implementations may be antiquated mammoth
| shit shouldn't prevent anyone from building something new.
| bitwize wrote:
| It's one of those things like "building an X server that
| isolates the graphics and events of untrusted clients from
| evert other client". It could be done, but people won't do
| it. They'll just whinge about its lack being _inherent_ to
| the technology because there 's more excitement in sweeping
| away the old tech and starting afresh than there is in
| building on what's there.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I can see that there's no easy money in doing such a
| project, and that it's quite a bit more than a few nights
| hobby project, so there are too many shits to give, but
| instead of whining about how technology is outdated, one
| can at least be frank about it.
|
| I understand that a part of this whining is a desire to
| market one's own proprietary silo which purports to solve
| these problems.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I think because many people would not want that. I think if
| some channels start this, people would flee.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| This is a problem solvable with a newfangled thing called
| ,,server configuration".
| nathias wrote:
| thats why we need to go back to irc with eggdrops
| pmarreck wrote:
| Retaining old IRC chat while I wasn't present was the original
| reason I learned how to use the "screen" command.
|
| Of course, this was over 20+ years ago now.
|
| I had an IRCCloud account for the same exact reason until
| freenode "blew up"
| RomanAlexander wrote:
| there's built in support for this
| https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history
| lucideer wrote:
| The IRC3 chathistory extension is less than 5 years old and
| still an unstable "work in progress" spec.
|
| Absolutely fantastic that it was finally added but IRC is 34
| years old, and this has been an essential feature of chat
| services for at least 20 of those years.
|
| I'd love to see it's introduction now save IRC but given the
| seeming resistance to adding it, one wonders how long any
| other improvements will take.
| j45 wrote:
| How old is slack and discord?
|
| Slack is just a modern irc interpretation. It literally
| started running on top of IRC.
|
| Discord got popular because it was one of the only chats
| that kids could access and install in school. It wasn't a
| serious tool.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _just a modern irc interpretation_
|
| This is the point isn't it. If IRC were fit for purpose,
| we wouldn't need "modern interpretations".
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| if IRC weren't fit for purpose, nobody would be using it
| Karunamon wrote:
| "Purpose" and "fitness" change over time, while IRC has
| not. And proportionally speaking, nobody is. Companies
| use Slack and Teams, while gamers, friend groups, and a
| nontrivial amount of open source projects use Discord.
| lucideer wrote:
| That depends on your definition of purpose. If the
| purpose is to be niche tech, then yeah, sure, you're
| right.
| prmoustache wrote:
| The purpose has slided.
|
| IRC was an instant/synchronous chat protocol. We had
| newsgroup/web forums for unsynychronous chat/dicussions.
|
| The likes of slack, and later discord, had the idea of
| merging sync and unsync discussion to provide both.
|
| In the end slack/discord/teams ended up being jack of all
| trades/master of none.
|
| Yes the backlog is saved automatically but for most of
| them the search is slow and borderline unusable and it
| ends up being much more difficult to search for
| information than using google with the
| site:yourwebforum.example.org option.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| in exactly the same way as how the post I responded to
| depends on _your_ definition of purpose, a point it seems
| I illustrated successfully
|
| as for your snide, obviously wrong comment at the end,
| it's not worth a substantial response
| op00to wrote:
| Chat without history is such a waste. I used IRC recreationally
| back in the day, then at work for 10 years. What a total
| garbage communication format IRC is. People changing nicks to
| indicate being away was my biggest complaint.
| nmz wrote:
| It is unnecessary, AWAY indicates status, however people
| prefer changing their nick. of course, on mobile era, AWAY is
| unnecessary given you have a good mobile irc client.
| veave wrote:
| I like that IRC has no backlog support. When you join a channel
| it's like you actually joined a room. You don't know what they
| were talking about when you weren't there.
| j45 wrote:
| Having the days history could be useful.
|
| Still maybe there could be a way to summarize those chats
| with some kind of a transforming generative text system that
| I hope exists one day.
| Avamander wrote:
| Depends on the server. Many servers give you a reasonable
| amount of backlog before joining. A lot of regular users use
| something nice like Quassel or ZNC.
| j45 wrote:
| Good point, connecting to a client or bouncer right on the
| server resolves this.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Yes, but then you need a client/bouncer which costs some
| sort of resource, whether it being your own computer, VPS
| or paid service.
|
| It's not trivial to setup a bouncer for the new guy who's
| just worked out how to connect to IRC.
| nulbyte wrote:
| > It's not trivial to setup a bouncer for the new guy
| who's just worked out how to connect to IRC.
|
| As I recall, newbies often figured out how to do this
| pretty quickly, even before the recent trend of IaaS and
| free tiers. Shell accounts with bouncers were a quite
| common offering back in the day.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's a very interesting topic. Feature will alter the
| sociological / human aspect of the tool. I could feel it on
| discord, you join a room like on IRC, you join a realm, a
| group with lots of idiosyncrasies.
|
| When I join an IRC chat there's a lot less baggage.. it's
| just a label / topic, it's very freeing.
|
| logging, message fixing, embedded replies .. all great but
| not important in the end. These things are blending
| professional complexity with normal human moments. Not the
| right optimization (if optimizations are required at all)
| j45 wrote:
| Threading is handy though. Although keeping track of so
| many convos was half the fun of irc.
| qudat wrote:
| Having the ability to reply to a message would be
| incredibly useful in irc, which is being worked on:
| https://ircv3.net/specs/client-tags/reply.html
| agumonkey wrote:
| Everyone of these feature is entirely awesome, but when
| talking i actually find that it changes the nature of the
| convos.
| lucideer wrote:
| That's nice as an optional feature but as a baseline it just
| seems like sentimental skeumorphism/metaphorism.
|
| Chat being real-time is certainly "approaching real life"
| much moreso than fully asynchronous email, but most people
| don't want either to be real life: chat still needs an
| element of asynchronicity to distinguish it as a
| technologically useful medium improving over actually walking
| into a real room.
|
| To put it another way: if I'm in a real life room where being
| present for the full conversation is necessary, it's easy to
| excuse being late or going to the bathroom as unfortunate
| parts of life when people are repeating themselves. When
| there's simple technological solutions that can easily
| prevent me from missing anything important, and someone's
| telling me they don't want it because they like the
| inconvenience, that's harder to justify.
| Razengan wrote:
| How about partial backlogs? Like say I could "subscribe" to
| certain keywords (upto a max limit if that's necessary, say
| 10) and the server will store all messages containing those
| words or my username.
|
| If I need more context about those messages when I return, I
| can just ask those users (or a bot).
| phoronixrly wrote:
| I prefer no built-in logging (which is and has been easily
| achieved with bots that loiter in the channel and store
| messages) in place of orders of magnitude more resources
| required to run the server. Looking at Matrix btw. XMPP does
| not have the resource issue, and has XEPs for message archives.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| You can look at Matrix, but it won't help you, since Matrix
| additionally has a DAG datastructure for decentralized
| chatrooms, which allows to recognize and deal with bad
| servers in an open federation.
|
| Additionally, it's richer in features
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't understand the Matrix hate. Matrix is the defacto
| successor to IRC and it is getting feature parity with
| Discord. IRC refuses to evolve and it will become
| irrelevant.
| masklinn wrote:
| Beyond the backlog support, it's the _addressing_ of the
| backlog.
|
| Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially unusable
| so having the backlog is often useless, however the ability to
| "pin" a useful message or discussion by getting a link is very
| relevant.
|
| Baseline IRC doesn't have message addressing, regardless of
| backlogging.
|
| You need the "message-tags" extension
| (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/message-tags) and message-
| ids support (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/message-
| ids.html) for that to even be entertained, plus probably echo-
| message (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/echo-message). I've
| no idea how well those are supported in servers, to say nothing
| of clients (which would need a way to surface message ids, and
| possibly permalinks).
|
| At that point, you probably also want the WIP chathistory
| extension (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory)
| which provides backlog support.
| cout wrote:
| Calling search unusable is hyperbole. I've used search on
| discord many times to find a discussion from the past.
| j45 wrote:
| Discord is pretty disjointed though as a first time
| experience
| ungamedplayer wrote:
| Some people have higher expectations and needs than single
| word matching.
| j45 wrote:
| It's amazing someone just doesn't connect an existing
| open source search to it
|
| Oh wait they're probably using nosql
| Filligree wrote:
| At least they're large enough that that makes somewhat
| sense.
| eropple wrote:
| Discord does support other search features. It would be
| _nice_ to have a wildcard search, for sure--but, in my
| experience, even on busy and large servers I very rarely
| can 't narrow something down to what I was looking for
| with `from` and `in` along with not-just-single-keyword
| matching.
|
| But also, _it 's chat_, so I don't really care if on the
| once-per-month I use the search I have to think about it
| for a second, because all the other stuff is there and
| it's good.
| lightedman wrote:
| "Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially
| unusable"
|
| Discord's search function is 1,000x better than what's built
| into Windows 10 and 11. I've found pictures I posted from
| years ago in discord, Windows 10 can't even find half the
| files I downloaded and transferred to another drive the other
| day.
| Mawr wrote:
| That is to say, Discord's search actually works. It may not
| work _great_ , but it will find all posts containing the
| word "dog" when you search for it. The search in windows
| explorer, on reddit and on most forums will often fail to
| find an item even if you search for its exact name. Last I
| tried it, windows explorer couldn't find a file in the
| folder I was already viewing. It's impressive.
| imchillyb wrote:
| > I've found pictures I posted from years ago in discord,
| Windows 10 can't even find half the files I downloaded and
| transferred to another drive the other day.
|
| That sounds like indexing settings, on your end, are not
| sufficient for your use cases. I suggest decreasing the
| interval between indexing on your machine.
|
| If indexing is correctly setup in windows any/all files
| will be immediately searchable and indexed.
| TylerE wrote:
| Reliability? IRC? Is this article a joke?
| Borg3 wrote:
| Not at all.
|
| Server Up 1375 days, 10:05:01
|
| *.XXX.net[xx.x.x.xx] 0 9696 10570 56550590
|
| Its server to server link, online 56M secs. Now do the math,
| how much days this link is up (no netsplit).
| jrm4 wrote:
| Genuine question: Why isn't "run bot on top" a solution for
| this?
|
| And for that matter, for "pretty much everything?"
|
| Seems to me the simplicity of the bot is the biggest feature?
| ginko wrote:
| Where do you host the bot? Not everyone has an always-on
| server.
| mplewis wrote:
| The average user cannot be expected to run an additional
| piece of software just to use chat.
| jrm4 wrote:
| "The average user" is literally never a useful metric here.
|
| Federation and federation type ideas should be enough;
| let's get (back?) to a place like cars mostly used to be.
| You should theoretically be able to know a friend who can
| fix your car if you don't want to be a mechanic, and the
| same for "computer stuff."
