[HN Gopher] Why I Live in IRC (2015)
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Why I Live in IRC (2015)
Author : spacebuffer
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-02-06 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aaronparecki.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aaronparecki.com)
| gerikson wrote:
| I'd love to know if the author still lives in IRC after the
| Freenode meltdown.
| arccy wrote:
| most stuff just moved to libera without much change
| srgpqt wrote:
| Freenode was smoothly recombobulated into Libera Chat, so the
| meltdown shouldn't have affected much.
| g4zj wrote:
| I could've written this article at that time. I was all about
| Weechat and IRC in general. Unfortunately, the Freenode
| situation was what finally made me jump ship.
|
| I've been using Discord every since and while I'd still prefer
| to use IRC, I don't mind it nearly as much as I originally
| expected to.
| uoaei wrote:
| It's surprising to me that IRC diehards jumped to Discord and
| not to hosting Matrix servers.
| mortallywounded wrote:
| He's on IRC, @aaronpk in #indieweb within Libera.
| aaronpk wrote:
| oh hi. Yes I moved to Libera a while back and am still there
| regularly.
| susam wrote:
| 18 years and counting! Still living in IRC. I use the old and
| humble Irssi as the client with ZNC running on a Debian VM on
| Linode as the bouncer to maintain a persistent connection.
|
| It is simple, reliable, and well established. I initially used to
| hang out on multiple networks like DALnet, EFnet, etc. but I
| quickly settled on becoming a regular at Freenode and OFTC
| because those are where most of the free and open source software
| communities were active.
|
| The biggest recent event in IRC that happened recently from my
| perspective (user perspective) was the controversial change in
| ownership of Freenode. I switched to Libera like everyone else.
| The migration took only about 30 minutes or so: point my ZNC to
| the new server, register my nick, register my channels, and done!
| nerdponx wrote:
| A side benefit of ZNC is that it makes setup on a new machine
| easy. I don't want to have to remember how to set up CertFP for
| OFTC, and with ZNC I don't need to.
| catherinecodes wrote:
| Same here. ZNC on Debian (apt install znc) on an Entrywan
| instance.
|
| The freenode debacle impacted a handful of my favorite
| channels. #tcl is noticably quieter and a couple others are
| still trying to decide whether they're an official channel or
| not (this affects #channel vs ##channel naming). I'd bet that
| the number of active users has dropped but I don't have any
| emperical evidence.
|
| If anyone is considering ZNC, here are a couple suggestions to
| change to the default config:
|
| 1. AllowWeb = false (only enable the web interface if you need
| it)
|
| 2. For each channel, add Buffer = 10000 so that you can have
| history for more than a day or two (the default is quite small)
|
| 3. Add these two lines:
|
| LoadModule = chansaver LoadModule = clearbufferonmsg
|
| to get better history tracking and avoid duplicate messages.
| bitwize wrote:
| All the action is on Discord and Mastodon these days.
| aaronpk wrote:
| Discord is just fancy IRC
| uoaei wrote:
| No, it's much more than that. _Matrix_ is fancy IRC.
| didntcheck wrote:
| Whenever someone says this I can only presume they've never
| used at least one of the two. Or think that IRC invented the
| concept of text messaging
|
| Zoom is just fancy telegraphy
| aaronpk wrote:
| sorry my sarcasm didn't make it through the computer screen
| robobro wrote:
| Mastodon? Do you mean Fediverse / Activitypub?
|
| No one should call IRC "mirc", email "outlook", or the web
| "chrome", come on bro.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Coincidentally I had to use IRC today, not much changed. Biggest
| hurdle continues to be messages when I'm away and it seems
| IRCCloud hasn't seen an update in a while.
| korse wrote:
| t2.micro AWS instance + irssi and tmux. Problem solved.
