[HN Gopher] IRC Driven - modern IRC indexing site and search engine
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IRC Driven - modern IRC indexing site and search engine
Author : pabs3
Score : 92 points
Date : 2025-01-13 05:58 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ircdriven.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ircdriven.com)
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Unfortunately we need this for Discord a lot more. Really should
| be a default thing instead of extra steps and on by default with
| the possibility to export to something else (static html with
| some search engine) so it doesn't depend on the discord server
| running.
| creesch wrote:
| Discord community servers can already be searched and
| discovered. Which is effectively what this is about. I suspect
| you are more talking about the conversation on discord?
|
| I don't think the actual chat conversations need to be indexed,
| in fact as a platform for chat I appreciate discord for what it
| is. though irc also worked fine for me back in the day.
|
| What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also
| used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much
| information just hidden on discord you will only find when you
| know to join specific servers because there is no way to search
| for that information from the outside.
|
| For some topics and subjects that is fine. But for support for
| software (even open source) I feel that it is a loss and
| actually has contributed to a decline of information
| availability on the internet.
| squigz wrote:
| > What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is
| also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so
| much information just hidden on discord you will only find
| when you know to join specific servers because there is no
| way to search for that information from the outside.
|
| Which would, of course, be solved by having those
| conversations indexed and searchable on the web.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Discord community servers can already be searched and
| discovered.
|
| By those that have an account and that know on which
| "servers" to find the content they're looking for.
|
| > What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is
| also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so
| much information just hidden on discord you will only find
| when you know to join specific servers because there is no
| way to search for that information from the outside.
|
| And that's exactly the problem. Discord is a great Teamspeak
| successor (I suppose; I've never used that). It's a horrible
| substitute for a bug tracker, development roadmap, forum,
| release announcement feed etc.
| mdaniel wrote:
| That's why I loathe any project that picks Discord (or worse,
| fucking Slack) when Zulip exists, is open source, offers
| hosting for open source projects, and _ships_ with "publish
| these channels to the web": https://zulip.com/help/public-
| access-option#enabling-web-pub...
|
| To see it in action, feel free to open this in an incognito
| window, it won't prompt you for credentials
| https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/
| progval wrote:
| Zulip seems to rely too heavily on Javascript to be indexable
| by search engines. I copy-pasted some sentences from month-
| old posts on https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/ into Google
| and Bing, and neither could find the posts.
| tabbott wrote:
| Search engines are great at rendering content using
| JavaScript, they're just not able to explore the Zulip web
| application's URL structure, so they tend to index one page
| per Zulip installation.
|
| The current solution is that projects that want their
| publicly available content to be search engine indexed set
| up https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive, which usually
| involves hooking a GitHub action up to GitHub Pages for a
| 0-infrastructure deployment. Ultimately, that's the same
| model as an IRC indexing project like this one: a separate
| tool from the chat server is responsible for search engine
| indexing.
|
| Lean runs one here: https://leanprover-
| community.github.io/archive/, but it looks like it hasn't
| updated in a year, so likely whoever in the Lean community
| needs to investigate why it isn't updating.
|
| https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 tracks our goal
| of making the server natively offer search engine indexing.
| The current separate archive tool model has some advantages
| (search engine load can't break the server, for example),
| but I think it'll be worth doing the native version when we
| can find the resources for it.
|
| Source: I lead the Zulip project.
| WD-42 wrote:
| I just got sucked down the rabbit hole looking at all the super
| low pop servers here: https://www.ircdriven.com/networks/list/
| definitely some interesting looking stuff, very esoteric
| websites. Cool.
| Twelveday wrote:
| This is a fun one to look at: https://www.desktopmasters.com/ I
| love how the download for Java still links to JDK7 :)
| dijit wrote:
| I wonder how they choose which networks to index.
|
| I've been running an IRC network for 20 years, that currently has
| a few thousand users on it. Yet it does not seem to be indexed.
|
| there was another topic recently about nostalgia regarding the
| old Internet, one of the arguments presented in centralisation is
| that discoverability is much improved-
| creesch wrote:
| There is a "submit network" button in the menu ;)
| pabs3 wrote:
| Looks like it is broken, I got a HTTP 5XX error.
| creesch wrote:
| Looking at the statistics I can't help but notice how small IRC
| is these days. Specifically when you compare it to how many
| people use the internet. The biggest channels have a few thousand
| people in them, but those seem to be rare.
