I know IRC still exists and there's a lot of people there, but for some reason I don't feel like it is the same ~vibe~ as when I used to use it growing up in the 90s
I miss the culture that came with small distributed IRC networks. I miss the technical people that chose to use the networks. Those people moved to where they could reach more of their friends and family members.
I do not miss patching the IRC servers and upgrading / rewriting configurations (Unreal IRCD 2.x 3.x 4.x and now 5.x) and Anope services. Certainly not when we went from thousands, to hundreds, to dozens of users. Too much work for too few people making use of it.
I miss the feeling you had using it and the fun bots people made in some channels. I do not miss the difficulty of getting less technical users onto it and it's lack of portability with out some work. New tools these days make the portability aspect easy and barrier to entry low for less technical users which expands the user base of a lot of platforms today.
On the other hand, even if the barrier is a bit higher, nice things will eventually be used by everyone even if it evolves some research and learning - or seeking help from others. The most difficult thing about IRC is probably picking a unique user name or even registering one. But yeah, especially non-tech channels had a fun vibe, something I completely miss from Slack or Facebook.
twitter took that "vibe" and Eternal September-ed the idea for many people. IRC was already suffering from "if you're not from the right network you're nobody" and fragmentation of user experience with services etc; which didn't help either.
When I reminisce about IRC im usually thinking about the few channels I actually used, which were in my case smaller groups of geek tangentially spawned from a larger channel (everybody met on #slashdot but had other channels for real discussion). That kind of small group text chat is doable on discord now.
This experience still exists, but you have to find smaller channels where people come to know one another as regulars. The smaller networks and channels still exist and they have a good community vibe.
Of course, it's hard to find out about these channels. IME it takes time to find the small channels (or the small networks, there are many networks tiny enough for nobody to know about unless they've been invited). Try starting with a large channel and eventually you'll find out about smaller and smaller channels. Some larger projects on Freenode are also big enough to have -offtopic channels, which can easily become their own communities.
Keep in mind that a 24/7 connection is basically essential, get a bouncer or use something like IRCCloud.
I met my partner in one such channel about five years ago. We’re getting married this October. A lot of the guest list for our wedding is made of folks we met on IRC.
Congrats! I lost my virginity to a woman I met on IRC. Sounds less romantic than your story, but I loved her very much. I mourn those days, 1998-2000 on dalnet.
IRC in 1991, until maybe 1999... I don't think anything like that will ever come back. There were some vandals with their scripts, but mostly it was way more civilized than you ever see these days. Had a lot of enjoyable conversations, lots of fun.
I still use it, every single day. Works well and now has SSL encryption to the server, which cuts down on snooping. However, true end-to-end requires client support.
I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops and you miss messages. You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!).
Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something that just works without any additional effort it only has advantages.
I have a Raspberry pi 2 with an immutable SD card running weechat in a tmux session. Logging is done to a USB stick. On any occasional power failure it restarts everything and logs me back in.
It has been running since whenever the rpi2 came out, and total downtime since has been under an hour.
It's funny for me to see some people are still advocating Slack's "convenience". I mean I get it, Internet Chat because accessible without actually learning what a client or server is. And I'm myself in at least 3 slack groups professionally out of a total of 20...
But I just know nobody, from a variety of OSes, who doesn't experience the "bug where slack completely looses where you are in time" and then you have to scroll for a while because the "Jump to new messages" doesn't work well. I came to the point where I wonder if anybody here doesn't have that bug at all ...
A bug that kills UX like that and that we can do nothing about, not even contribute a fix, and still it seems Slack is the best product people can find, meh, I run Mattermost in my company and we're all very happy with it and don't experience as much problems as we do with Slack.
Never really been anywhere but in tech channels on IRC,
I had a few years without going back but I'm back and I love it.
I'm not a big fan of Slack for a long list of reasons, but at least I don't have to muck about with finicky undocumented (or semi-documented at best) software just to get a basic usable connection which won't drop any messages.
I think just that goes a long way.
Mattermost might be good (never used it), but being self-hosted means it's a lot harder to set up than just subscribing to Slack. I talked about this before on HN[1]: I think providing a simple hosted SaaS should be a key part of the strategy to displace shitty closed-source products like Slack.
>You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!).