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| The average user cna be expected to run quite a lot of
| things, actually; it's just that the last decade of VC-
| funded services has trained them not to. Otherwise--
| AIM/ICQ/Pidgin, LAN game servers, Hamachi, DC++, a
| BitTorrent node ... Remember when Opera came with a web
| server? I doubt people have gotten so much stupider since
| then, even if computers have become much more complex and
| mainstream consumer software essentially troubleshooting-
| proof.
|
| (Now if it's an extra-special piece of software just to use
| your extra-special chat, then they'll tell you to take a
| hike, true. They've got to actually want to get to the
| dancing bunnies[1] first.)
|
| [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dancing-bunnies-
| problem/
| ginko wrote:
| I think I'm reasonably tech savvy and at no time in my
| life I had a system I could trust to be 100% always-on.
| No way you could expect average users to run their own
| service just so they don't miss messages.
|
| Anyways it feels silly to require always-on service when
| history could just be part of the protocol.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I don't actually disagree about chat logs. (An argument
| could be made that no-logging IRC was a good thing when
| it allowed volunteers to run genuinely large networks on
| the relatively wimpy contemporary machines they had
| access to, but it's solely of historical relevance.)
|
| I just think that the general argument that users are
| only capable of running server software with as much
| uptime as they care for (in the "easy" < 90% range) is
| unfair to users. They're not dumb, it's us the
| programmers who have made them behave as though they are
| and gave them little choice in it.
|
| All that aside, a say 95- to 99-percent-online machine is
| pretty handy to have when you can code, you should try it
| if you don't have one. The best such machine is one you
| don't use interactively--an old desktop in a closet, an
| RPi with a USB HDD, hell, that old Eee PC you have laying
| around gathering dust works pretty well and even comes
| with builtin battery backup. You don't--and shouldn't--
| need to have one, but it's liberating to be able to go
| "oh I'll just throw that into urlwatch and have it poke
| me on Telegram" without a second thought. Now excuse me
| while I pacman -Syu && reboot my webserver :)
| zemo wrote:
| Not having a backlog is actually the thing I like about it.
| Discord (and Slack) have this thing where because there's a
| backlog, people expect other people to have read everything. I
| prefer the experience where the assumption is that the people
| not in the room are assumed to have not seen a message. It
| makes it more unambiguously a synchronous experience, whereas
| Discord and Slack chat is pretty ambiguous as to whether it is
| synchronous or asynchronous.
| webstrand wrote:
| IRC was bigger while I was growing up. But due to living with
| an internet connection that'd drop multiple times a day, I
| was never able to really use IRC because I'd ask a question
| and then get dropped. Getting dropped does not immediately
| log you out, the server has a timeout period. So when I'd get
| back in, I'd have to ask people to repeat whatever they said
| since the last timestamp I'd seen.
|
| Not to mention some IRC channels are really high latency, you
| leave a message and someone else replies ten hours later. If
| you miss the reply because you were offline, you couldn't
| expect anyone to be around to repeat missed conversations
| back to you.
|
| Due to this I've never really liked IRC, its not good for
| mobile devices or people who live with DSL or dial-up. Sure
| you can "just get an account on a bouncer" but that's pretty
| esoteric knowledge that I never encountered until after
| university.
| zer8k wrote:
| I don't understand the problem. No one really connects to IRC
| directly. You always go through a bouncer. Bouncers can log.
|
| I understand if what you mean is it's an extra step the
| technically challenged don't want to do but the ability to do
| so has existed forever.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Logging isn't a "fancy" feature
|
| If you're storing data, someone somewhere has to pay for
| housing it. One of the reasons IRC is lightweight is because a
| network and its constituent servers only facilitates exchanging
| data between users.
|
| Consider how Discord is _begging_ you and everyone to sign up
| for Nitro because they 're housing and serving all of their
| data. Most IRC networks on the other hand operate perfectly
| fine off of donated volunteer time and hardware for tens of
| thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users.
|
| No data to store means cheaper and easier logistics. IRC is
| just a simple bridge, whereas Discord is a Costco.
| wolrah wrote:
| > Consider how Discord is begging you and everyone to sign up
| for Nitro because they're housing and serving all of their
| data. Most IRC networks on the other hand operate perfectly
| fine off of donated volunteer time and hardware for tens of
| thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users.
|
| As of around a year ago Discord claimed to be passing around
| 4 billion messages a day.
|
| I don't know how their average message size compares to
| Slack, but I just took a look at an export of messages from
| my company's Slack server and our busiest day in six years
| was just over 1MB in uncompressed JSON format, around 1.4KB
| per message. Compressed it was around 104 bytes per message.
| If we assume that the average message size is similar and
| similar amounts of metadata are stored per message, that
| means we're talking about somewhere between 400GB and 5.6TB
| per day for the entirety of Discord.
|
| That's a lot of space on an individual basis, but nothing for
| a global-scale service. Obviously that's just for text and
| not any uploaded files, inline previews, thumbnails, etc. but
| still the point remains. Archiving text is not really a hard
| problem to solve. It's tiny by modern standards.
| hoyd wrote:
| To preserve logs, I would ssh into a screen on a server that
| was connected.
| j45 wrote:
| It's nice when simple solutions just work.
| eropple wrote:
| That sure is a simple solution! As a side effect, it
| filters out almost all of the people _I_ actually want to
| talk to in my day-to-day life.
|
| The inability for partisans of particular technologies to
| understand that affordances matter more than the
| technologist's spherical-cow notion of "better" continues
| apace. And I have some empathy for that viewpoint, too, but
| I grew out of it as a teenager and I always find it odd
| that others stuck to it.
|
| If you can't meet people where they want to be, your
| solution might be simple but your solution isn't good for
| them and fulminating about it just isn't great.
| johnea wrote:
| The "standard" config of a leet IRC user is an always on
| "bouncer", that's then connected to by the user's IRC client.
|
| This provides a really reliable chat framework in a totally
| open-standards compliant way.
|
| Of course, most people don't care. This is why the corps
| business model of profit via surveilance is so successful. So,
| to jump straight to Godwin's Law: this is the same lack of
| concern, and passive cooperation, that led to the rise of
| hitler...
| donpark wrote:
| Importance of a feature depends largely on use-cases.
|
| Chat is not just for business. Its use-case existed even before
| notion of business came to be.
| [deleted]
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities.
|
| Discord's logging is shitty because:
|
| 1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned
| from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you
| altogether your access to those logs is gone forever.
|
| 2 - Unlike the logs of some IRC channels, Discord's logs aren't
| available on the web anywhere, so they can't be indexed or
| searched outside of Discord.
|
| 3 - Paging through hours or days of Discord logs is so
| incredibly painful, because every few screenfuls or so Discord
| has to load the previous/next logs and that is super slow
| compared to paging through text logs offline. If you have a lot
| of logs to page through, this experience is absolutely
| atrocious.
|
| 4 - There's no easy way to export the logs to be processed with
| standard/powerful text manipulation tools, like text editors,
| sed, etc..
|
| Discord's search is painful because:
|
| 1 - There's no regex search.
|
| 2 - No ability to search via web search engines, because the
| logs aren't available on any website (see above).
|
| 3 - No way to search through the logs of multiple servers at
| once.
|
| I have IRC logs going back decades, from servers I haven't been
| on in decades, but they're all instantly searchable, and the
| text in them is easily manipulable.
|
| My Discord logs are trapped in Discord and I'm forced to use
| Discord's pretty but otherwise horrible UI to search them.
|
| No, the reason Discord is popular has nothing to do with
| logging, but everything to do with how easy it is to sign up,
| join, and get a server running. Inline images and not having to
| learn obscure IRC commands or figure out obtuse IRC clients are
| also huge plusses for your average user. Discord's client is
| also visually pleasing -- something that most IRC client
| developers still haven't figured out. Aesthetics matter to
| users, as Apple has proved.
|
| But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to
| die.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I think everything discord does is still outright better. I
| was an IRC yser for a long time and I still have a znc server
| out there running, but:
|
| Everything is painful. Clients tend to be terrible and I
| cannot search at all in IRC, or I get weird integrations
| between znc and and the chat client.
|
| All in all, i'd rather use discord than IRC, even with the
| downsides. I do prefer forums or the "was" reddit for
| information.
| fossuser wrote:
| Urbit's current chat implementation solves a lot of these
| issues and there's a clear path to things like search getting
| way better since all your chat data is stored on your local
| urbit.
| redserk wrote:
| Let's not suggest IRC logs are much better. Individual
| clients may be able to log but say you just join a project
| channel with years of discussion -- you'd have literally
| nothing to start with.
|
| Discord gives you a chance at searching old history with zero
| additional setup if the permissions allow.
|
| For _both_ IRC and Discord you'd need to run a bot to have
| truly open logs online.
| TkTech wrote:
| I've just started adding logs to notifico (ex:
| https://n.tkte.ch/c/1/2023-07-28), which is very barebones.
| Don't get much time to work on it, but I'm working on
| implementing search in a cost-effective manner. If the
| ~3000 IRC channels that use Notifico opt-in to logging
| they'll get it for free permanently, and I'll be offering
| nightly dumps to an SFTP server of your choice to make sure
| there's no lock-in.
|
| You're totally right that you need a bot to have open logs
| online, I'm just trying to point out that a huge number of
| open source projects (CPython, FreeBSD, Haiku,
| Quotebrowser, random NASA weather balloons, thousands of
| others) already use a common bot so it's not that hard of a
| problem. The bigger problem is political, in that most IRC
| network discourage logging, and many communities are
| outright hostile to it.
|
| Notifico discards PRIVMSG's immediately and the rest of its
| logs after a couple of hours normally, but in its last
| decade of operating it's seen more than 2 billion messages
| to give you an idea of how much has to get indexed.
|
| Also, writing your own bot for IRC is trivial, and has no
| TOS, complicated APIs, OAuth flows, or other barriers to
| entry. Can absolutely do the same for Discord but they've
| already been making changes to make it more difficult to
| log or export your data.
| redserk wrote:
| Thanks for hosting a service to help host the logs in a
| public manner.
|
| As far as logs hosting though, this only works for as
| long as you're willing to host though. It seems unlikely
| that Discord will disappear overnight -- or if this was a
| risk, I'd assume they'd be acquired with a large
| userbase.
|
| I've written IRC and Discord bots and don't think Discord
| bots aren't much more difficult. One of the best
| strengths of writing a Discord bot is that if your bot
| goes down, you can query and fetch lost history fairly
| easily. This isn't doable in IRC unless you put a bouncer
| in front of your bot or the server is set up to feed
| clients with history.
| TkTech wrote:
| I've already run it for more than a decade, it's not
| going anywhere :) The project is also open-source, and
| the daily SFTP log exports can be imported into another
| instance. I hate lock-in.
|
| Ultimately, it uses an irrelevant % of resources on a
| dedicated box used for other projects, so it's not a
| financial or even operational burden. One of my favorite
| things about IRC is that if all you want to do is a JOIN
| a channel and PRIVMSG some people, the same code I wrote
| a decade ago works fine today. The project went almost 6
| years without requiring a single code change from me,
| other than accepting 3rd party feature PRs.
|
| I may have missed something last time I looked at it, but
| Discord was making it harder to react to all messages and
| wanted to force you to only use slash commands. The whole
| discord.py saga - https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f6275
| 1b9600a31a0d3c7810028....
| TylerE wrote:
| Not to mention with netsplits a canonical history may not
| even exist.
| op00to wrote:
| IRC is an information black hole where data that crosses the
| event horizon (scrolls off screen) will never return.
|
| Sure, you can write your own logs, but does your business
| want you creating even more information to have to submit as
| evidence if you're sued? What a nightmare.
| backendanon wrote:
| The wording reminds me of something I'd expect to read from
| a marketing person hoping to avert losing customers to an
| open source protocol.
| j45 wrote:
| It's just a bot to run on IRC to log away
| darreninthenet wrote:
| That's also true of Discord though to be fair
| salawat wrote:
| ...Don't do shit worth getting sued over?
| Zetice wrote:
| Anyone can sue for anything, asking to not do things that
| create lawsuits is asking not to operate a business in
| the US.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I worked for a company who interviewed someone who turned
| out to be a habitual scammer.
|
| He somehow managed to know enough technical information
| to get past a phone screen, and in the in-person
| interview claimed to be the second coming of Christ. When
| he didn't get hired, he sued for religious
| discrimination.
|
| Fortunately, all communications with and about him were
| entirely professional and didn't include a reference to
| his claim, so (iirc) the case was tossed in short order.
|
| That being said, you don't need to do anything to get
| sued- you just need to have something worth suing for.
| 1337biz wrote:
| I would put logging as a bottom tier feature for most chats.
| The characteristic of chats is in the moment and not some
| archival function. I am a heavy discord and telegram user but
| overall I would value the benefit of everything getting
| deleted after 72hours higher than the few times I actually
| search for something older than that.
| op00to wrote:
| My company uses chats as information stores. Not saying
| it's the best idea, but you are an outlier with your
| preference.
| Zetice wrote:
| More like your company is in the minority; most orgs
| recognize the problem with that idea...
| redserk wrote:
| While this would be arguing an anecdote with an anecdote,
| I completely disagree "most orgs" have executed
| information management well.
|
| A number of places use email as their effective
| information store. Good luck finding content once
| everyone in the relevant chains have departed.
| Zetice wrote:
| I also agree most orgs don't execute information
| management well. Knowing chat isn't a good place for that
| doesn't mean they know anything else!