|
| One of the biggest channels ironically is one for an IRC client
| called "the lounge". Which is a very nice web based client with
| bouncer build in. Though I might be biased as I did contribute to
| the project years ago.
|
| I was a dedicated IRC user for a long time, even going as far as
| developing this monstrosity:
| https://github.com/creesch/discordIRCd
|
| At some point I didn't see the point anymore, as it clearly was
| just old guard sticking around with no one new joining.
|
| It is a shame that discord as a closed platform is the de facto
| standard though. I am not sure things could have gone
| differently. Considering how glacial IRC development was at the
| time and the convenience and features Discord offers over
| alternatives like Matrix. I know that Matrix these days has a lot
| of the same features but certainly is not there as far as
| convenience goes.
| nkzd wrote:
| I've always wondered, why was IRC not developed further? Some
| of the features people take for granted in chat clients today
| never made it to IRC.
| zaik wrote:
| https://ircv3.net/
| creesch wrote:
| It was, someone already pointed you to ircV3 which attempted
| to bring a lot of modern features to irc. But besides the
| specification process being slow you also had to content with
| all the different clients and networks. Most of which at that
| point in time already had stagnated in development.
| j45 wrote:
| The instant messengers did that.
|
| Then slack did the modern IRC client.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I'm so old I remember the days when Slack had built-in IRC
| integration :)
| j45 wrote:
| I thought I read somewhere the early versions of slack
| actually ran on irc.
| cpach wrote:
| Moxie Marlinspoke thought hard about that, here's his
| conclusion: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
| ezst wrote:
| That's more Moxie's PR department rationalizing why they
| didn't go for the better (more resilient, more privacy
| respecting, more flexible, freer) decentralized approach.
| It's also extensively debunked:
| https://gultsch.de/objection.html
| cpach wrote:
| Ok. So what do you think are the reasons that IRC has
| lost marketshare to Slack and Discord?
| mariusor wrote:
| I would assume it's mostly marketing. There's no entity
| behind IRC to push its adoption and herd the cats to a
| singular goal.
|
| The lack of features that Slack/Discord specifically
| added to differentiate themselves from IRC are also
| important, but it was a lot simpler to add them to their
| brand new designs, than to work through having to specify
| them onto the IRC protocol and then get servers and
| clients to adopt it. You can look at the IRCv3 page
| linked higher in the thread to see some of the efforts,
| but this is 10 years later and we're still not there. :D
| immibis wrote:
| If it supported things like picture messages, then it
| wouldn't really be IRC any more. I suppose you could create a
| new protocol that's most similar to IRC, but when creating
| new protocols, people typically want to make other
| improvements at the same time, such as the ability for a user
| to stay in a group while offline.
|
| In my opinion, _most_ of the differences between IRC and
| Slack /Matrix/Discord/etc stem from trying to keep users in a
| group chat while they're not actually online, since this
| requires servers to store message history, and then you're
| legally required to have a way to moderate the message
| history, and you might as well send back-history to clients
| who just joined, and so on. Additionally, since each message
| is stored authoritatively on the server, it can be updated
| with things like text edits and emoji reactions.
|
| Some of the differences, like being able to send pictures, do
| not stem from that.
|
| I read and responded to a similar comment recently here on HN
| about email security. The gist of the question is "why don't
| we create something like email but secure?" and the gist of
| my reply is "if we created a whole new system, we'd add all
| the things we can now have that we couldn't have when email
| was invented, like instant notifications, and then it would
| be a reinvention of a newer protocol (I didn't name Matrix,
| Fediverse or XMPP), nothing like email.".
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42633785
| doublerabbit wrote:
| IRC supports picture messaging.
|
| Encode the image to Base64, post the string and have your
| client decode. Or use your browser.
|
| Simple.
| Borg3 wrote:
| Because there is nothing wrong with good old IRC. It was
| developed to a point and left alone. Trying to improve it
| could actually lead to overengeeniring and spoiling the
| protocol. If IRC is not what you want, look for alternatives.
| There are plenty of those.
| diggan wrote:
| > I've always wondered, why was IRC not developed further?
|
| Personally, part of the charm of the IRC protocol is the
| simplicity. You can implement a client effortlessly in most
| languages in just an hour or two.
| mariusor wrote:
| I think that the biggest IRC channels are on twitch. Large
| streamers have tens of thousands of people in their channels,
| and probably the servers must have millions in aggregate.
