What makes or made IRC applications better than other chatting
applications then and now?
reddit / irc

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subless · 2018-10-24 02:44

I was born in the 80's and did not have a computer until 2003. My go-
to app after school was Yahoo's Instant Messenger or AOL's AIM. I have
joined a few IRC channels through the web interface but they always
seem dead with nothing but idlers.
As the title suggests, what's the big deal about IRC that made or
makes it better than everything else you've used up until now?

P.S: I just want to see what I've missed out on and why.

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Monkespank · 2018-10-24 11:05

It doesn't depend on one single company like Yahoo or AOL which can
decide at any time to pull the plug on it's chat service. An
individual like you or I could host our own network for others to
connect to least that is my understanding.

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ruby-rhed · 2018-10-24 15:36

In relation to personal hosting, both the simple protocol and
lightweight implementations make IRC especially useful in low-
bandwidth low-power situations - such as what one might normally find
on a home network with a raspberry pi.

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unixwizzard · 2018-10-24 15:41

decentralization

that is what makes irc work

no one person, no one company, no one organization, no one government
had any control or say over what goes on.

nobody to come in and force a particular ideal, nobody to force what
can and cannot be said or done.  should a server owner or operator
tries to pull off a Twitter or Reddit and starts to censor who can use
the server or what can be said while using their server - they will
soon find themselves operating a stand-alone server.

networks, irc networks, the larger ones at least, can easily afford to
lose servers if need be... going back more than two decades, certain
EFNet ops wanted to run specific modified irc server code, over the
objections of the rest of the operators.  that disagreement lead to
nearly all the European servers breaking away to make their own
network, and still EFNet survived and still thrives to this day.

decentralization is the key, something that Slack and Discord does not
offer.

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PleaseNoSmallTalk · 2018-11-14 11:09

Among other things, is that it was way faster with hundreds, sometimes
thousands, of users in a single channel than the current browser-based
technologies today, like Rocket chat. Not sure if Slack has the lag
problem. The js based clients today are slow, they lag on any higher
loads... mIRC, the most popular client, was so freaking fast. IRC as a
server also.

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OldWolf2 · 2018-11-14 21:22

> no one person, no one company, no one organization, no one
government had any control or say over what goes on.

Well that's not quite true. The organization of opers for a network
have control over that network. To use your own example, they can kick
servers off at a whim. They can ban people at a whim. They could, in
practical terms, censor a topic by g-lining any people who mention the
topic.

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unixwizzard · 2018-11-14 21:45

> They could, in practical terms, censor a topic by g-lining any
people who mention the topic.

if this is what they're doing now, that's really fucking sad.

g-lining someone was a very drastic and very extreme ban that was used
very rarely.

I don't know how other networks do it today, even including the
original EFNet which I was on.. back in the day every g-line was
questioned by multiple opers, and if g-lining was being abused that
server will find themselves on an island alone very quickly.

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known_person · 2018-11-21 23:49

It's completely decentralized and not owned or controlled by any
company or government.  While AIM and Yahoo IM have gone down, IRC
won't (at least not for a looong while) cause it's distributed and
essentially uncensorable