Does a version of this graph going back to 199x exists ? If not, which goes the furthest ? reddit / irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wRAR_ · 2021-09-21 07:04 https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php has only per-year graphs but maybe some other page on that website has something you seek or at least raw data. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-09-21 07:13 Thanks, wow didn't realize 2004 was the golden era of IRC. I wonder why it fell after that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wRAR_ · 2021-09-21 07:15 Better messengers and actual social networks have emerged. IRC was always bad, people just didn't have anything better. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-09-21 07:21 But IRC is an open standard, it could have gobbled up any new feature the other platforms had ? What stopped it ? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wRAR_ · 2021-09-21 07:33 For most of useful features both the server and the client need to be updated, and there are both a multitude of servers and a multitude of clients. Even the services implementations weren't unified, and everybody uses one, it would be even harder to add something not existing before. Also, most parts of the protocol aren't extensible, including the message packet. Also "an open standard" sounds like there is a single standard that you can extend and everybody then will decide whether to implement this extension. This is not true either, and even the server modes weren't unified among different server implementations. There were some attempts at writing a specifications for a "modern" IRC protocol but that didn't lead to any major changes and in any case couldn't "gobble up any new feature the other platforms had". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-09-21 07:38 So it is some kind of organisational issues ? The protocol's own infrastructure and inertia stopped it's progress ? NNTP seems to have suffered the same fate. Are all those open standards from the 1990s, like mail and tcp/ip (even http ?) eventually going to die the same death ? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wRAR_ · 2021-09-21 07:50 > So it is some kind of organisational issues ? I can certainly say that an organizational issue of having multiple incompatible and for the most part badly supported networks and a separate organizational issue of not having a single initiative were a big part of why IRC has not modernized. But even if those things existed, the protocol is still outdated and not extensible. > The protocol's own infrastructure and inertia stopped it's progress ? Something like that (again, I think it's only a part of the problem). > Are all those open standards from the 1990s, like mail and tcp/ip (even http ?) eventually going to die the same death ? I'd say it depends. HTTP 1.1 is good and extensible, though one can say it's being replaced with HTTP 2. Lower-level protocols are either doing fine or are invisible to users anyway (but you can look at the IPv6 adoption progress and then check why it's so bad). Email can devolve into a bunch of walled gardens but if it even happens then it's still far in the future, as even the gmail's success didn't do enough for that. OTOH some of the newer protocols like XMPP seem even more dead than some older ones despite their advantages. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LordGarak · 2021-09-21 09:22 I don't think the people behind IRC ever wanted it to become Facebook. That is really what was the end of IRC popularity. Most of my IRC community moved to using facebook for staying in touch. The peak of IRC for me was around 2000. I started in 1995 and then through high school it became where the parties were planned in my home town. Everyone from my school was on IRC. When I went to college in 2002 it wasn't popular there but I still kept in touch with many of my high school friends on IRC. In 2004ish one of my buddies send me an invite for facebook... No one knew what it was at the time. But before long everyone was on facebook and the IRC idlers started dropping off. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-09-21 09:49 My experience was similar. Back in 1998, every large local town had their own channel on undernet. It was the central online meeting place. Now everything is balkanized and held in private hands looking to sell out the users. It's really sad. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bongo_kip · 2021-09-21 12:50 if IRC is so bad why everybody is still using it? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- throwawhatwhenwhere · 2021-09-21 13:19 because it's not bad ---------------------------------------------------------------------- throwawhatwhenwhere · 2021-09-21 13:20 how is IRC bad? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fps81 · 2021-09-21 15:35 2004 is about when applications started needing to have mobile compatibility as more people moved from desktop computers to cell phones and laptops. IRC doesn't really work on a laptop without a screen session or a BNC, as you lose messages when the computer is off or moved. IRC eats data on a mobile connection. 2003 was around when smart phones started be affordable to nerdy people - phones running PalmOS, WinCE, BlackberryOS and Symbian were everywhere. Prior to 2004, you also didn't really have social networks, so you'd idle in IRC. Fark, Myspace, Friendster, Orkut etc. were message boards, not communications mechanisms. Wordpress and RSS were hard to set up. Facebook came along in 2003 and it became a way of publishing things to an audience of people you knew. in 2016 or so, slack started to replace IRC for software developer networks. I had been continually logged in to 4 networks for about 20 years at that point, and 2016 is when I finally shut down my last ZNC process. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wRAR_ · 2021-09-21 15:41 "Everybody" stopped using IRC in the last 10 years, of course. Only open source communities continue using it, for various reasons not always applicable to the general public. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wRAR_ · 2021-09-21 15:47 *shrug* judging by the downvotes I don't think it will be worth it to explain, but I will list several points: non-extensible protocol, bad encoding support, mutually incompatible network-specific configuration and usage details. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- joscher123 · 2021-09-21 19:45 Why is Freenode at ZERO? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ProgVal · 2021-09-21 19:48 > non-extensible protocol Really? Look at all the extensions created and implemented in the last decade: https://ircv3.net/irc/index.html And Twitch chat is has lots of weird features, yet is an extension of IRC; so clearly it is extendable. > bad encoding support I guess that's fair; but almost everyone uses UTF-8 these days > mutually incompatible network-specific configuration That doesn't have anything to do with the protocol. Just use a different client if yours is bad at multi-network > usage details What? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-09-21 20:11 The date seems to coincide with the require from 28 August that all client authenticate with IRC.com and connect only via TLS with Sasl whatever that means. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ProgVal · 2021-09-21 20:14 Lack of funding to develop nice interfaces. [Slack had over 30M$ in funding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_Technologies#History) before launching. [Discord's funder was rich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software\)#History) and Discord ran at a loss for years. Meanwhile IRC developers have to work with funding in the thousands of dollars/euros if they are lucky; because IRC is much harder to monetize because it is hard to make into a walled garden (just see what happened when Andrew Lee tried). Also, fun fact: the Twitch chat is actually IRC under the hood. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ProgVal · 2021-09-21 20:16 It fell very quickly following a hostile takeover by Andrew Lee, followed by lots of bad decisions from him, driving people away. Eventually he reset the service database (big drop mid-june), then made the network impossible to join without registering on his website, so the netsplit.de bots could not collect stats anymore. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-09-21 20:16 I think you put the finger on it. We really need to find how to fund open source software development and open standards. Relying on the generosity and ambitions of a rotation of programmer volunteers is unsustainable. If we don't we're all going to end up living in a walled garden or more accurately a prison and a panopticon. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ProgVal · 2021-09-21 20:46 I'm afraid the best option we have is Matrix. Even though it's lacking in interoperability and some parts are centralized (eg. identity servers), it's mostly an open protocol. And its owner, New Vector, has a ton of money. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jenwrr · 2021-09-21 23:51 The story is told, partly, here: https://kline.sh/ tl;dr: freenode got bought out and the entire community fled as a single piece to a new network, staff, projects and users ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bongo_kip · 2021-09-22 23:28 i don't even use IRC for any open source community, i only use it to chat with frens ---------------------------------------------------------------------- wRAR_ · 2021-09-23 06:54 You aren't "everybody". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-09-25 10:29 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-10-01 16:58 Thanks for this interesting link. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- throwawhatwhenwhere · 2021-11-08 17:41 no it's not fair to say "IRC has bad encoding support". That depends solely on the client. I see unicode and special characters just fine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ProgVal · 2021-11-08 20:22 The problem is that, for a long time, IRC did not have a way to tell clients what encoding to use, causing issues when people configure their clients to use different encodings. Now there is https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/utf8-only , but it's basically supported by no client but hexchat. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2021-11-09 01:19 [deleted]