| creesch wrote:
| I didn't know twitch uses IRC, though I wouldn't categorize
| in the same box as traditional channels and networks either.
| I mean, the protocol might be the same, but it clearly is
| used in an entirely different context.
| mariusor wrote:
| I mean, you can connect to twitch using a standard IRC
| client. And it works equally well, better in some respects,
| as the browser chat has become a sluggish mess. There are
| stand-alone twitch chat clients now which support all its
| extra bling, but AFAIK they are just glorified IRC clients.
| dewey wrote:
| First time I've heard about it, really cool!
| (https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/chat/irc/)
| Arathorn wrote:
| > I know that Matrix these days has a lot of the same features
| but certainly is not there as far as convenience goes.
|
| For what it's worth, the whole Matrix community has been
| solidly plugging away improving convenience and making good
| progress - all the new Matrix 2.0 APIs, and on launching
| Element X on the Element side:
| https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/ and
| https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-...
| etc. A lot of the "Matrix isn't good enough" trope is a few
| years old now.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I wouldn't expect any other sentiment from the head of
| Matrix, to put it more bluntly.
| creesch wrote:
| I mean yeah, that is all true as Matrix has slowly been
| improving over the years and is more user-friendly than it
| was years ago.
|
| But the reality is also that it has also been a decade since
| Discord was released. Meaning that for almost a decade people
| have been able to experience a very low threshold experience
| of joining entire servers and creating their own.
|
| I don't want to discredit all the work that went into the
| protocol and clients. All I am saying is that after almost a
| decade it is quite clear that as far as IRC replacements go
| most of the internet moved to Discord. Which I also am not a
| fan of, but I can see why it did happen as Matrix simply
| didn't have all the features back then. I also do recognize
| that Matrix at this stage is much more user-friendly and
| offers many of the features discord also does. Spaces in
| place of servers and at least one client that is still quite
| okay. Though I do think some of the things I said a few years
| ago still apply
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30328120#30333252.
|
| And the fact that after a decade there is still only one
| client having feature parity still stands out to me. I know
| that discord officially only has one client. But since there
| are multiple clients advertised for matrix it does add to
| confusion and therefore detracts from convenience.
|
| Having said that, I firmly believe there is a place for
| matrix. It is clear there are vibrant communities on the
| platform, so I am not saying it is a dead platform. Just also
| not one that I see being more widely adopted in the near
| future.
|
| I also have seen other applications that I found quite novel
| and pleasant. Just last year I had to do an online
| interactive training with a trainer. The platform itself with
| breakout rooms and trainer interaction was all based on
| matrix and element as far as I could tell.
| WD-42 wrote:
| The small nature of irc is a benefit in my opinion. Theres a
| certain type of person that only seeks out the place with the
| biggest audience, and they are notably absent now. Way fewer
| trolls too. Libera is super cozy these days.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Excellent, I was looking for new channels to join and idle on.
|
| In all seriousness, I hope this helps index some more active
| servers and some communities to grow. IRC was a big part of my
| life back at the turn of the century, but I spent some time last
| year sniffing around for my old haunts. They were either
| graveyards or did not exist anymore, sadly.
| dijit wrote:
| For those looking for an IRC client; there's;
|
| * The lounge (web based) :
|
| * Halloy (rust, native) : https://github.com/squidowl/halloy
|
| * Tiny (rust, TUI; easier to configure than weechat) :
| https://github.com/osa1/tiny
|
| * Weechat (TUI; the goat but harder, here's a good guide to
| setting it up) : https://newblood.anonops.com/weechat.html
| defanor wrote:
| A few more, which seem to be used somewhat commonly:
|
| - Emacs clients: built-in rcirc and erc, non-built-in Circe.
|
| - irrsi (standalone TUI)
|
| - Quassel IRC (GUI; have not tried it myself, but saw others
| using it).
|
| - mIRC (GUI, for Windows).
| mavhc wrote:
| Quassel is basically self hosted irccloud, I use it on 5
| computers, Windows, Linux and Android, it's great
| immibis wrote:
| I use Quassel because it's a so-called "split" client, where
| "quassel core" runs on a VPS, and then I can run actual
| clients of the quassel core on several different devices,
| including Quasseldroid on Android. It's a much better
| experience than sshing into a screen session.