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Do employee's store stuff in the "recycle bin"/"trash"?
| And get upset when IT empties it when the disc is full?
|
| Yes this is a real thing.
| op00to wrote:
| Some days when I am mad at the world I would want to work
| the help desk at a place like this and just destroy
| people.
| j45 wrote:
| It's just a bit to save a history then to your favourite
| search
| j45 wrote:
| Good point
|
| Free slacks lose their history in 90 days
| kmfrk wrote:
| The thing that's driven me crazy about Discord since its
| launch is how bad its read position logging is compared to
| the service they copied (Slack). I don't know how you catch
| up on any conversation regularly, especially in a work
| environment.
| eropple wrote:
| I don't think any Discord server I'm in expects people to
| pay particular attention to the history of the server--the
| affordances are for _chatting_ , not _working_. They 've
| done some pivoting to add work-responsive features, but
| it's a WoW guild chat room at its heart.
| judge2020 wrote:
| They added threads recently (within the last 2 years), so
| your server can emphasise using threads when appropriate,
| but the channels are much more focused on IRC-style message
| chat, not thread-based siloed conversations.
| Zetice wrote:
| Literally all of your concerns are 100% solved by adding a
| log bot to the channels you care about, both on IRC and
| Discord.
|
| I'm beyond sick of the helplessness performative shtick
| around Discord. This is an ancient problem with obvious
| solutions. Do better.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Among other things, there's no way to add a log bot to
| private messages.
| Zetice wrote:
| Ok so now Discord is supposed to solve the problem of
| people not documenting things that come out of private
| conversations?
|
| What a hilariously unreasonable standard to set...
|
| Let's call your bluff! What "other things" are there,
| exactly?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Huh? Supposed to what?
|
| I was just listing a way that Discord is worse than an
| IRC client, in a way that you can't solve with a log bot.
|
| You're imagining whatever standard you think I'm setting.
|
| Anyway, the main "other things" are needing direct
| moderator permission and button-pressing on every server
| you want to join your log bot to.
| eropple wrote:
| You're right, this is a solved problem. On the other hand,
| mobile access on IRC not being _unpleasant_ isn 't and
| won't be, though, so the search for something better for
| users will continue.
|
| (To their credit, IRCCloud tries. They are the best swing
| at it I've seen. They aren't Slack-good, let alone Discord-
| good. The search continues.)
| Zetice wrote:
| IRC isn't an app, it's a protocol. If you don't like IRC
| clients as they exist, write or fund one of your own.
| eropple wrote:
| I am well aware it isn't "an app". I was using IRC in
| about 1997 and stopped in about 2017 because other
| options that were better suited to my needs, and had the
| people I wanted to talk to, arose.
|
| The second part of your response isn't helping you move
| towards the end state you want. If anything, it's going
| the other way. Product empathy isn't optional--ask
| yourself: why would I write or fund an IRC client when I
| have things that work for me already? Like, this is the
| Linux-on-the-desktop advocacy all over again. "Your thing
| doesn't work for me because of X [usually literally X on
| Linux, but you get the idea], but Y does." "Well, expend
| time or money to fix X!" Why? You're the one who likes X.
| You're advocating for it. Why would I fix the thing you
| like when the thing I use already works?
|
| Take the sibling response to yours--I learned something
| new in seeing https://thelounge.chat, and while I don't
| want to run software to deal with chat, that was a cool
| thing to see. I learned something! I'll remember it
| later!
|
| Contrast that to "do it yourself".
| Zetice wrote:
| [flagged]
| eropple wrote:
| I did "solve the problem". I use Slack and Discord to
| talk to the cohorts who used to be on IRC.
|
| Your behavior in this thread is really strange. Discord's
| a fine tool. So is Slack. I have nothing to fix, and my
| posts in this thread have been explaining why for me
| they're fit for purpose when IRC isn't. Why would I "do
| something about" a situation that isn't a problem for me?
| Zetice wrote:
| Then why bring up IRC's lack of a "pleasant" app? Just
| seems like a problem you can and should solve for
| yourself, but is otherwise wholly unrelated to the
| protocol.
|
| One doesn't complain about http because the mobile
| browser options aren't to one's liking.
| boredtofears wrote:
| You don't have to take responsibility for fixing
| something just because you criticized it.
|
| Fixating on the term used is a tad disingenuous. I think
| most people reading hacker news understands that the IRC
| ecosystem is being referenced here - not the protocol
| itself. IRC has been around 30+ years and it still
| doesn't have any great clients.
|
| If you wanted to build a featureful chat client IRC
| wouldn't even be a good choice because there is so many
| things missing from the spec.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Why is this getting downvoted?
|
| The spirit of what's argued is right in line with the
| spirit of free protocols, open source software, and
| venture capital funding for new challenges.
| eropple wrote:
| Generally speaking, when somebody wants other people to
| adopt a practice, they make sure that practice is fit-
| for-purpose _themselves_ rather than expecting the people
| to whom they advocate to stop using things that _are_ fit
| for purpose, _then_ adopt something unfit-for-purpose,
| and _then_ fix it.
|
| Your implication that lots of open source communities
| have historically not done that is absolutely true. But
| also it's why people don't want to talk to them much,
| too.
| rascul wrote:
| You might check out The Lounge.
|
| https://thelounge.chat
| eropple wrote:
| Thank you for linking this--this is cool! I'm not in a
| place where I want to run software to solve the problem
| of chat, but this looks like a really good One Of Those
| for those so inclined, and I'm going to keep it in my
| back pocket for the future.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Discord's search can't even find many specific words because
| it conflates them with other words and the results are
| flooded.
|
| It's also very bad at URLs.
|
| And sometimes it just _breaks_ and loses results. If I
| remember right I even hit a situation where searching one
| word found a chat line, and another word found that same
| line, but both words didn 't find it.
| nologic01 wrote:
| > Discord's client is also visually pleasing
|
| Actually I find it ugly, but thats firmly in personal
| preference territory. A decenct client would be skinnable or
| css-able to meet users diverse aesthetics.
| password4321 wrote:
| In case anyone is not aware, you can download Discord logs.
|
| https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
|
| But beware -- it can result in account termination!
|
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/115002192352-A...
| judge2020 wrote:
| If you have permission, nobody has been suspended for using
| a dedicated discord bot (one where you must be an admin to
| invite to a server) to run this Discord Chat Exporter, at
| least based on the GitHub issues/discussions of that repo.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| The problem isn't no one has - it's that the could be.
|
| I can not possibly understand why anyone considers
| discord to be anything but a company with absolute
| control of a product.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I don't think anyone believe otherwise. People still
| choose it because the feature set it provides addresses
| their needs and makes online chat, voice, and live
| streaming to friends a wonderful experience.
|
| For 99.9% of users, they don't need to worry about
| Discord terminating their account or their friends'
| account. If Discord somehow fumbles this by randomly
| suspending peoples' accounts for no reason whatsoever,
| and on such a wide scale that everyone will know a friend
| affected by this, they'll quickly lose marketshare.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Perhaps if you directly contacted support and said "hey I
| am using a log bot come and get me" but in no other
| circumstance is a reasonable fear. They have no way to
| track what you do with on message events once they have
| been delivered.
| Renaud wrote:
| >But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to
| die.
|
| I'm really saddened and angry that projects end up using
| Discord as their main forum interface.
|
| Not everything is worth keeping around forever, but Discord
| is as closed a closed garden as can be.
|
| That's great for private servers between friends, but it's
| contrary to the ethos of Open Source, as nothing is really in
| the open.
|
| History is basically unsearchable and everyone lives in a
| perpetual present where topics need to be discussed over and
| over again instead of being easily available to newcomers.
| Once they disappear from the current page, they become really
| hard to reach.
|
| And discord will happily close your account or prevent you
| from logging if your activity is deemed suspicious, i.e. if
| you're travelling and using VPNs, getting in can be a
| nightmare. The feeling of also being constantly watched, a
| step away from having your account blocked, is jarring.
|
| I wish there was a good open source alternative that would
| also allow data to be easily made public and allowed users to
| just join and participate with whatever existing accounts
| they have (google, GitHub, any Fediverse account, etc).
|
| Servers could be self-hosted or hosted for free or a minimal
| fee based on the server size, with some paying additional
| features (like flair, large audio rooms, automated backups,
| branding, more customization, etc).
|
| But is discord too big to be taken on by an Open Source
| project?
| sjcobb wrote:
| Does the Matrix ecosystem fit this use
| case?https://github.com/matrix-org
|
| One project I'm working on uses it instead of Slack and the
| Element client specifically is pretty good and constantly
| adding new features
| mburns wrote:
| Linen might be a good fit.
|
| https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities.
|
| It's shitty, but if you just have to beat "non existant" that
| will often work.
| mylons wrote:
| "1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's." is the
| absolute best selling point. you are at serious risk if you
| say anything a censor would deem bad if the logs were ever
| surfaced and your anonymity were compromised.
|
| people in the west have a lot of freedom in this and don't
| really need to care at the moment, but imagine living in the
| CCP or Thailand and bad mouthing the supreme leader?
| imtringued wrote:
| I recorded logs back in my IRC days but I never used them for
| anything or searched through them. That is a complete red
| herring. Nobody who uses IRC cares about persistent chat.
| What most people want is to see the last X hours of chat
| history while they were offline, so if they open their chat
| client they don't have to stare at an empty window, not the
| last X months.
|
| Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice
| chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web and
| the various desktop clients like Skype were a crapshot or
| were obscure and required you to host your own server like
| Mumble.
| roenxi wrote:
| This perspective is internally consistent but reveals why
| IRC struggles without better logging support - the sort of
| person who is connected and savvy enough to keep logs does
| fine. Doesn't need them. The people who use IRC are
| comfortable with that lack.
|
| But the people who use logs won't use IRC, and the people
| who often miss out on important conversations because they
| are only casual users will not have logs. Casual users
| outnumber dedicated users - the lack of good logging is a
| real problem for them.
| op00to wrote:
| I worked in a global team. When I got booted off VPN I
| would have my irc connection drop and I would miss
| critical conversations. IRC sucks for collaboration.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| You could just use an IRC bouncer.
|
| But, yeah, I understand this is beyond the capabilities
| of your typical user, and not something most users even
| know exists.
|
| This is really a UI/UX deficiency of IRC, not a
| functional deficiency.
| tremon wrote:
| I disagree that it's merely a UX deficiency, but I agree
| that it's not a protocol deficiency. Yes, indeed you
| could just use an IRC bouncer: the problem is that many
| users don't have easy access to such a bouncer. What IRC
| "needs" is a network of open bouncers that users can
| subscribe to.
| Filligree wrote:
| So IRCCloud?
| redserk wrote:
| I couldn't imagine joining a workplace only to be told
| that I had to maintain a service to participate in
| essential communication channels.
| j45 wrote:
| Exchange servers anyone?
| taejo wrote:
| If my workplace made every employee run an Exchange
| server rather than IT running one for everyone, I'd leave
| bandrami wrote:
| So you're saying an IRC daemon for corporate use needs a
| competent administrator, which is true of most daemons in
| business situations.
| op00to wrote:
| I had a bouncer (with push notifications!), but I was in
| the minority.
| j45 wrote:
| Could it just be a donkey image that spins up with the
| convenient bits in place?
|
| I have a hard time imagining irc heads don't have a
| solution dockerized
| j45 wrote:
| Context of the current or recent chat when joining a
| channel would be in irc
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I don't know if you ever used IRC to get help on technical
| issues, but I've done that a lot, and going back to figure
| out what the solution was to a particularly thorny
| technical problem that someone told me about years ago has
| been something I've done multiple times.
| op00to wrote:
| Yeah, let's just spend 30 minutes grepping the IRC logs!
| Biganon wrote:
| If you have the logs as text files, then there's
| literally nothing you could be doing better. Want to
| index them? Turn them into a database? Use fuzzy search?
| Grepping? Everything is possible.
|
| Therefore I don't understand your sarcasm. What's the
| alternative? If you find Discord's search feature good,
| you could implement it on top of the text logs.
| 6510 wrote:
| There are fancy gui's to search in text files even on
| linux.
| redog wrote:
| try ripgrep. You're welcome
| bandrami wrote:
| s/minutes/seconds/, but... yes? Let's just grep the IRC
| logs?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Why would it take 30 minutes? Maybe in the worst case,
| but most of the time it would maybe take a couple minutes
| to find the right thing to search for. And grep is pretty
| fast.
| simoncion wrote:
| And even if it _did_ take 30 minutes, that's _way_ better
| than blowing a day, week, or even more time rediscovering
| the information contained in the log.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I used Roger Wilco and Ventrilo until Mumble came out. I
| haven't given Discord a try because it's smothering,
| obsessive integration just rubs me the wrong way, like
| Teams.
|
| Once every 5-10 years, I look through the logs I have that
| aren't on textfiles because the statute of limitations
| hasn't run out and relive a little of the history of how
| certain things came to be.
