Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

There's no point in overhauling IRC when Matrix is a much more modern alternative that includes E2EE and such things out of the box, no custom extensions required.

Also IRC doesn't store message history, which is kinda a really important thing.

People seem to feel that using open protocols for chat is like putting a hand in a toilet. XMPP seems to be mostly used by soliders and police.

Proprietary chat apps on the other hand go bad like cheese. When they start out there is a honeymoon period where they know they have to perfect onboarding because otherwise people won't use it, but once it gets a critical mass they fire the engineers and stop fixing bugs and keeping up with a changing environment.

The story is "want to try a meeting with Zoom?" and people would say "it's got to suck right?" and you'd reply "it works as well as Skype did 10 years ago" and then they try it and say "Wow!" but you know ten years from now it will be legendary that Zoom sucks and there will be something new that people are comparing to what Zoom used to be.

There ought to be a law mandating chat interoperability, Facebook Messenger could actually have a longer shelf life if you could talk with Microsoft Messenger because competition and the threat of exit would keep them on their toes.

> why don't more companies just set up their own IRC server

> The pricing for Slack

You've answered your own question there. Because "pricing" an open (as in RFC defined) IRC server is significantly more difficult than "pricing" a proprietary protocol.

So the "companies" follow the money, and setup their own proprietary silos.

Integrations and whatnot would be my best guess. But smaller projects and groups still use IRC.

I would wager it is a generational thing also.

Setting up and running IRC requires some time and knowledge most companies don't want to invest in. It's much easier to buy than to build, especially when it's not your core competency.

Slack, etc. pricing is a rounding error for most companies.

> Admittedly, I haven't used IRC much and I know the UI/UX isn't the best,

I mean, you seem to understand what's wrong. IRC is meaningfully worse to use than Slack/Discord. So people use stuff that's nicer to use.

> but that could probably be fixed pretty easily and tacked on to the existing messaging infrastructure?

If it were easy, it would have already been done. "The UX isn't great" isn't a recent discovery, it's something that's been known for a very long time.

I regularly use two messaging platforms: Discord, and Element. The former is proprietary and the latter is open. Element is meaningfully worse to actually use. And it's still the best Matrix client I personally have used.

Persistent history (i.e. being able to read messages in a channel from both when you were offline and from before you joined) is pretty important for Slack-like company chats.

That fundamentally doesn't work on IRC, as it's message-oriented (like XMPP, which has some elaborate bolt-ons and hacks to implement history that actually work ok), not history-oriented like e.g. Matrix.

Nothing? I read these HN link posts from IRC. ##hntop on libera network.

Many s/w projects still maintain support channels on IRC.

The migration to proprietary support mechanisms isolates a number of users. Mozilla in particular is much more difficult to interact with since migrating away from IRC.

I've also worked for a company that ran it's own XMPP chat server. XMPP chat clients allow file attachments, see messages from times when client is disconnected (without a bouncer), integration of voice and video chat, whiteboard, etc. Pretty much everything slack, discord, etc offer.

This question is similar to why do companies use the cloud, when most of the time they could just run a server. My biased opinion: laziness. Mostly the laziness of following fashion instead of the technically superior solution.

"I know the UI/UX isn't the best, but that could probably be fixed pretty easily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Most of the time when you ask "why isn't open source thing more popular" the answer is UI/UX. Impericaly, it is neither easy nor common for open source software to have good enough UI/UX to be adopted by non-technical people.

> What's Wrong with IRC?

• No support for server-side history, and all that comes with that (usable mobile clients, offline messaging and push notifications to mobile clients, persistent presence in channels, search, editing/deleting messages, auditability, etc). Bouncers are a poor solution, as they aren't part of the IRC server and integrate awkwardly, if at all, with clients.

• No support for attachments. (DCC SEND isn't a solution; not only does it require direct IPv4 connection between users, but it doesn't work at all in groups.)

• Poor user authentication. Connection-time auth solutions like SASL are poorly supported; after-connection auth like NickServ is hokey. Support for federated (non-password) authentication is practically nonexistent.

• Short - and unpredictable - message length limits (typically around 500 bytes).

• Crude permissions system.

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring:

Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app.

Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point).

Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screenshot with someone? Drag it into the app and they can get it at their leisure. No need to mess around with DCC send or uploading to Google Drive and sharing a link, it's right there.

All of these could be solved with IRC (in fact, Slack was initially built around IRC) but they require extra infrastructure and tooling and development to make it seamless, and that takes extra development and hosting costs.

I understand what's wrong with IRC.

I don't understand what was wrong with Jabber.

Unfortunately cross-device history is table stakes for any messaging application. IRC doesn't stand a chance against any popular app today.

Barriers to use IRC for non-technical people are higher.