| art0rz wrote:
| For some reason I always used `screen` and never considered
| alternatives, it's just how I learned to use irssi.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I've been using ZNC for several years now. It definitely feels
| a little janky and weird to set up, but once it's working it's
| virtually maintenance-free. I run it on a cheap Debian VPS at
| Hetzner.
| korse wrote:
| I still live there. Rizon and Libera baby!
| robobro wrote:
| One of the weirdest irc networks I've seen is a rizon adjacent
| one, irc.sageru.org - its basic premise is forced anonymity
| implemented serverside.
|
| It's a bit slow. It's not an entirely beautiful place. But it's
| a fun idea, at its core.
| korse wrote:
| Thanks. Will be checking that out asap.
| swozey wrote:
| I was an ircop on efnet for like half my childhood until they
| figured out I wasn't 18 and desynced my server. I just could
| never go back to IRC. I stopped using it probably 15 years ago or
| more after using it for 20ish years. Got my first job on it,
| learned linux and networking through it, definitely propelled my
| career.
|
| TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This
| is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree to it
| in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those 1500 bots
| in a channel are doing.
|
| NO features. I'm just over the IRC client and protocol and
| whatever else. It won't preview gifs, you probably still have to
| do some xdcc crap to send a file. After using discord and twitch
| and anything remotely modern it just doesn't allow the same type
| of conversations, socializing, interactions, but a lot of people
| do love that about it. I don't include weird irc clients like
| AcidMAX or whatever would be hip nowadays that probably came from
| a russian warez group that now has your credit card numbers.
|
| No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere
| running it 24/7. No multi-device support, have to join the server
| and log in again etc. if it ever restarts or you're somewhere
| without a shell running it.
|
| Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy
| outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone.
|
| And being an op the amount of absolutely depraved and creepy
| stalkery stuff that went on was insane. So many of the few women
| who identified themselves as women would be harassed and stalked
| all over irc and sometimes IRL. Lots of glining of creeps.
|
| This was very much an efnet problem with some of the communities
| it developed. Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much
| if any.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Under 18 but used it for nearly 20 years? Were you born at a
| negative number?
| swozey wrote:
| I was an op when I was under 18, stopped using IRC 15+ years
| ago, and used it in total for probably 15-20 years. I'm 39
| and started at .. Idk, probably 8-9. I think I was an op from
| 12-16 maybe 17.
|
| A lot of ops were people who synced (peered) their stable and
| moderated servers on good connections with efnet. Like, OC1-3
| connections. My friends and I were pretty much apprentice
| network engineers to a family member who ran a NOC so we
| had.. servers..
|
| edit: LOL I just looked up oc1-3 speeds. That used to be so
| fast.
|
| OC1 - 52 Mb OC3 - 156 Mb
| sophacles wrote:
| Childhood me is envious of childhood you. I had heard about
| the internet, but didn't get any real access til around
| when you were already ircopping.
| swozey wrote:
| I didn't grow up in California but Virginia so it was
| pretty lonely. Everyone online was from CA in the 90s and
| my friends didn't start having family computers until
| probably the 2000s.
|
| And my parents really weren't very helpful with me
| growing it into a career. I was always "playing on the
| computer."
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head when it comes to why people don't
| use IRC anymore. Missing messages because you're not online is
| simply unacceptable to today's audience, and running a bouncer
| is too technical for most folks. Using a shared bouncer like
| IRCCloud isn't feasible since they get abused and the entire
| provider often gets banned.
|
| I still use IRC (For nearly 30 years now!) and am in a channel
| that is still highly active with regulars, but I certainly
| don't fault anybody for not wanting to use it. I run a bouncer
| not just so I don't lose messages (I leave my computer on 24/7
| with mIRC running, so it's not like I'd miss anything), but so
| I can hide my IP address.
|
| It's actually kind of appalling from a security perspective to
| expose users' IP addresses. I'm genuinely surprised that the
| major IRC networks still don't hide them. Sure, it'd break
| things like DCC, but would prevent DDoS attacks against fellow
| users.