|
| Those chats are an ethnography waiting to happen. You'll
| wish you had yours one day.
| bandrami wrote:
| No, you definitely want the IRC log from when a vendor was
| helping you troubleshoot the frobnosticator with the wonky
| LED panel, because 10 years from now you'll still be using
| that same tired old frobnosticator and the LED panel is
| going to go wonky again.
| gsich wrote:
| >host your own server like Mumble.
|
| Or use one of the public ones.
| prmoustache wrote:
| It is not like hosting a mumble server was a difficult
| thing to do.
|
| And some communities had it setup for you so it is not
| something that each user had to do.
| lightedman wrote:
| "Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality
| voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the
| web"
|
| Camfrog video chat has been around since the beginning
| '00s. You could put as many video feeds as you could fit on
| your screen, with 20-30FPS streams, and good sound quality.
| Granted, resolution was 352x288, but for seeing and
| talking, you don't really NEED much else.
|
| Discord, meanwhile, can't keep a reliable WebRTC stream
| going.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| let's rebrand "mosh and a vps" as "irc nitro", and then
| everyone will be happy.
|
| (ripgrep is a very nice log searching tool, only top tier users
| will be told about it!)
| j45 wrote:
| Or be told about the channels that are not for beginners
| hprotagonist wrote:
| this is just actually true; a certain amount of
| demonstrated non-idiocy is required to get the invite to
| the cloaked channels.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| A lot of the original ircd/ircII devs and I are on Signal these
| days, we had a private channel on efnet for about 25 years. Open
| e2e with history is pretty compelling, and decent mobile clients
| on top. But we still love irc.
| iamnotsure wrote:
| Chanel-less tag-only chat protocols are missing.
| timbit42 wrote:
| What are some examples of such protocols?
| coldblues wrote:
| One thing I miss about IRC is the lack of a typing indicator.
| frumiousirc wrote:
| IRCv3 has it. I've tried it. It truly brings modern levels of
| irritation to this age-old protocol.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Read receipts plus typing indicators... too much information!
|
| It applies heavy pressure and behind that is the motive to
| monetise attention. Snapchat is the worst for this; it notifies
| your recipient once you start typing.
| jdjdjdhhd wrote:
| I always disable that feature in chat software whenever I am
| allowed to... (prevent it from sending information about me)
| gorgoiler wrote:
| We span up a Synapse instance the other day and connected to it
| with Element on a few different laptops. (This is the Matrix
| server and client btw -- they really need a marketing / branding
| person!)
|
| It was both hellish and amazing. Hellish in that I had absolutely
| no idea how to use anything. Channels and rooms and stuff. All
| very complicated and weird. I just wanted a single, default place
| to hang out!
|
| It was also amazing because it all worked beautifully all the way
| from text chit chat up to in channel video calls. Snappy and fast
| and reliable. Bliss. LDAP integration out of the box (or near
| enough out of the box) too. Lovely.
|
| If it was just a little bit more seamless it would probably take
| over the world.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I'd probably switch to Discord before using Matrix as my
| primary way of communication. It's a clusterfuck held together
| by duct-tape and ADHS.
|
| I try it every now and then and within a couple minutes, I
| manage to break something, that my Matrix-using friends just
| shrug off. As an example, just a few days ago I used the web
| client again and had a chat with a friend. Just for fun, he
| added a bazillion emoji reactions to one of my messages, and
| after that the client would always claim our conversation has
| unread messages, even after right-clicking and selecting "mark
| as read".
|
| But my favorite is how they broke the IRC bridge about 3 months
| ago: It randomly drops messages from IRC -> Matrix. There's an
| issue[1] for this with pretty much no reaction from the devs.
| Like, nobody cares. So on one hand, the Matrix folks always
| stress how it's the best chat protocol on the planet because of
| all the bridges that connect it to everything, but then in
| reality those brides are unreliable and apparently only there
| to tick a box, working as well as Microsoft's POSIX layer for
| Windows NT in the 90s.
|
| And apart from the complete lack of interest in getting this
| fixed, it also just boggles the mind how you can even break it
| in this way. IRC has a persistent connection and streams
| messages separated by CRLF. How do you end up parsing the
| protocol properly and then randomly ignore a received message?
|
| In its current form, the bridge does more harm than good, as
| you can't always keep in mind during a conversation that the
| bridge might just have dropped a message again, leading to
| frustrating misunderstandings every now and then.
|
| [1] https://github.com/matrix-org/libera-chat/issues/6
| progval wrote:
| FWIW, someone identified the issue, and next Monday's update
| (https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/postponing-libera-chat-
| depor...) may include a fix
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Thanks for the hint. While they don't mention the issue in
| that post (and neither in the linked one regarding
| plumbing, where they say they regret libera's decision to
| request disabling portalling, like it came out of the
| blue), let's still hope it is fixed in this release.
|
| Again, I find the communication from matrix' side
| absolutely pathetic. Yes I know, it's an open source
| project, I don't pay them, they don't owe me anything, but
| come on, wtf. I really wonder how many people have had
| weird miscommunication because of this and never became
| aware of it.
| Arathorn wrote:
| fwiw, i would be first to agree (as project lead for
| Matrix) that we (I) have fucked up the communication
| about libera irc bridging problems, and I am sorry for
| it.
|
| the root cause is lack of bandwidth: the bridge is both
| written and run by one guy, alongside a tonne of other
| stuff which often takes priority given it revolves around
| trying to generate $ to fund matrix dev.
|
| Around the beginning of the year, we had some nasty
| problems on the bridge (from memory, some delayed
| traffic, and a security bug). Libera started threatening
| to deportal us, so we rushed out a major feature
| (persistent IRC connections, so Matrix users don't
| reconnect when the bridge restarts) to try to address the
| longest running series of issues and avoid Libera killing
| portals (ie stopping users bouncing via Matrix).
| Unfortunately, while this seemingly worked, it introduced
| the nightmare subtle traffic loss bug which the parent is
| complaining about, which we haven't been able to repro
| outside of production. Meanwhile, rather than averting
| deportalling, the new problem reinforced the case,
| combined with false concerns about archive.matrix.org
| (https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-happened-with-the-
| archi...).
|
| This has caused a particularly unpleasant vicious
| negative feedback loop where we've had to split time
| fixing the reliability bug with: fixing plumbing,
| preparing deportalling, handling tonnes of community reqs
| about deportaling and the awkward UX of plumbing, dealing
| with the libera team, and dealing with a new brace of
| security issues which showed up thanks to newfound
| attention on the bridge.
|
| Meanwhile it's fair to say that we have badly failed to
| communicate about this with the wider IRC community,
| focusing on trying to fix bugs while talking to the
| libera team instead. This is clearly a huge screwup, and,
| again, I apologise for it (and for the bad job I've done
| on resourcing keeping the bridge running).
|
| At this point, the our best hope is that we've fixed the
| root message loss bug, and that the bridge will go back
| to being lower maintenance again, and plumbing will prove
| usable in practice. However, we're also in a catch 22
| when the main use of the bridge (portalling, ie acting as
| a bouncer) is now gone, meaning fewer people will be able
| to use it and it'll be even harder to justify spend time
| on it going forwards. If libera hoped that by turning off
| portals they would somehow make it easier for us to
| improve the bridge, they were wrong.
|
| Our fallback position, if plumbing doesn't work out, is
| to try to find a set of people who libera trust to
| run/maintain the bridge and hand it over to them - or
| alternatively give up and encourage the community to run
| their own personal bridges via matrix-appservice-irc or
| heisenbridge or even matterbridge, if empirically running
| a huge bridge to libera's satisfaction is impossible.
|
| If anyone has any other bright ideas, please let me know.
|
| Finally: the reason we have run the bridge for the last 8
| years is, perversely, to try to support IRC and let
| xkcd.com/1810 style users still participate in
| communities which have otherwise migrated to
| discord/slack/matrix and avoid community fragmentation.
| Right now the Libera Matrix bridge has around 10K IRC
| connections - around 25% of Libera's total users. By
| knifing portaling, I'd guess this will drop 10x. So the
| whole thing ends up being an utterly depressing spiral of
| fail.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Appreciate the feedback, this gives much needed insight
| into the situation. I just wish something even half as
| informative could have ended up in that issue a couple
| weeks ago.
| jokoon wrote:
| Discord Server moderators will create too many channels, which
| completely fragment conversations, and many channels have zero
| conversation. Users cannot "bookmark" channels to only follow one
| or two channels per server, they have to view a server and then
| select a channel. Discord should limit the amount of channel and
| force people to pay to have more channels.
|
| Chatting "accelerates" conversations which considerably reduce
| their quality, which is cancelled by discord adding the "slow"
| mode. Online forums are slow which encourage people to make a
| better effort to write posts and answers.
|
| The UX is not that simple. I have to say discord "forums" are a
| bit better, but it adds more complexity and there already are
| threads. It's a lot of noise. Should I write in chat or start a
| forum post? Discords makes several things at once which will
| often confuse the user. Discord is mixing chat and forums in a
| single confusing thing.
|
| On top of this, discord is not federated, because communities are
| often redundant. For example if I just want to join a community
| to play a certain game, it's all spread across so many
| communities that those communities are just awful. Quantity over
| quality. You have some many battlefield or overwatch servers,
| it's pointless. Quakenet has one channel per game, and it worked
| well.
|
| The single thing that IRC needs is a good frontend interface.
|
| I just like minimal software. Discord bloated, and their carbon
| footprint must be quite high. Not to mention so few people use it
| for voice or visioconference.
| nicoco wrote:
| IRC is great! I access through the excellent biboumi gateway,
| which offers bouncer-like functionality and let me choose between
| various clients. There are open instances available for everyone
| to use, although I couldn't give a list of them since I self-
| host. I like that it's very lightweight, making it a reasonable
| permacomputing approach to group chats.
|
| I wouldn't go as far as saying it's the only viable chat
| protocol, if you follow the link below you'll guess what I have
| in mind saying that. (it starts with an X and ends with two Ps)
|
| https://biboumi.louiz.org/
| pard68 wrote:
| Incase the website owner is checking HN and sees this:
|
| On mobile the links in your header are fiddly because the links
| clickable area overlap.
| Razengan wrote:
| Why can't we "solve" instant messaging like we have solved email?
| QuackyTheDuck wrote:
| How did we solve email?
| [deleted]
| INTPenis wrote:
| I dislike web chat for one reason, the overview is very limited.
|
| So Matrix, with a bitlbee plugin or a text client, would be
| amazing imho.
|
| I'm just so used to seeing many lines of text, and getting a good
| quick overview of what is going on that way. Sometimes I use
| /last in irssi, and very rarely I've searched through a channel's
| web archive. But mostly I just see whatever it is I need directl
| in the client. If it's a slow chat I see it the next day. It's
| not going anywhere.
| Grom_PE wrote:
| No, I much prefer XMPP MUC to IRC.
|
| - Doesn't expose your IP address by default
|
| - No need to fiddle with automating responses to NickServ to log
| in
|
| - No need to register with that specific chat server, can simply
| use your XMPP account for any server
|
| - No annoying netsplits
|
| - Supports multiline text messages
|
| - Has avatar, away status, profile info support
|
| - Can show about 20 last messages when you join a chat so you
| have some context of the conversation
|
| - Nicknames can have spaces and Unicode
|
| - Can transparently join from multiple devices under a single
| nickname, no need to kill a "ghost" from time to time after a
| lost connection
|
| - Configurable with GUI instead of cryptic modes designated by a
| single character symbol that varies from server to server
| tester756 wrote:
| Discord haters look, it is simple.
|
| Until Discord appeared we had
|
| Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc
|
| I've been using those for like 10 years almost everyday
|
| They had voice chat, some had viable text chat, etc, etc.
|
| And then Discord appeared which had:
|
| Voice Chat,
|
| Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc)
|
| Streaming Video (!!)
|
| File share
|
| Robust bot integration
|
| Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives
| have.
|
| This one is important in gaming communities in e.g MMORPG games
| cuz there's nothing better than being DDoSd cuz you left team or
| because you talked to somebody on wrong TeamSpeak server 5 months
| ago :)
|
| Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g
| Teams dont have this shit.
|
| Imagine you're working on remote with kids in the background -
| having an ability to push button and talk is really useful! So
| you don't have constantly mute/unmute yourself! Gamers have been
| doing it for over 2 decades but with the parents in the
| background instead of kids
|
| One account between all servers with ability to customize your
| identity
|
| All of that in one solution. That won its market.