...Yeah. From installing znc from your favourite package manager to having it set up and running in your client is all of ten minutes, with SSL, auto-joins, channel history and all. Is it a barrier? Yeah. Is it so much of a barrier that it would push someone concerned about centralized services and proprietary software to just give up and use Slack? I don't think so.
Not all of us have a server in the closet running 24/7, and having to use someone else's computer feels like half the way to using a service like Slack.
Not that hard, if you don't care about two things:
- Typing latency
- Access from mobile devices
Many people don't care about those things; good for them. Unfortunately for me, I do.
I can (and do) use a bouncer, which theoretically solves both problems: text entry is handled by my local IRC client rather than every keystroke going through a server, and I can run an IRC client on my phone. Unfortunately, bouncers are a rather poor approximation of true cross-device history/state synchronization; e.g. they don't sync unread messages. And they're generally slow and fiddly for various silly reasons. For example, most bouncers require you to make a separate connection for each IRC network, which is slower, and requires configuring each client device for each network, annoying if you have a lot of networks. Also, long backlogs can overload slow IRC clients, but typically the alternative to long backlogs is losing history, since there's no standard mechanism for clients to request history on demand.
There are also some IRC clients that do "true" state synchronization, like Quassel or Weechat's relay mode, but none with a tolerable iPhone version, last I checked.
I haven’t used The Lounge; it looks well-designed, but I try to avoid web-based clients as they have a lot of overhead. It also doesn’t seem like The Lounge has any solution for push notifications on iOS.
(Alas, most ‘native’ IRC clients for macOS have web views inside anyway, so avoiding web-based stuff may be a lost cause. But then I’m in no position to complain about Slack or Discord using Electron…)
I wouldn't call it bragging. I just have a lot of trust that my current kernel is robust enough for this particular application. If there were a serious exploit I obviously would update.
You still need a VPS or server of some kind, but if the "screen with irssi/weechat" concept sounds too much like 80s UNIX, there is quassel[1].
It's like a relay/proxy/bouncer but actually uses its own protocol between the GUI and core, so you get infinite backscroll, proper sync when running multiple GUI instances at the same time etc. Oh and there is a decent Android client called quasseldroid.
I can't say I miss IRC particularly. It does have a nice simplicity to it but the fact that connections are stateful and fragile is a real downer - I don't love that closing my laptop and wandering off somewhere onto a new network causes me to disappear from the network entirely.
Bouncers like ZNC rely on having somewhere reliable to host one and are additional maintenance overheads. Leaving irssi or weechat open in a screen/tmux session on a remote host leads to a terrible mobile experience.
I now just find it easier to interact with IRC users using Matrix bridges that other people maintain instead.
I don't miss IRC much -- I actually miss the paragraphs-level chat systems with lightweight categories, like MIT Zephyr and Gale. They really encouraged deeper thought, in the way that an HN comment is often deeper than an IRC one, just by virtue of having more time to collect your thoughts and then getting to attach them to the right place. It's surprising that nothing like those systems lasted.
I also miss ytalk, which shared each character you typed as you typed it. I used ytalk with my spouse a lot while we were dating.
I don't miss IRC, since I still use it, but I miss certain channels. I swear every linux related channel I go into is full of a bunch of a-holes. 20 years ago I got a lot of help (and I hope provided a lot of assistance myself) in #linux and others, but now it feels like I'm offending a channel when asking for help.
yeah I joined the bitcoin channel and asked something and I started getting really hostile treatment, I received the explanation that alot of new bad characters had joined recently and were causing trouble. i dont know but yes the positive vibe has gone a bit.
I still use it daily after nearly 30 years, though the main channel I'm on has dwindled from hundreds active during its prime to just a handful.
While I miss the people that has moved on over time, I must say Discord feels like a fine replacement for me in terms of functionality. I use Discord for a few technically oriented things and those places give me the same vibe IRC did back in the day.
Like USENET, I miss the coolness factor I remember surrounding IRC back in the 1990s and early 2000s. But as a communications tool, I don't miss it given the alternatives today.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadI do not miss patching the IRC servers and upgrading / rewriting configurations (Unreal IRCD 2.x 3.x 4.x and now 5.x) and Anope services. Certainly not when we went from thousands, to hundreds, to dozens of users. Too much work for too few people making use of it.
When I reminisce about IRC im usually thinking about the few channels I actually used, which were in my case smaller groups of geek tangentially spawned from a larger channel (everybody met on #slashdot but had other channels for real discussion). That kind of small group text chat is doable on discord now.