| squigz wrote:
| I used irssi for many years before switching to Weechat, and
| I can't imagine ever switching back.
| xena wrote:
| mIRC is one of the best chat programs on the market these
| days. It uses megabytes of ram at most for hundreds of
| channels. It's a modern technology miracle and I wish more
| people used it.
| k1kingy wrote:
| I haven't used IRC in years, but when I started out with
| IRC/MSN Chat in 2001ish it was using mIRC. That piece of
| software can basically answer for my becoming a developer
| and the career I've had over the last 20 odd years.
| econ wrote:
| Long ago I installed dozens of irc clients, joined a few
| dozen servers, a few hundred channels. Most didn't do well.
| Then there was kvirc that just sat there at 0% CPU no
| matter what I did.
| diggan wrote:
| > Long ago I installed dozens of irc clients, joined a
| few dozen servers, a few hundred channels
|
| Maybe mIRC got bloated as of late, but my shitty Windows
| XP computer could easily handle multiple networks and
| 50-ish channels per network back in early 2000s, could it
| really have gotten so much worse since then?
| econ wrote:
| I don't actually remember how good or bad mirc was. It
| was the most popular client at the time but lacked things
| I don't really remember, it was time to move on. I tried
| Quassel which was nice but it got slow as the logs grew.
| Then i tried a lot of clients.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Back when I was maintaining an IRC client, my go-to
| stress test was to hop on Wikipedia's IRC network, where
| they have a bunch of firehose channels showing edits to
| Wikipedia stream by in realtime. Both super high load and
| occasionally edifying :)
| dewey wrote:
| There's also http://irccloud.com, it's paid and includes a
| bouncer and mobile apps but I've switched to that from my self-
| hosted ZNC + Textual (https://www.codeux.com/textual/) setup
| and it's very worth the money. Just having push notifications
| on mobile and full backlog everywhere makes this a way better
| experience.
|
| It got me back on using IRC every day after not using it
| regularly for years any more. Just following along in channels
| like #postgresql / #beets / #dokku on Libera I already learned
| a few new things.
| dpedu wrote:
| I don't think it's quite accurate to call it a bouncer;
| there's no way to connect to IRCCloud's bouncer with your own
| client. They do provide a bouncer-like managed service
| though, and a pretty nice one at that. Long time user as
| well.
| dewey wrote:
| That's not correct, they are offering a bouncer if you are
| a paid customer: https://blog.irccloud.com/bouncer/
| culinary-robot wrote:
| I've spent over 20 years on IRC and im still on every day. Two
| years ago, I felt the community could use more client options,
| so I created Halloy. It has since become my primary spare-time
| project, and I love seeing people enjoy IRC.
| airstrike wrote:
| And we're all thankful you did, for various reasons ;-)
| sho_hn wrote:
| On IRC since 1997 - even still in the first channel I joined!
|
| Writing an IRC client is really a fun and rewarding exercise.
|
| I also more or less started my career as a software engineer
| by maintaining a mildly popular Linux one, at the time.
|
| Some things I learned ...
|
| - A lot about shipping to real users and their pain points,
| since the devs are naturally accessible by IRC and you get to
| meet directly
|
| - A whole lot about what makes a successful technology
|
| - Equally much about tech warts, as IRC suffers from a fair
| number misguided early decisions and many years without
| functioning governance
|
| - How incredibly rewarding it is to work on products that
| users directly "live their lives" in and that can help
| facilitate anything they do - it taught me to look out for
| jobs that have similar substrate-like qualities
|
| Good luck with your project, I'm glad to see the cycle of
| renewal continue.
| anthk wrote:
| Catgirl it's fine. No Rust needed. And it has a very simple
| design.
|
| https://git.causal.agency/catgirl/about/
| sylware wrote:
| https://c9x.me/irc/
|
| A retarded C compiler, a TLS lib if you want TLS, and you are
| good to go.
| crtasm wrote:
| Use https://glowing-bear.org/ for a web UI to Weechat.
| prophesi wrote:
| To sell The Lounge some more, it essentially acts as both a
| bouncer and a web-based IRC client that you can access on any
| device. If you want to get a friend into IRC, you can provision
| them an account on your instance too. I've been running an
| instance for years without issues.
|
| edit: also just noticed parent post didn't include a link to
| it. https://thelounge.chat/
| pluc wrote:
| I ran a site like that in the late 90s/early 00s (iirc) where
| we'd make available a server file containing user-submitted
| servers. We also ran news and interviews of notable IRC people.