| ehPReth wrote:
| There's client addons to log all messages (even highlighting
| deleted and edited ones) and chat exporters literally anyone
| can run, mod bots that log every deleted and edited message
| to special channels, and probably more with Discord too.
|
| (also don't forget umode +x and vhosts/cloaks exist on most
| competent networks to hide your IP/hostname)
| creatonez wrote:
| > TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites.
| This is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree
| to it in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those
| 1500 bots in a channel are doing.
|
| These sorts of bots are quite rare on Discord, you usually have
| to make an account to be able to see anything. There have been
| attempts at standardizing this (like
| https://www.answeroverflow.com/) but they haven't taken off.
| Public logs are much more common on IRC than on Discord.
|
| > Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.
|
| It seems all of the drama hit all at once, due to Andrew Lee's
| cocaine fueled episode in 2021 which caused hundreds of open
| source projects to leave the network within the span of a few
| weeks -
| https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
| bostik wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks that many of the listed gripes are
| core features?
|
| > _TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites._
|
| Fair enough. This would be a likely problem with any non-
| private chat system.
|
| > _It won 't preview gifs_
|
| Why would I want _my_ client to preload arbitrary third-party
| supplied fourth-party content? No thank you.
|
| > _No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere
| running it 24 /7_
|
| Screen and tmux have been table stakes for decades. If you can
| not sustain a 400h idle, you're doing it wrong.
|
| > _Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy
| outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone._
|
| Which one do you want? Anonymity or privacy? I don't see how
| this is in any way different than our current-day antisocial
| networks.
|
| -- -- -- -- --
|
| But this, now this is a real problem in all modern
| communications:
|
| > _depraved and creepy stalkery stuff that went on was insane_
|
| This has always been a problem. In the 90's, IRC was a
| relatively low-friction method of getting online and talk to
| people. At least these days the creeps have largely
| concentrated on their selected forums, but back in the day
| having just one in _any_ ISC channel was a real menace.
|
| Disclosure: in IRC since 1992.
| unleaded wrote:
| >Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party
| supplied fourth-party content? No thank you.
|
| I would describe it as a funny picture that moves
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| But on the other hand, sometimes it's goatse.
| korse wrote:
| You are not the only one!
| lmm wrote:
| > Fair enough. This would be a likely problem with any non-
| private chat system.
|
| No, because most non-private chat systems don't oblige anyone
| who wants to participate seriously to run a log bot. Of
| course any chat _could_ be being logged, but most people don
| 't bother if you don't give them a reason to.
|
| > Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party
| supplied fourth-party content?
|
| The whole point of being in a public chat is exposing
| yourself to arbitrary third-party content. Why would you want
| to read a message from someone you don't trust enough to load
| a gif from?
|
| > Screen and tmux have been table stakes for decades. If you
| can not sustain a 400h idle, you're doing it wrong.
|
| "It was hard for me, so it should be hard for you too." And
| IRC fans wonder why the younger generation don't want to use
| it.
|
| > Which one do you want? Anonymity or privacy? I don't see
| how this is in any way different than our current-day
| antisocial networks.
|
| People generally want persistent pseudononymity with some
| kind of reputation/integrity. When you DM someone on
| Twitter/Instagram/Reddit (or indeed on a phpBB-style forum),
| you don't have to show them your driving license, but you're
| reasonably confident they're the same person you were DMing
| yesterday. For most people that's a better tradeoff than
| IRC's "they could be anyone who's chosen to call themselves
| that, lol, good luck". Heck, HN accounts are the same kind of
| thing (whereas IRC is more akin to 4chan).