Of course, it's hard to find out about these channels. IME it takes time to find the small channels (or the small networks, there are many networks tiny enough for nobody to know about unless they've been invited). Try starting with a large channel and eventually you'll find out about smaller and smaller channels. Some larger projects on Freenode are also big enough to have -offtopic channels, which can easily become their own communities.
Keep in mind that a 24/7 connection is basically essential, get a bouncer or use something like IRCCloud.
Congrats!
I'm still using it for my day to day. ;-)
Though I'm no longer on the traditional large help channels on freenode (or dalnet before it ) to be fair.
Today, it seems most of the user interaction has migrated to a ton of commercial social networks.
The chat standard? Not in the least.
Haven't used IRC for almost 20 years now.
(I'm sorry, just had to do that.)
Quite honestly, I don't chat everyday, but there's a cool subscene that keeps it alive.
Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something that just works without any additional effort it only has advantages.
It has been running since whenever the rpi2 came out, and total downtime since has been under an hour.
But I just know nobody, from a variety of OSes, who doesn't experience the "bug where slack completely looses where you are in time" and then you have to scroll for a while because the "Jump to new messages" doesn't work well. I came to the point where I wonder if anybody here doesn't have that bug at all ...
A bug that kills UX like that and that we can do nothing about, not even contribute a fix, and still it seems Slack is the best product people can find, meh, I run Mattermost in my company and we're all very happy with it and don't experience as much problems as we do with Slack.
Never really been anywhere but in tech channels on IRC, I had a few years without going back but I'm back and I love it.
I think just that goes a long way.
Mattermost might be good (never used it), but being self-hosted means it's a lot harder to set up than just subscribing to Slack. I talked about this before on HN[1]: I think providing a simple hosted SaaS should be a key part of the strategy to displace shitty closed-source products like Slack.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195
...Yeah. From installing znc from your favourite package manager to having it set up and running in your client is all of ten minutes, with SSL, auto-joins, channel history and all. Is it a barrier? Yeah. Is it so much of a barrier that it would push someone concerned about centralized services and proprietary software to just give up and use Slack? I don't think so.
I'm just going to use Slack and move on with my life.
Actually I lied, I do know what all that mumbo jumbo is, but I hope you get my point.
- Typing latency
- Access from mobile devices
Many people don't care about those things; good for them. Unfortunately for me, I do.
I can (and do) use a bouncer, which theoretically solves both problems: text entry is handled by my local IRC client rather than every keystroke going through a server, and I can run an IRC client on my phone. Unfortunately, bouncers are a rather poor approximation of true cross-device history/state synchronization; e.g. they don't sync unread messages. And they're generally slow and fiddly for various silly reasons. For example, most bouncers require you to make a separate connection for each IRC network, which is slower, and requires configuring each client device for each network, annoying if you have a lot of networks. Also, long backlogs can overload slow IRC clients, but typically the alternative to long backlogs is losing history, since there's no standard mechanism for clients to request history on demand.
There are also some IRC clients that do "true" state synchronization, like Quassel or Weechat's relay mode, but none with a tolerable iPhone version, last I checked.
tmux, irssi, and mosh on a VPS and i’ve had that setup for IRC for ... pushing a decade?
(Alas, most ‘native’ IRC clients for macOS have web views inside anyway, so avoiding web-based stuff may be a lost cause. But then I’m in no position to complain about Slack or Discord using Electron…)
It's like a relay/proxy/bouncer but actually uses its own protocol between the GUI and core, so you get infinite backscroll, proper sync when running multiple GUI instances at the same time etc. Oh and there is a decent Android client called quasseldroid.
[1] https://quassel-irc.org/
Bouncers like ZNC rely on having somewhere reliable to host one and are additional maintenance overheads. Leaving irssi or weechat open in a screen/tmux session on a remote host leads to a terrible mobile experience.
I now just find it easier to interact with IRC users using Matrix bridges that other people maintain instead.
I also miss ytalk, which shared each character you typed as you typed it. I used ytalk with my spouse a lot while we were dating.
MIT Zephyr inspired. Bought by Dropbox then divested.
While I miss the people that has moved on over time, I must say Discord feels like a fine replacement for me in terms of functionality. I use Discord for a few technically oriented things and those places give me the same vibe IRC did back in the day.