| Fun times.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| I used IRC in my teens as an early social network but has since
| never used.
|
| If I wanted to get involved in say more technical/niche channels
| outside my expertise, is there any advice or unwritten rules I
| should know?
|
| Perhaps a better question, how should you participate (as noob)
| without getting Stack Overflow beatings, and show respect of
| other people's time?
| defanor wrote:
| I think it is about as varied as communications outside of IRC:
| there are different communities with different rules, which are
| sometimes written down and linked from the channel topic.
| Generally hanging around quietly for a bit may help to get a
| sense of any particular community's customs.
| _joel wrote:
| Perhaps take a look at https://libera.chat/guidelines/
| diggan wrote:
| > Perhaps a better question, how should you participate (as
| noob) without getting Stack Overflow beatings, and show respect
| of other people's time?
|
| As long as you adjust when people give you guidance (if
| needed), you'd be fine.
|
| Everyone does something bad/ill accidentally every now and
| then, it's not the end of the world, apologize, learn and move
| on. It becomes a huge hassle for everyone involved when it's
| repeated even after being told it's wrong, so just listen and
| follow what others (ops) tell you.
| Mashimo wrote:
| The couple of channels I took a look at have logging disabled. So
| this is more of statistic information?
|
| MM/DD timestamps is big yikes.
| ezst wrote:
| At the risk of hijacking the thread, for a somewhat equivalent on
| the Jabber/XMPP side of things, there is
| https://search.jabber.network
|
| https://providers.xmpp.net/ to help find a provider
|
| https://xmpp.org/software/ to help find clients/servers
| kmstout wrote:
| For BBSes, MUDs, etc.:
|
| - https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
|
| - https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/
|
| Plenty of boards run Multi-Relay Chat (MRC), which is IRC-ish.
| lxgr wrote:
| For XMPP, the problem is unfortunately not just discoverability
| - actually joining the discussion is becoming more and more of
| an ordeal.
|
| Many once-popular servers have stopped accepting new
| registrations (e.g. jabber.ccc.de), were involved in some
| nation state espionage activities [1], or simply seem to no
| longer be around.
|
| For modern clients, it's not looking much better. There's
| always a promising new one around for a while, only to not live
| up to the expectations and become the "still current best but
| unmaintained" option of the future.
|
| As much as I like XMPP, I can't help but notice that its future
| looks somewhat grim.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955264
| mogoh wrote:
| Looking at the site I have my doubts, that this is modern at all.
| Don't get me wrong, I have no objection. I just wonder what
| justifies the modern predicate.
| diggan wrote:
| "Modern" can refer to more things than just "pretty" web
| design. If you reject things based purely on visual impression
| (especially technical communities), you'd miss out on lots of
| great things, Hacker News being a very relevant example :)
|
| Why they call it "modern" is outlined in the very first
| paragraph:
|
| > Originally started in 2006, inspired by the now defunct
| SearchIRC [...] Our goal is to bring awareness to IRC, help
| modernize the IRC platform and prove that IRC is not dead
| voytec wrote:
| Is it because it's lacking huge empty spaces (looks like HN)?
| J-Kuhn wrote:
| The de-facto leading IRC indexing site is netsplit.de
|
| Compared to that, IRC driven looks more modern.
| alekratz wrote:
| some of us do not want to be found. obviously the easiest way to
| opt out of (most) of these things is to use a port other than
| 6667 and 6697, but when you've been operating on those ports for
| 10+ years, and you have an old friend who wants to pop in, how do
| you announce that you've moved to port 12000? adding a server
| password is another option, but we run into the same problems.
|
| my IRC network in the past has had issues with script kiddies
| disrupting us and causing drama and claiming that our IRC server
| was insecure (it wasn't), and we figured out that they had found
| us through another IRC indexing site - one which we weren't aware
| were indexing us. another problem was someone adding a
| "partyline" bot to our server, which opened a channel to all
| other "partyline" channels that the bot had been added to. cute
| idea, but we did not ask for this, someone just plunked it in our
| server and left.
|
| I wish there was a robots.txt for IRC, or at the very least for
| the indexers to tell one of the admins, "hey, we're indexing your
| server, please let us know if you don't want us to do that". we
| want to be left alone.
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(page generated 2025-01-13 23:03 UTC)