|
| Provide something as innovative and robust as Discord and people
| may consider switching.
|
| __________________
|
| I know that IRC's simplicity may be beautiful for hacker's mind,
| but it doesn't solve my problems nor make my life easier, so I'm
| not going to use it over Discord.
| gertrunde wrote:
| Apparently Teams does have push-to-talk, although it's not
| switched on by default.
|
| [ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/muting-and-
| unmuti... ]
| tester756 wrote:
| Interesting, I do wonder whether this is configurable so you
| can use it on e.g mouse scroll button
| QuackyTheDuck wrote:
| Unfortunately, this only works unless you have a textfield
| focused or something similar that "consumes" your keyboard
| input. At least in my experience, it's quite unreliable.
| mouse_ wrote:
| lol I bet this is a problem caused by UWP "security"
|
| same way Wayland broke push to talk for ages in Linux
| desktops (incl. in Discord).
| j45 wrote:
| Surprising there isn't a teams addon
| TheFreim wrote:
| > Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives
| have.
|
| This is a major issue. Back in the day TeamSpeak was the
| primary mode of communication for game servers of a certain
| kind. Every game server had an associated TS for offering
| support and many/most of the teams had their own. This was a
| disaster with people's IP addresses being leaked all over the
| place, if you joined a server and associated yourself with your
| in game name there was a high chance that you'd get DDoS'd
| offline at an important moment. Switching to discord makes this
| much less likely.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc
|
| Looks to me that Discord went after those and not after IRC.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g
| Teams dont have this shit.
|
| MS Teams _does_ support this feature, though you have to
| activate it first: see
|
| > https://answers.microsoft.com/en-
| us/msteams/forum/all/teams-... (concise answer)
|
| > https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/muting-and-
| unmuti... (documentation)
| Razengan wrote:
| I get what you're saying, I like Discord, but I wish there was
| an ecosystem of custom (less bloaty) apps to connect to Discord
| with, like IRC had.
| 418tpot wrote:
| Except it will never exist for discord because discord is a
| proprietary communication service instead of an open
| protocol. At best it can provide an API, but that can be
| broken or shut down on a whim. This is why it's a much better
| use of time for developers to make things like Matrix clients
| match feature parity to discord rather than attempt to give
| discord the client diversity of Matrix/IRC.
| j45 wrote:
| The way I remember discord is it's the only chat app kids could
| generally install, access or use as in school chat.
|
| Then it was the voice chat for any video game play.
|
| Being a Swiss Army knife of chat can be handy to get users
| together from different chat platforms
|
| How am I doing
| magsarion wrote:
| > Voice Chat
|
| Integrating a Jitsi bot into the channel solves this.
|
| > Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions,
| etc)
|
| All possible with good old web linking. Link to an image host,
| a pastebin, or a file host of your choice. Many IRC clients
| support inline display of image/media URLs.
|
| All major IRC clients and servers support UTF-8 as well, so
| emoji away.
|
| > Streaming Video (!!)
|
| Jitsi (with a bot) or web linking.
|
| > File share
|
| Web linking.
|
| > Robust bot integration
|
| Quite possibly one of the strongest arguments for IRC. The
| protocol is well-documented, and it's very easy to write an IRC
| bot.
|
| > Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives
| have.
|
| Also lack of transparency. The self-hosted open alternatives
| are auditable and can be inspected. Nobody knows what Discord
| does with user data or what security issues exist.
|
| > Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g
| Teams dont have this shit.
|
| Your (possibly self-hosted) Jitsi instance already has this.
|
| > One account between all servers with ability to customize
| your identity
|
| Until you get banned/blocked for some arbitrary reason, at
| which point you might as well start over, since everything is
| gone.
|
| tl;dr: Web linking + some bot integration and client
| affordances solve all these. This is how the web is _supposed_
| to work.
| [deleted]
| thiht wrote:
| You sound like the Dropbox guy. No one wants to jump 10 hoops
| for what's considered a basic feature set nowadays.
|
| Can you even write multi-line messages with IRC now?
| tester756 wrote:
| >Also lack of transparency. The self-hosted open alternatives
| are auditable and can be inspected. Nobody knows what Discord
| does with user data or what security issues exist.
|
| This doesnt solve (or doesnt even tries to solve) my issue AT
| ALL.
|
| I'd rather have Discord have some user data that I'm
| consciously putting there instead of my enemies from the game
| DDoSing/Stalking me
|
| I've played hardcore MMORPGs and this is serious concern.
|
| >tl;dr: Web linking + some bot integration and client
| affordances solve all these. This is how the web is supposed
| to work.
|
| sounds like: go put effort and decrease your UX.
| magsarion wrote:
| > I'd rather have Discord some user data that I'm
| consciously putting there instead of my enemies from the
| game DDoSing/Stalking me
|
| Security by obscurity is not a real solution. If you have a
| public IP connected to the internet, you will be subjected
| to attacks and port scans either way.
|
| Configure your network and firewall correctly and ensure no
| ports are open instead of trusting the false sense of
| security given by some proprietary vendor who has your
| data.
|
| > sounds like: go put effort and decrease your UX.
|
| "UX" is subjective. For me, Discord has horrible UX, with
| its flashy, slow, obnoxious UI and its incessant cacophony
| of tips, "new feature" notifications, and advertisements
| for "Discord Nitro".
|
| Putting in the one-time effort to configure an IRC client
| (and making it "fancy") seems worth it to me instead of
| having to continually put up with Discord's whims. At least
| there is no threat of enshittification with this approach.
| "IRC Nitro" will never be a real thing. With Discord, you
| can never be sure. Elon might just decide to buy it on a
| whim and rename it something like "XDickswords" if he feels
| like it.
| rcxdude wrote:
| You don't understand the threat model of OP: it's not a
| case of "general internet port scanner getting into my
| network" it's a case of "guy I've pissed off in this
| video game DDossing my residential internet connection or
| using that information to dox me". For the latter no
| level of security on my own network is going to prevent
| the bad outcome, but effectively having a proxy through a
| 3rd party does (and discord does go to extra lengths to
| avoid webRTC from leaking IP info)
| magsarion wrote:
| The "threat model" of OP is the consequence of a wrong
| usage pattern. You keep your identities separate. If
| you're in a high-stakes environment where being DDoSed or
| attacked is an actual threat, you compartmentalize that
| identity adequately by going through a proxy, VPN, TOR,
| I2P, or using a different medium altogether. Fortunately,
| unlike other services, this is extremely easy with IRC
| since the identity is just a nick, and nothing prevents
| one from having as many identities as needed.
|
| This obsession with having a single centralized identity
| where some vendor is trusted to painstakingly guard the
| linked PIID is misguided, unsafe, and harmful. Discord
| will fall prey to a data exfiltration attack eventually,
| and affected people will only then realize that this
| trust was misplaced. The fact that people are comfortable
| giving Discord their _phone numbers_ while being worried
| about their client IP being exposed on IRC is baffling.
| rcxdude wrote:
| It's not a matter of one single identity. Whether you use
| one or multiple you have a real practical problem which
| does actually happen which is prevented by discord
| without the need for using a 3rd party tool or you have a
| selection of alternatives which don't. Giving discord
| your phone number (which theoretically could be a
| problem) is really not an issue by comparison (hint:
| while not exactly the paragon of virtue, discord in
| general is more trustworthy than a random user of it).
| magsarion wrote:
| > a real practical problem
|
| It's not a real practical problem - and I'm not sure why
| we're pretending that it is one. Let's clearly state what
| the problem is: OP wants to play MMOs & online games
| against potential threat actors who may DDoS and/or doxx
| them. Which is why they _simultaneously_ also want to
| shield their identity from them. An analogy would be
| somebody who wants to play games with the neighbourhood
| meth gang while not wanting to get stabbed.
|
| This is not safe or reasonable behaviour. Even if these
| people lack a client IP, a motivated attacker can piece
| your identity together from what you say and/or post
| eventually. Discord just makes that a bit more difficult
| at the cost of you handing over PIID of _greater
| importance_.
| tester756 wrote:
| Exactly.
| tester756 wrote:
| >If you have a public IP connected to the internet, you
| will be subjected to attacks and port scans either way.
|
| Yes, and somehow it magically happened this way that
| during decades of having access to internet we were being
| DDoSed only when targeted by ppl from the game that had
| access to our IPs from TeamSpeak/Ventrilo, right?
|
| Because what incentives attacker would have to DDoS
| random IPs?
|
| >Configure your network and firewall correctly and ensure
| no ports are open instead of trusting the false sense of
| security given by some proprietary vendor who has your
| data.
|
| Again, put effort, time to manage firewalls and security
| solutions.
|
| I'm not even sure if this would work this way.
|
| They purchase $5 (or who knows how much nowadays)
| stressers and DDoS your IP, so even your ISP feels it and
| you lose internet access.
|
| My friend's village had no internet access for X hours.
|
| And all of that for actually what? solving issue which
| could be easily avoided?
| rcxdude wrote:
| So supplement IRC with a bunch of other services? Realising
| people didn't want to deal with this shit is why discord is
| so popular.
|
| (Seriously, this response and others like it demonstrate that
| IRC will continue to remain a niche. I won't fault you if
| this kind of setup works for you but suggesting this kind of
| thing is acceptable for the average user is really, truly,
| genuinely out of touch. I'm among the demographic who can and
| has done this kind of thing, and I don't want to do it!)
| magsarion wrote:
| > So supplement IRC with a bunch of other services?
| Realising people didn't want to deal with this shit is why
| discord is so popular.
|
| Supplementing services with other interoperable services is
| how most of the internet works, and still remains a valid
| and successful approach.
|
| An IRC client with some bells and & some plugins that
| expand web-linked media would offer most of Discord's
| feature set.
|
| Discord is popular because of network effects, virality,
| and marketing. But that kind of popularity is ephemeral and
| will disappear when Discord inevitably falls victim to
| enshittification like its many predecessors:
| https://pomf2.lain.la/f/7sl51lqf.png - at that point, few
| will remember Discord, and none will be able to recreate it
| (owing to its closed nature), but IRC will be still around.
| shlant wrote:
| > Discord is popular because of network effects,
| virality, and marketing
|
| I don't think you are even attempting to fairly represent
| Discord if this is what you actually believe
| rcxdude wrote:
| People always mention "marketing" as a reason for
| Discord's success, and I always wonder what they mean.
| It's a poster child of adoption through word-of-mouth, I
| don't know if they've engaged seriously with advertising.
| I'm serious, you have absolutely no clue what the average
| user values and how your suggestions don't meet that
| while discord does. Discord may go the way of the dodo
| due to enshittification but the successor will be another
| option that actually adresses most users needs, not IRC
| (which I'm sure will still be around: gopher's still
| around, people are still tinkering with 9600 baud modems
| and the like, a tech like that will never completely die
| but it's also delusional to expect that it's not
| mainstream just because the alternative has better
| marketing)
| Karunamon wrote:
| >An IRC client with some bells and & some plugins that
| expand web-linked media would offer most of Discord's
| feature set.
|
| And yet, this hypothetical client does not exist. Discord
| does.
| progval wrote:
| IRCCloud and The Lounge do it natively. Maybe KiwiIRC
| too.
| lolinder wrote:
| You seem to have completely missed tester756's point:
| Discord became popular because it _bundled_ good-enough
| versions of all of those features with no extra hassle.
| No one has to keep track of which client you 're using in
| order to decide which features you can interact with, no
| one has to spin up a new server for voice chat or
| anything else--it's handled for you automatically.
|
| _You_ might be comfortable stringing together a bunch of
| plugins for IRC in order to get the same functionality,
| but the average Discord user never will be.
| siriusfeynman wrote:
| so many conversation about discord/slack/$currentThing vs
| IRC end up repeating the "why Dropbox when you can rsync"
| meme
| lezojeda wrote:
| [dead]
| the_gipsy wrote:
| > Push to talk
|
| Isn't that solveable on the OS level? I have a global mic mute
| toggle hotkey, this could be done on keydown/keyup too.
| judge2020 wrote:
| It being apart of the app is what makes it intuitive. Most
| people don't want to have to go through setting something
| like that up at the OS level.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| I don't hate Discord, but I do hate that it's being used in
| contexts where a good old fashioned web forum would make more
| sense.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| It's also like Slack but very noisy.
|
| I don't get its appeal at all.