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.
|
| Freenode had all the drama and discovered how to kill off 99%
| of its use in just three easy steps: (see
| https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 for the
| dramatic abruptness of its fall)
|
| 1. There was some drama over the new "owner" of freenode which
| resulted in most of the moderation staff leaving, planning to
| set up a new network (libera chat).
|
| 2. Most of the communities saw this drama and basically said
| "uh, we're still evaluating what the hell we're doing," with
| many opting in the interim to do something along the lines of
| have presence in both freenode and libera. Freenode responding
| by de-op'ing and kickbanning people from channels that
| mentioned libera in the topic. This resulted in pretty much
| every community still on the fence going "thank you for making
| the decision, we're now on libera, goodbye freenode."
|
| 3. A few months later, the network cleared its chanserv and
| nickserv lists and basically completely rebooted itself from
| scratch, to avoid the problems of legacy people.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Even before freenode murdered itself there was controversy
| around Rob "lilo" Levin's stewardship, leading to the
| creation of OFTC.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites.
|
| Don't expect privacy in public.
|
| > NO features.
|
| Thank god.
|
| > No syncing
|
| Conversation should be ephemeral. If you want an audit trail
| use email.
|
| I also use ircs/ircx on plan 9 where the server portion, ircs,
| runs on my cpu server and I can connect from anywhere and open
| the ircx chat clients which are just rc scripts in windows.
| dangus wrote:
| No mention was ever made of why anyone would want their life
| filled with so many damn notifications.
|
| Half of these seem more appropriate for email, and email is
| already set up to handle them with zero configuration (like
| GitHub).
|
| Twitter, who cares, that's a time waster.
|
| Home surveillance stuff is also a waste of time. It is basically
| entirely ineffective, every petty criminal knows to wear a mask
| and clearance rates are below 15%.
|
| And putting your sleep logs on your website publicly...really!?
| Seems like this is just data collection as a hobby with no end
| goal.
| aaronpk wrote:
| what if data collection as a hobby _is_ the end goal
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > Home surveillance stuff is also a waste of time. It is
| basically entirely ineffective, every petty criminal knows to
| wear a mask and clearance rates are below 15%.
|
| This is very context-dependent.
|
| If I lived in a large city somewhere and was often not at home,
| sure - but I live in a small town and am almost always home.
| "Home surveillance stuff" notifies me when something unexpected
| is happening on my property and lets me respond to it
| personally. The clearance rate for reported crimes is
| immaterial when you're able to prevent the harm from occurring
| in the first place.
| aaronpk wrote:
| Exactly. Even in a relatively dense location, I have a new
| automation that runs when my cameras detect a person, both
| blaring a siren outside as well as notifying me in the house.
| Now about half a dozen times, it has stopped someone from
| getting farther than a few feet on the property, whereas
| without it I had people sneaking around looking for unlocked
| doors.
| novagameco wrote:
| I've tried to get into IRC but the public servers have so many
| dead channels. On the one channel I did find active someone
| called me a racial slur because I use Windows.
|
| I wish there were more people using these alternative, somewhat
| decentralized services that weren't just tech people. Whenever I
| see some cool new fediverse technology or alternative protocl
| (e.g gemini), 99% of the conversation is just people talking
| about the technology itself. I originally joined facebook because
| I had friends on there, not so we could talk about the tech
| behind facebook
| robobro wrote:
| Classic irc!
|
| Idling is very much a key aspect of the irc culture.
| spacebuffer wrote:
| these are channels I found to be active and had cool people:
|
| - #darkscience on the darkscience server
|
| - #linux and #indieweb on libera.chat
|
| - #talk on snoonet
| _dain_ wrote:
| there are individual discord servers with more people online than
| there are people who use IRC in the entire world. literally
| nobody under 30 is on it. just let it die.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| found the teenager
| aunderscored wrote:
| Libera currently has 34.5k users connected. And hi, I'd be
| someone under 30 that uses IRC quite often.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Counter-example experience: At some point I tried to find an
| active community to discuss Electrical Engineering. I sampled
| 8-9 Discords, and they were all dead and all had redundant
| #general and #offtopic channels.
|
| ##electronics on Libera otoh is highly active.