| pynappo wrote:
| discord makes hosting a real-time online place for most
| communities of all sizes very easy. it also doubles as a
| free cross-platform messaging app with a massive userbase.
| as the top-level GP posted, it mostly has a superset of the
| features of other community/messaging platforms (at the
| cost of searchability and data ownership/privacy).
|
| as a student, I'm in discord servers for friend groups,
| school clubs, unofficial classroom servers, game
| communities, fanbases, etc - anything that can benefit from
| conversations organized into different channels is usually
| turned into a discord server.
|
| when I think "how can I take this group of people
| interested in the same thing to gather together online?",
| the alternatives that come up are:
|
| - facebook (too linked to real life identity, also not
| really great for separating conversations into specific
| channels to my understanding) - reddit/forums (which can
| compliment a discord server in being more searchable/async,
| but in no way rival Discord's real time text/voice chat) -
| mumble/teamspeak/skype/matrix (largely just has a subset of
| discord features) - slack/microsoft teams (pretty much
| solely designated for work and not at all marketed as a
| general purpose communication solution)
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I don't know, I've tried joining some discord
| communities, and they were all like slack with trigger-
| happy channel creation, in each channel it was really
| hard to even grasp what the conversation was about
| because of emoji and meme flooding.
|
| Maybe it's me getting old, but while I remember quite
| vividly that IRC regulars liked to flood with emoticons
| just as much, in five minutes I'd know what the
| conversation was about. In discord... not so much. And
| there's the whole voice layer I didn't even touch. It's
| too chaotic and demanding full immersion, so I just noped
| out of there.
|
| (And there's the whole aspect of Discord actually owning
| it all, and banning you discord-wide if you blow your
| nose funny.)
|
| The idea of using discord as a medium for conversations
| you mean to log and refer to later seems like bollocks in
| the light of above. Also the idea of having work
| discussions there seems to be bollocks too and
| indistinguishable from Slack in 99% aspects imaginable.
| j45 wrote:
| But irc can't
| nottorp wrote:
| Let's start with one account between all servers.
|
| And one censoring authority.
|
| Nope, not a good idea.
| imtringued wrote:
| I have so many discord accounts because they won't let you
| change your avatar based on the server.
|
| Yeah there is a way to register accounts without phone number
| verification. I did it four times. The trick is that they
| block you if you do anything suspicious and any account
| created under this 'suspicious' state demands phone
| verification. I don't know how they identify you, but you
| must succeed with your first try. So your best bet is to find
| an email provider that is trusted by discord that does not
| need a phone number.
| Jiig wrote:
| I think they added it pretty recently, but you can change
| your whole profile per server now if you have nitro
|
| https://support.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/4409388345495-...
| tester756 wrote:
| > Let's start with one account between all servers.
|
| Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing prevents
| you.
|
| I've actually been doing it for some time - school (1 server)
| & private discord account (like 10 servers).
|
| >And one censoring authority.
|
| Sure, that's valid concern, I respect it.
|
| For me it's a trade off.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Actually, if a previous account happened to have a phone
| number attached, and you're asked for one again when making
| a second account, then provide the same number, Discord
| will automatically ban both accounts with no way to appeal.
|
| Which happened to me because I apparently had an old
| account I had forgotten about. So now I need a new phone
| number if I want to use Discord.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Actually, if a previous account happened to have a
| phone number attached, and you're asked for one again
| when making a second account, then provide the same
| number, Discord will automatically ban both accounts with
| no way to appeal.
|
| You left out that it just bans you on any servers that
| you're already banned on.
|
| It doesn't deactivate/suspend your entire discord account
| for trying to reuse a phone number for servers that
| require verification.
| jowea wrote:
| I've heard of that, but I think the rule changed, Discord
| even includes an account switcher now.
| j45 wrote:
| Teenage style gossip mills on discord rumours is a great
| way to have a smashing chat experience
| fruitreunion1 wrote:
| >Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing
| prevents you.
|
| Doesn't having to give up a phone number for each account
| (and you can't use the same number on different accounts)
| make it difficult? (unless you haven't had to, maybe my
| browser is suspicious, but it's just regular old Chromium).
| Would like to do this so that I can separate IRL/weak
| pseudonym (from random people in servers, obviously you
| can't be truly anonymous on Discord)
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| I think that depends largely - if not entirely - on the
| particular server? I'm on 14 servers and haven't given
| Discord my phone number - but there's one server I
| refused to join because my phone number would have been
| required, which is a hard nope from me.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing
| prevents you.
|
| You think? I still have to use the official client to log
| on to all of them so they can just ban all if their AI
| thinks I'm a communist pedophile terrorist.
| pard68 wrote:
| I have two Discord accounts. The desktop app supports
| this and lets you log into multiple accounts at once. So
| I doubt it's against TOS.
| Dah00n wrote:
| But if one does something that breaks ToS then both will
| be banned, no?
| tester756 wrote:
| Yes, I think, because I used to run 2 accounts for a few
| years.
|
| >I still have to use the official client to log on to all
| of them so they can just ban all if their AI thinks I'm a
| communist pedophile terrorist.
|
| so... what? Your country can cause you a lot of harm too
| if they think you're pedophile terrorist.
|
| That's edge case, not something that happens to 99.99% of
| the users.
| nottorp wrote:
| A lot of countries tend to have some sort of due process,
| as opposed to a chat server's "AI".
| yard2010 wrote:
| I don't know where you live but in my country the best
| you can get is a tough bureaucracy process that most
| people can't afford that hardly can be called "due
| process"
| [deleted]
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| > Until Discord appeared we had
|
| > Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc
|
| And now we have Discord, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype,
| Slack, Teams, etc etc
| baruchel wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/927/
| j45 wrote:
| And the 29 other chat apps on our phones because chat is too
| "complicated" to run with an interoperable protocol like xmpp
| for today
| Beached wrote:
| I love and use discord daily. I totally understand why it is
| "winning".
|
| I just wished it used an open protocol, and allowed its content
| to be indexed. I dislike proprietary as a principal, and I get
| that discord isn't going to open it's secret sauce, but at
| least allow the discord moderators to click a box that will
| index text channels for search engines and future people trying
| to solve the problem that's pinned on you faq I. your discord
| channel without having to join your discord channel. (mostly
| for when that discord channel goes away in the future, lal that
| knowledge isn't completely lost"
| Groxx wrote:
| Since you are a Push To Talk user, I'm honestly curious: how is
| it different from temporarily un-muting yourself? Like, how
| does it work better for you, or cause fewer problems, or
| something.
|
| It's so popular in so many places that I assume I'm missing
| something obvious. I've always just hit a key to toggle mute
| though.
| ranger207 wrote:
| I mean, practically speaking it is just temporarily unmuting
| yourself. It's active while being held instead of toggling is
| the only major difference
| Groxx wrote:
| That is what it seems like to me too.
|
| Which is why I find it puzzling that it's so frequently a
| make-or-break feature, when everything I've used since
| early teamspeak days has had a keypress to toggle mute. (I
| have not used Teams)
| lolinder wrote:
| I don't play multiplayer games, but I can totally see how
| push-to-talk would be essential for them. In an intense
| game with lots of keyboard work, people would be liable
| to accidentally leave the mic open, distracting teammates
| with keyboard sounds or whatever.
|
| Push to talk also frees up your brain cycles from having
| to keep track of which mode you're in.
| jdougan wrote:
| I do play multi-player games, and that is exactly my
| experience. Also, on occasion I've had to be connected to
| more than one VoIP system at the same time and having to
| track all the toggles would be a huge pain.
| Groxx wrote:
| Would this imply you're using a _globally available_ key
| to briefly talk, without having to see / switch to the
| voice app? I don't think I've seen or noticed that, if
| so, only "focus discord and hold a button to talk"... at
| which point I'm already looking at it there's nothing to
| track, personally.
|
| If it's global though I can absolutely see why that's
| useful.
| tester756 wrote:
| e.g
|
| You're playing video game / sharing your IDE / whatever
|
| with discord/ventrilo/whatever being in the background
|
| you push e.g MOUSE3 (scroll) button - talk, and stop holding
| it.
|
| And you were unmuted just for the moment of holding scroll
| button.
| MildRant wrote:
| > The fundamental fact that Discord users refuse to see is that
| the platform isn't run on magic dust and fairy incantations, but
| actual human beings. Using Discord is no different from having a
| group of strangers sitting in your room with you, noting down
| every word you say to your friends and everything you run on your
| computer, and doing the devil knows what with it.
|
| Anyone making this argument doesn't understand why people use
| Discord. These articles about why Discord is bad crop up over
| time and they ALL miss the boat. If your argument is that
| "Discord isn't private" then you've already lost because no one
| who uses Discord cares about that and you've shown that you don't
| actually understand Discord.
| jowea wrote:
| Well, in fairness, I believe the guy that got caught posting
| classified docs in a small private discord server would
| appreciate privacy, even if I myself and a lot of people almost
| exclusively use public servers and would prefer if they were
| even less private so internet search would work.
| lolinder wrote:
| His friends passed the documents along to their friends, and
| they eventually got the attention of the New York Times. At
| that point tracing the documents back to him would probably
| have happened regardless of whether he used IRC or anything
| else.
|
| Do you have any evidence that him using a centralized
| platform like Discord played a role in him getting caught?
| mmercedes wrote:
| Discord handing over his billing details certainly made it
| quicker at least
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/14/fbi-
| used-d...
| MildRant wrote:
| Every company will hand over your data if subpoenaed by a
| law enforcement agency in the country they operate in.
| lbourdages wrote:
| My main issue about Discord is not what it is, but what it
| replaced. A lot of websites or forums have been replaced by
| Discord. It sucks, because it's fundamentally a messaging app,
| but people will use it for reasons where a website would male
| sense ("link is in my Discord").
| stu2b50 wrote:
| That's on the things (vbulletin forums, etc) that Discord and
| Reddit have replaced for being so bad that people would
| prefer using Discord over them. It's hard to blame Discord
| for making a good product. As to users, a UX principle is
| that users aren't wrong, the UX is wrong. There's a reason
| people use Discord for these purposes, and you need to
| resolve that reason, not make punitive actions towards users.
| naikrovek wrote:
| discord is great, ideal maybe, except for the closed nature.
|
| IRC as a protocol is extremely simple and that has value, and I
| feel that Discord's UI, search, built-in history, and finer-
| grained permissions (finer than anything IRC can do, anyway) are
| all plusses that IRC advocates should not discount.
|
| other great features that Discord has which are discounted by IRC
| afficionados: replies. inline image and short video support.
| reactions. very high quality video streaming and voice chat
| (though IRC can be forgiven here given the time period in which
| it arose.)
|
| these things almost all matter to modern day users. saying that
| no one needs them because you don't need them or want them is
| gatekeeping and is myopic and short-sighted.
| toastal wrote:
| I like that Prosody MUCs default to just giving you the last 20
| messages-enough to give you context of the current topic.
| Shipping the entire history like Matrix & others do is more that
| should be necessary for the communications best suited for
| chatrooms. If you needed something to be longer lived, it should
| have been on the forum and/or mailing list.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Matrix is a very viable chat protocol: I have been using it now
| full-time for some months. I even bridged my whatsapp and
| telegram accounts so that I exclusively use the matrix clients on
| my phone and desktop without hiccups.
|
| I find that I can use it both for IRL friend groups a la
| whatsapp, and for online "rooms" a la IRC/discord/slack (but with
| history, which IRC is lacking).
| jacooper wrote:
| How do you deal with the terrible element client? I use matrix,
| but I don't bridge my accounts because I can't trust element.
| sph wrote:
| Same. Element is the single reason I dislike Matrix with a
| passion, and any other client is either another Electron
| monstrosity, or a crappy native app that's little more than a
| proof of concept.
|
| Element is so bloated and slow, it's impossible not to feel
| Matrix is bloated and slow as well.
| LorenDB wrote:
| I'm not sure why you don't trust Element. It's open source,
| so you could just look at the code yourself to determine
| whether you can trust it.
|
| I personally use the nheko client since it is a native client
| and less bloat (in other words, no Electron stuff).
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Element mobile isn't as smooth as WhatsApp/Telegram but it
| isn't terrible either.
|
| If you don't trust then there a few alternative mobile
| clients and plenty of options on desktop. I use iamb which is
| modal TUI like vim.
| j45 wrote:
| What trust issues are there with elements if someone is self
| hosting?
| bhickey wrote:
| Why not matrix? Due to the creeping shitification of Discord my
| friends moved over to a self-hosted matrix server. It costs about
| $5/mo and does everything we need it to do.
| badrabbit wrote:
| The one thing I dislike about matrix is how it has to use http.
| IRC is an escape from the web. The matrix api is simple enough to
| use a couple of curl commands for basic chat though.
|
| A simple "everything is a json schema" protocol but over TCP/UDP
| would be cool.
| doix wrote:
| My friends and I started a private IRC server when we were in
| university and still use it to this day (15ish years later). We
| also used to run a ventrilo server that quickly got replaced by
| mumble. I can't see us ever switching to discord.
|
| IRC was always a pretty big part of my life, it's where I got
| into organized quake/cs1.6/Dota matches. I'm not as involved in
| hardcore gaming now, but I suspect that's all been replaced by
| discord and automated match-making in games.
|
| I was also a great resource for learning about technical topics.
| Nowadays most open source communities point to
| discord/slack/gitter or something like that.
|
| I really wish IRC would make a comeback. All these new networks
| force you to use their client to connect, and I hate the modern
| design trends. mIRC (on windows) and irssi(on Linux) got the
| UX/UI pretty much perfect in my book. Everything since then just
| adds more whitespace and distractions from the actual important
| content (the chat).
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Everything since then just adds more whitespace_
|
| I always felt that UX people are self-loathing, and thus, view
| their best work as... nothingness!
|
| The more of nothing they add, the more space, the more
| emptiness, the more comfortable they are with their work!
|
| The less of them, the better they did!
|
| "Hi, I took this perfect thing, and added ... nothingness, and
| got paid for it!"
|
| Perhaps, a little voice in my head whispers, the nothingness
| matches their soul!
| __david__ wrote:
| I don't have anything against IRC, but to suggest it as an
| alternative to Discord shows such a fundamental lack of
| understanding of what Discord is good for that I'm kind of
| baffled. If you're looking for self hosted alternatives then
| Matrix (especially with the latest video/voice chat rooms)is much
| closer to what Discord offers, but even that isn't really a
| viable replacement for the core use case of Discord: voice chat
| while gaming + seamless video streaming of captured game footage
| with a UI so smooth that my 8 year old nephews figured it out on
| their own.
| fruitreunion1 wrote:
| Yeah, I think there's just a disconnect in culture. Making IRC
| more viable towards those who like Discord etc. would
| fundamentally change and ruin it for many who like IRC. And
| vice versa. So IRC will never resurrect and be used by the
| masses again.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think it never was used by masses... Maybe teens and even
| then I never found it particularly ergonomic.
| j45 wrote:
| Discord was definitely the school age crowd.
|
| Voice chat before cell phones with unlimited meant calling
| your friends
| nemetroid wrote:
| I don't think these are the use cases that the article is
| against. There are plenty of text-only uses of Discord, see
| e.g.:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36746154
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098
| rvz wrote:
| That ship has sailed. IRC lost to Discord years ago. Don't care
| about it being closed source. IRC also lost to the Matrix
| protocol as not only that is much better, it is also just as
| competitive with Element and they are making money, meaning that
| they can afford to add more features.
|
| IRC is prehistoric ancient history. It's time to evolve and leave
| that protocol in the dust and go with modern alternatives like
| Matrix.
| throw2022110401 wrote:
| > IRC lost to Discord years ago.
|
| A couple of years ago you'd have told me the exact same thing
| but with s/Discord/Slack/
|
| IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around
| while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant. Even
| if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes
| terminally enshittified?
| rcxdude wrote:
| Last I checked Slack has many more users than IRC
| snvzz wrote:
| IRC will still be around after Slack is long gone.
| rvz wrote:
| > IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around.
|
| IRC is no more relevant than the fossils that are still
| underneath the ground.
|
| > while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant.
|
| So Matrix is gone and irrelevant?
|
| > Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it
| becomes terminally enshittified?
|
| Even if that happens I can guarantee you that they _won 't_
| be going back to IRC.
| Arathorn wrote:
| Matrix is very much alive and well; we just hit 100M total
| addressable users on the network :)
| progval wrote:
| How do you count users? I couldn't find a way to get
| stats from other people's homeservers when I looked into
| it
| magsarion wrote:
| https://pomf2.lain.la/f/7sl51lqf.png
|
| Yes, it totally lost, like it has lost the other 34 times.
|
| The reality is, IRC will probably be still around after Discord
| and its successor have bitten the dust. The Lindy effect has
| been trustworthy so far.
| rvz wrote:
| > The reality is, IRC will probably be still around after
| Discord and its successor have bitten the dust. The Lindy
| effect has been trustworthy so far.
|
| You do realize that even if Discord dies, its users on there
| _won 't_ be going back to IRC? That is the point.
|
| We have already seen the Matrix protocol being used in the
| tens of millions whilst IRC is in decline.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It will be around, but it will be used by about same number
| of people... It won't grow from where it is now. Unless it
| fundamentally changes.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Was IRC ever used privately and internally within the workplace?
| I'd like to know if anyone did. I only ever used it briefly with
| forum communities and some older OSS projects.
|
| At work, it has only ever been Slack. Some older employees recall
| using Skype for Business.
| vq wrote:
| Ericsson had an internal IRC server a long time ago.
| fragmede wrote:
| Absolutely. Most big tech companies had, at one point, or still
| have (Google's is alive and well - how do you talk to your
| coworkers over Google Meet to troubleshoot why Meet is down
| when Meet is down?) their own internal IRC server that the
| sysadmins setup because it was easy enough to stand one up and
| all the tech people were on IRC anyway, back in the day. IRC
| predates cloud and the virtual machine proliferation, nevermind
| Docker.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Yes in Swiss Bank/UBS with logging and other extensions to make
| it effectively one server across regions. - This was either
| sold to Microsoft as MindAlign
| nottorp wrote:
| Yes we had a private irc server for work in the 2000s.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| RH still has IRC, but it's rather deprecated.
| yborg wrote:
| It's funny, still actively working in the tech space I usually
| don't really feel my age, but topics like this remind me that
| I've been around a long time. At one point I think you would
| have found most large *ix-using organizations running internal
| IRC servers or even networks. When Slack first came out, it had
| a first-party IRC bridge, partly for this reason.
|
| IRC is very much a first-generation distributed comm protocol,
| but by the time it was mature it had most of the capabilities
| of current systems, mostly provided by external services. As
| Jamie Zawinski once observed about email, team chat has a
| common set of functions that people will always want and any
| system used for that eventually implements all of them or is
| replaced; and if a system implements these functions better, it
| also replaces its predecessors. I mean, I'm old enough to have
| regularly used 'talk' at work, evolution is a good thing.
| rascul wrote:
| US Army did. Not sure if they still do.
| soldeace wrote:
| > Anyone who has ever used IRC knows that there is nothing even
| remotely complicated about using it, but the terminology and the
| steps required to use one are ostensibly terrifying enough to
| reliably keep the technically illiterate at bay.
|
| This remark, topped with the author's piece on "normiefication",
| is the kind of intellectual elitism that reliably keeps me away
| from IRC whenever I think of coming back to it.
| yborg wrote:
| This is a silly statement. The technology doesn't embody any
| 'elitism', back in the day there were many channels/networks
| with non-technical users. Back when Shoutcast was a thing,
| servers often had an associated IRC channel where people would
| make requests, or just talk music, just as one example. This
| also makes the "keep technically illiterate users away"
| statement silly, I've seen middle school age kids connect to
| IRC channels without any apparent difficulty.
| c-cube wrote:
| I stopped being engaged when the author uses "normalcattle"
| in a unironic, disdainful tone. Then later on there's praise
| of RMS. I like the overall message, as a long time daily IRC
| user, but the contempt seeping from the whole article is a
| turn off.
| mplewis wrote:
| This person's view is so insular and so self-centered that they
| truly seem to believe that IRC is not complicated. This is an
| excellent illustration of how important it is to stay grounded
| and connected to your real-world user base.
| Spivak wrote:
| When the irreducible complexity of a problem is met with a
| simple implementation the complexity has to go somewhere
| else, usually the user.
| imadj wrote:
| Not receiving a message unless you're online is really the deal
| breaker for most people
| magsarion wrote:
| Most IRC networks have a MemoServ, so that's not an issue.
| NoNotTheDuo wrote:
| That's a feature in many people's eyes
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Define many.
| progval wrote:
| This isn't inherent to IRC; some servers support sending
| history when you are back online:
|
| *
| https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....
|
| * https://docs.inspircd.org/3/modules/chanhistory/
|
| * https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history
| DogLover_ wrote:
| I am still perplexed that people accept the UX of Discord. It is
| just so horrible that I can not get myself to use it even if I am
| looking for a place to engage with communities. There are way too
| many channels which you cannot opt out of.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I use Discord for my CTF team going back four years. Our lead
| will sometimes say "to prepare for the next one, search
| Discord..." which kind of works. There are some software that
| uses Discord for tech support. Since Discord isn't indexable by
| Google, all of that information is then locked up in Discord's
| "knowledge base" forever.
|
| This is more against the migration of these "knowledge base"
| services to Discord chat than a knock against Discord itself.
| scarygliders wrote:
| I've been on IRC since the 90's and was an Op for Undernet #Linux
| & #Japan for many years, used to run an IRC server for a small
| IRC network back in my London days, and also ran a server for the
| same little network in my Japan days...
|
| The article was excellent, however, it made no mention of Matrix.
|
| Matrix, like IRC, is decentralised.
|
| You can run your own homeserver - just like running an ircd.
|
| Connecting to a Matrix homeserver with a suitable client - I use
| Element - you get all the equivalent benefits of IRC (chat) but
| with the additional Discord-like benefits of being able to post
| images in-chat, text formatting.
|
| Another benefit is chat history (if configured for a room). Also,
| fully encrypted rooms. You can have voice and video rooms too.
|
| What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that I'm a full convert now
| to Matrix. It's better than Discord in that Discord is a walled
| garden, whereas Matrix - like IRC - is completely decentralised,
| and I highly recommend using Matrix over IRC these days.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Its still somewhat slow with loading existing chats but Matrix
| has serious potential. It is already doing much better than the
| fediverse in terms of discovering niche communities.
| scarygliders wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Some rooms have so many user and so much chat history, that
| my own puny homeserver struggles to join them. I've tried all
| sorts of tweaks - from tweaking the PostgreSQL service, to
| using things like noatime etc. on the ext4 filesystem. This
| has helped immensely, but some rooms, like the Python room on
| matrix.org, brings my homeserver to its knees :)
|
| Perhaps in the future the Synapse devs will improve the code
| so that mammoth rooms don't bring more resource-starved
| homeservers down. Alternatively I could throw more resources
| at the homeserver, but for my use-case, the 6GB ram and 6
| cores I assign to the VM running the Synapse instance and the
| PostgreSQL service - and the IRC bridge heheh - is the bare-
| minimum I can get away with.
|
| On saying all that, I like Matrix more than I like IRC,
| nowadays, and more folks should IMO get on Matrix.
|
| (p.s. custom emoji's would be lovely on Matrix ;) )
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The slow loading and tracking of who has read what are the
| two biggest gripes I have about the protocol.
|
| If I'm joining a huge channel with thousands of people I
| _really_ don't care whether astroboy8756 has read my message
| or not. I don't want that traffic to enter my client at all.
| Tmpod wrote:
| Matrix 2.0 will put an end to that trait plaguing the
| protocol's viability. With the new "sliding" sync, clients
| will be able to fetch stuff much more efficiently (and more
| akin to Discord's API, for example) than before. Syncing an
| freshly logged-in account takes seconds instead of minutes
| and syncing messages when returning to the app is instant.
| They presented this at FOSDEM this year:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUPJ9zFV5IE
| judge2020 wrote:
| Do you have the same opinion on GitHub, a completely closed
| source Git frontend where 99% of OSS code lives?
| scarygliders wrote:
| In a way, I do.
|
| Which is why I use self-hosted Gitlab ;)
| smarx007 wrote:
| Same thought - I was surprised to see no mention of Matrix or
| XMPP.
| thiht wrote:
| XMPP is a monstrosity, just let it die... The X is why it
| failed, depending on the client used by participants, some
| features wouldn't work as expected. I remember someone
| shitting me because the messages I sent were ugly in his
| client, maybe because of a bad font on one side or the other
| or something, don't know, don't care.