|
| Discord sucks because it's way too fragmented and diluted.
| lmm wrote:
| Discord is fragmented and diluted because it's the only way
| to survive (other than by being small enough to be
| irrelevant, as IRC does). Using any social system that isn't
| fragmented and diluted for anything other than bland
| pleasantries carries too much risk of becoming today's
| "twitter main character".
| austin-cheney wrote:
| People over 30 have similar thoughts about TikTok.
| joshmanders wrote:
| "I don't use X, therefore X is dead" is a very common trope.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > literally nobody under 30 is on it.
|
| Maybe once we're all dead, it will.
|
| Until then, that's part of its appeal. It's not that it's
| mostly older people, it's that it's mostly people with a great
| deal of experience.
| kamlaserbeam wrote:
| haha yeah you may be right but it's not like you'll ever find
| those good servers
| ranger_danger wrote:
| The reason I don't like to use IRC is 100% the people. Just so
| brazenly rude and egotistical, and always confidently wrong.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I agree with your statement of fact, but not your conclusion :)
|
| Those kinds of people are pretty much just a different
| interface into a knowledge base. Once you get past the off-
| putting nature of their responses, I've found that IRC has a
| higher proportion of correct answers to complex problems.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Back in the early 1990s up until about early 2000s, i would
| frequent IRC a bunch. It was so new and fun back then to chat
| with so many different people across the world; to this day, it
| remains impressive to me in several ways. Nowadays, i spend my
| time mostly equally across matrix and the fediverse. While i use
| fediverse clients quite typically (as they're intended), I use
| matrix in a few different ways (chat, yes, but also system/task
| notifications, server "logs", system "dashboard", etc.). But, its
| quite impressive to the extent that the author uses IRC; very
| clever and awesome indeed! I hope to stretch my use of matrix
| even more, but sometimes bridges make things a little annoying.
| Nevertheless, for me, matrix has replaced irc.
| catherinecodes wrote:
| The author describes the alerting and notification workflow
| really well.
|
| We use IRC at work for this purpose. Prometheus alerts flow into
| channels that anyone is free to join or leave depending on what
| they're working on at the given moment.
| ionwake wrote:
| did the freenode startups channel die? It was active until
| atleast a few years ago...
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Why I Live in IRC (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12267254 - Aug 2016 (83
| comments)
| rubinlinux wrote:
| Surprised no one even mentioned the matrix protocol yet. Its
| still very rough around the edges, but for an old school IRC
| person talk of Discord as an alternative just hurts me.
|
| Do I want my community to be completely owned by a corporation,
| so that all the work we put into the network effect belongs to a
| company and they can impose/change rules at any moment? Have we
| learned nothing?
|
| Matrix is the modern IRC alternative, not discord. And in some
| cases, you can run a bridge between the two, so I use a matrix
| client as my daily IRC interface -- best of both worlds.
| iotku wrote:
| >Matrix is the modern IRC alternative, not discord.
|
| But simultaneously Matrix is not a good enough Discord
| alternative.
|
| Too much friction, too many issues, and still difficult for
| non-technical users.
|
| The reason Discord won out is you can just send a link to
| somebody and they're already on-boarded.
| lmm wrote:
| Even Discord is too hard for non-technical people. My attempt
| at a family server has dozens of stale accounts belonging to
| my parents. As much as it infuriates me, I now understand why
| WhatsApp is phone-only.
| BMSR wrote:
| What I like about irc is that the x-topic "communities" are one
| big channel, centralized. Compare that with Discord where you
| join a server/guild and you are presented with 10 or more
| channels and you have to take a guess into what the normal/off-
| topic/on-topic/general channel is. But irc is also very strange,
| I wouldn't be surprised if I had been chatting with a swarm of
| bots all these years.
| nathias wrote:
| you can also connect other chats to weechat like facebook
| messenger and slack, so you have a unified chat
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