| j45 wrote:
| Big miss
| chromatin wrote:
| Many who have causally read about Matrix and looked into
| running a homeserver have run across the reference
| implementation Synapse, which is (IMO only, pls no flame) a
| bloated python monstrosity. This turned me off for years.
|
| A second-gen (?) alternative written in Go called Dendrite is
| much lighter weight, but is lacking in some features last I
| looked.
|
| A couple of years ago, I found Conduit (https://conduit.rs/) an
| ultra lightweight homeserver implementation written in Rust
| with an engaged and responsive community. I've been running
| this for 18-24 months now and use it for family communications,
| as well as small business and my group at my $DAYJOB. I highly
| recommend anyone who hasn't already to check out Conduit :)
| nullifidian wrote:
| >bloated python monstrosity
|
| >an ultra lightweight
|
| 370 crates in Cargo.lock
|
| 176 crates downloaded by cargo-tree
| sph wrote:
| Not a surprise, Rust has attracted the Node.js crowd and
| they've brought their packaging philosophy with them, if
| not their love for reinventing the wheel every few weeks.
| jcul wrote:
| Thanks, will check it out. Last time I looked, dendrite,
| construct, and conduit were not ready, so synapse was the
| only option (which I used).
|
| Look forward to trying out conduit.
| donatj wrote:
| IRC had huge momentum like 5 years ago that just disappeared
| overnight. Freenode jumping the shark didn't help but I'm still
| surprised.
|
| I loved the days where I'd be in a couple IRC rooms and a couple
| slack rooms all in the same IRC client. Slack killing IRC support
| still bums me out.
| schmoooo wrote:
| why not using an end2end encrypted p2p only chat lioe
| https://cabal.chat instead?
| jimmychoozyx wrote:
| I've tried Slack and Discord. Of course, ICQ & MSN Messenger long
| ago.
|
| IRC is #1 in my book. I always come back to it. I like its
| simplicity and its community. It has been immensely valuable to
| me, to get guidance and answers to questions, from software
| engineers with tons of experience.
|
| Libera server all day!
| sylware wrote:
| IRC is the perfect chat protocol for interoperabitily between Big
| Tech and small tech, ofc where it is reasonable. Namely,
| regulators should enforce the availability of an IRC bridge (with
| TLS where pertinent authentication is to be used).
|
| Twitch has been providing a non-TLS and public IRC bridge.
|
| Moreover, IRC chat can be extremely well extented, namely with
| bells and whistle features if the client supports them, and if
| not can be ignored and and then displays harmless garbage (you
| can encode A LOT in a short text string, and now with utf-8...
| you can encode MASSIVE load of things within a short text
| string).
|
| From a noscript/basic (x)html, just need a irc:// URL and were
| good. We can even have pre-authencitated irc connection using a
| transient TCP port opening with IP[46] locking (ok... you will
| need a pool of IP[46]s for significantly sized services).
|
| Ofc, the bad thing: most of the time the noscript/basic (x)html
| browser will fire up an irc client, then you get 2 windows. Or we
| could have an IRC client integrated into a noscript/basic (x)html
| browser which will open a "frame"/new tab, well... modularity,
| and this would still be cosmically less costly from a technical
| point of view than any Big Tech web engine.
|
| It is like some _LEAN_ p2p protocols (streaming, live or not)
| directly integrated into noscript/basic (x)html browsers with
| good and honest default (that's the hard part, it will be abused,
| and if it is too much, won't actually work). Well, a "private"
| tracker would do the "trick". Still, it could fire up an external
| p2p-enabled media player (via <video> with the p2p URL with the
| private tracker and video hash, or the private tracker infos
| could be part of a dash file).
|
| Ofc, you have to expect the worst from Big Tech: adamant lobbying
| against that, sabotage up to shadow-hire hacker teams, etc...
| verandaguy wrote:
| This kind of article occasionally pops up on HN and for lack of a
| better word, it's just kind of detached from reality.
|
| As a preface, I'm not telling you _not_ to use IRC. If it works
| for you, if you like to use it and deal with its quirks and
| anachronisms, more power to you. There are loads of great
| communities out there on various servers.
|
| Having said that...
|
| I couldn't in good conscience recommend IRC to a hypothetical
| someone who's never used a chat program, under almost any
| circumstance. The feature set is truly beyond meagre by modern
| standard, with _some_ , though not all of these shortcomings
| being resolved by standing up, and administering, a bouncer, and
| (if you're using something like irssi) a stew of Perl
| incantations. Which, again -- I'm not bashing, necessarily, but
| Perl just isn't a language most people are learning these days,
| for a number of reasons.
|
| Following up, though:
|
| - Admining a bouncer, while not a full-time job in the long run,
| is something you need to keep on top of, from keeping the host up
| (both in terms of potentially paying bills if you're using
| commercial hosting and in terms of making sure resource usage is
| fine, nothing's crashing, and security updates). It's also
| nontrivial in the strict sense: I couldn't teach my parents to do
| this. - `tmux` or `screen` are _easier_ options,
| but man, it always feels dodgy to use them like this. I ran
| Python servers like this when I was an intern because I hadn't
| figured out how to create an init script and before Docker was
| the staple that it is now.
|
| - Multi-device support is _rough._ If you have a bouncer, you 're
| better off, but without one, you're talking about either strictly
| logging out and back in, or having multiple `handles`,
| `_handles`, `__handles`, etc. - Other commenters
| have pointed out that Discord, Slack, etc., have occasional sync
| issues between devices -- but *at least they support multiple
| devices.*
|
| - Server federation/decentralization, while a feature for some,
| is more of an extra complication for most, I'd wager, especially
| without a reasonable central source of truth about identity. In
| Discord, there are server usernames as well as a global username
| (which is editable by the user), as well as a non-editable
| numeric identifier.
|
| - Search is functionally non-existent without a bouncer
| - Once again: this is a feature that's not prefect on other
| platforms, but at least it's *there.*
|
| - Bots in IRC have no concept of permissions outside of what the
| default handful of roles offer, because IRC doesn't really do
| granular permissions on its own (which sort of makes sense,
| that's application-level, not protocol-level.
|
| I'm not making the argument that Discord/Slack/whatever are
| _universally_ better than IRC _in every way._ I 'm trying to
| argue that their usability is top-tier compared to IRC, for most
| people. I also won't say that Discord "killed" IRC. IRC is an
| older-generation chat protocol/UX, and by that logic it's gonna
| keep getting killed with every new generation of chat client.
| First, it got killed by Teamspeak, then Slack, and now Discord,
| each using their feature sets and UXes to chip away at what's
| left of the IRC user base.
|
| This isn't even touching on the other features offered by these
| chat platforms that IRC just doesn't really touch -- mainly,
| reasonably reliable audio/video calls and screen sharing. And I
| gotta say, dealing with self-hosted live video streaming is
| _surprisingly_ hard to get right for calls of more than 2-3
| people, generally speaking.
|
| There's _some_ argument to be made about data ownership, but
| honestly, the more time goes on the less I believe most people
| care about that very much for casual chats. If you 're worried
| about the government or ( _much_ more likely,) advertisers coming
| after your private chats, IRC is absolutely not an inherent
| solution to this, and is by default probably about as bad as any
| centralized platform in this regard.
|
| Use whatever you want and what works for you. I genuinely don't
| care. But don't deal in absolutes like this; you'd have to be
| really full of yourself, or totally out of touch with reality and
| how users interact with software to make a claim like this
| article's title. Discord and Slack aren't perfect, and certainly,
| IRC power users who've been on that platform for years or decades
| may find it falls short in some ways, but for the average person,
| they're both likely better alternatives.
|
| It's also kinda weird to fanboy over this kind of thing, which is
| the impression I always get from these posts. "I use X because
| the communities/friend groups/features/tools I like or am part of
| are there" is an extremely valid subjective argument for
| preferring a platform. "I dislike Y because it has A, B, and C
| issues which break the user experience for me" is just as valid
| and more objective. "Everything that's not Z is bad because of
| $PERSONAL_MORAL_FRAMEWORK reasons, and if you wanna put the work
| into it, Z can be usable actually."
| [deleted]
| urwrong22 wrote:
| No the only viable option is Messaging Layer Security (MLS)
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
| Y_Y wrote:
| 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.
| spacecadet wrote:
| I occasionally connect to IRC on an Apple SE over wifi using an
| original ethernet card and a raspberry pi. Fun project.
| fzzzy wrote:
| Which client do you use? Back in the day i first loved Homer
| and then ircle
| spacecadet wrote:
| Here :) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SHX3lRdVQS3
| U456yAJ9w...
|
| Edit, Homer was great.
| aykutcan wrote:
| Tell me what happened your freenode?
|
| Discord is IRC's next evolution. Next generation chat. Good
| voice, excellent interactivity.
|
| It has problems (bugs & weak beta phases) but after nearly 20
| years of irc, i stopped my bnc (currently znc) instance last
| week. ~20 years of irc, countless bots, tons of good memories.
|
| it is time to say goodbye for now.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| Look how quick the transition libera.chat was.
|
| If Discord went away no one can just spin up a discord server.
| throw2022110401 wrote:
| > Tell me what happened your freenode?
|
| It shat the bed, just like Twitter and Reddit did recently.
|
| The huge difference is that with IRC we were able to painlessly
| hop over to libera.chat pretty much the same day while a lot of
| people are still struggling to leave the other two behind. I
| have learned my lesson, it's open services for anything
| important.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > _Even if you have full-on Stockholm syndrome in regard to
| advertisers data-mining your life to sell you garbage, who knows
| where else your data could be going? Considering the horrific
| epidemic of sexual abuse being abetted and covered up in the
| workplace, is it really too difficult to imagine malicious actors
| at Discord (or any other technology company) illegitimately
| accessing the data of their business ' users and using it for
| stalking or other nefarious purposes?_
|
| Maybe the author could write something based in fact, rather than
| their dogmatic authoritarian fan fiction?
|
| IRC isn't viable for the pretty simple and obvious reason - it
| lacks features users expect. It's telling that things like Signal
| and Telegram have built IRC-like services (large chat rooms) not
| on top of IRC.
| stagas wrote:
| The lack of features, is a feature.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The only threat to message data on Discord is third party bots
| like mee6 who are gateway connected to tons of public, private,
| and "small friend-group" servers, vacuuming up every message
| data to some data lake for later use. This is why Discord
| pushed Application Commands[0], which only receive data from
| Discord when the application is initialized by the user, and
| made Message Contents a privileged intent[1] that requires
| identity verification if your bot is in 100 or more servers.
|
| 0:
| https://discord.com/developers/docs/interactions/application...
|
| 1: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/4404772028...
| Brybry wrote:
| I don't think the idea of rogue Discord employees accessing
| uploaded images for nudes or searching logs for personal
| information is far fetched.
|
| Consider that a Ring employee was doing exactly that, with
| customer security cameras, and the only reason they were
| caught is another employee reported them (and Ring has no
| idea how many other employees were doing the same thing). [1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146062
| [deleted]
| notpushkin wrote:
| TIL about Comic Chat. Looks like a novelty thing to me, but also
| I would probably use it today! I'm wondering if they do some sort
| of sentiment analysis on messages sent from other clients.
|
| Working at Microsoft surely must have been a lot more fun back
| then.
| johnea wrote:
| IRC Rulz! Those corps chats suck!
| wsdookadr wrote:
| I'd say IRC and Matrix are the only viable protocols.
|
| The rest are just proprietary, centralized, corporate-owned.
|
| Here's a short list of those: Teams, Zoom, Discord, Whatsapp,
| Telegram, Skype, Ring.
| [deleted]
| backendanon wrote:
| I used to use PidGin for years. It has both IRC and XMPP.
| Thinking about using it again. I wonder also about the Freenode
| shenanigans in recent times and who was behind it.
| https://pidgin.im/posts/2021-06-irc-network-changes/
| leach wrote:
| I'd love to use open source solutions but my friends would never
| switch over to that because they are lazy and don't care.
|
| I assume there are many such cases
| valianteffort wrote:
| IRC leaks your IP address, for that one reason I wouldn't use it.
| People can be insane and emboldened by anonymity on the internet,
| and one disagreement turns into some guy swatting your home and
| getting you killed. No thanks.
| vmladenov wrote:
| I wonder why Mattermost hasn't caught on more. It has most of
| what I expect from Slack/Discord but it's open source.
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