I use IRC regularly and will continue to do so, but I’ve changed my opinions in recent years to admit that it is only useful for power users. The spec maintainers went too long without supporting features of competing systems like authentication, history, Threaded discussion, and a whole bunch of other things. Many of these features have been added to v3 of the specification, but it is too little too late. It is absolutely absurd in 2024 to tell somebody to install a bouncer and host it on digital ocean. They are not going to do that, they are going to use Discord. With that being said, I still love IRC unlimited extensibility and simplicity. But I’m a software engineer.

There are technical issues with running an IRC server and the protocol.

It's the UI/UX you mention that seems to be the bigger blocker.

In my experience IRC was the preferred platform among software developers for a long time. Setting up a persistent shell and bouncer and managing your logs was common and preferred. It was how a good deal of the, small at the time, open source world ran (this is the 90's up through the aughts).

I recall that started to change when Slack and other alternatives started breaking into the market. A newer generation of software developers didn't care for IRC and the UI/UX around it. Open source, open protocols, free (as in freedom) software didn't matter to this generation.

And as management and executives got more interested in micro-managing developers we needed to include non-technical folks into our chat systems... which is where the UI/UX argument struck again: our friends in HR, management, etc couldn't be expected to setup their own irssi + screen client, log rotation, notifiers, etc; writing and hosting custom bots to integrate with systems became a chore and lost art, etc.

Now we have to run multi-gigabyte, resource hogging clients to post memes and emojis. But at least it's easier to administer and get folks on board. At the cost of all your data belongs to Slack I guess.

You do get a lot out of Slack than chat though. Forms, integrations, workflows, huddles, etc. It's a different ballgame from early to modern Slack.

Actually, I think my biggest issue with IRC is that at least in the past, it looked like it leaked my IP address to chats, which is a pretty big privacy issue (they can figure out what country/province/national subdivision I live in, and that makes me uncomfortable). While I'm sure Discord or Slack or Teams has my IP address at a company level, at least individuals in a Discord/whatever cannot by default get my IP address.

> why don't more companies just set up their own IRC server?

Why don't you grow your own food? Why don't you just write your own payment processor?

I used to think this way until I started a company with employees. My opinion on the matter changed almost instantaneously.

1. One does not simply set up their own "X". Setting up X takes time and you will also have to manage it, which also takes time (and is harder to anticipate when you are fully responsible for managing it).

2. As someone making decisions on this type of stuff (eg a founder, executive, head of IT, etc), maintaining something like X is a poor use of your time and not something you want to have to even think about. So you'll be paying for it anyway even when it's "free" by having an employee maintain it or sacrificing your own time on it.

3. You may trust yourself to be able to maintain it properly, but if you delegate it to an employee, the math changes. Now you have to hire someone you can trust to do a good job maintaining it and who is willing to do that kind of work. And you need to consider things like "what if that person quits/retires/gets sick" and "what if they get hacked or go rogue" and "what do I do when they go on vacation"?

4. Businesses have a lot more requirements of their communications software than just communications. If an employee loses a device or gets hacked you need to easily revoke access to everything, so you probably want to use SSO/an identity provider to make that easy. If you get sued you need to have a way to do legal discovery.

5. If you run into a bug or make a mistake, and introduce downtime or lose chat history, you just lost a lot of productivity or valuable info - operating things like this reliably is expensive, whereas having a support contract really reduces tail risk/provides peace of mind.

So if your option is to pay someone $10k for something like chat that Just Works (99.99% at least), and you are actually trying to build/operate a business and not just play around, something like $10k for chat can be an amazing deal compared to the true costs of doing it yourself. You pay someone some money and barely think/worry about it anymore, done.

As others have said, the UX for IRC is pretty bad, and I say this as an operator of a decently sized network for the last 20 years.

Meaningfully FOSS communities are better served by Zulip or Matrix.

I don't think this is specific to chat; pretty much the same question could be asked about any SaaS offering. At the end of the day, rolling your own is at least somewhat of a risk in terms of how much it will cost, how soon it will be ready, the quality of the product being made by your employees who potentially aren't experts in the given domain, etc. In the ideal case, it would probably cost a lot less than paying for service, but you need to weight that by how confident you are in your ability to achieve that, and sometimes a high cost with a known upper bound is going to be more palatable than an unknown cost that's hopefully lower but potentially unbounded.

I spend time in a coding Discord channel, it's a regular many times a day thing for people to paste 1-10 lines of code. With syntax highlighting. That's not possible on IRC, pasting 10 lines is "spam" and gets you complained at, everyone needs their own syntax highlighter, or the sender needs to bodge uploading to a pastebin site and other people need scripts to fetch them or clicking links waiting for a separate program to open to see them, then they're not inline, the sender can't edit them afterwards.

Emoji.

Search.

Pictures.

Screensharing.

Voice calling.

Video calling.

Web clients which can join video/audio calls.

Smartphone apps.

Push-Notifications.

Colours.

Embedded inline Office365 documents, in the case of Teams.

Meeting invites built-in to Outlook, in the case of Teams.

Click thing in Teams, opens in Edge browser with the Edge sidebar open to the Teams chat place where you clicked, for context.

Email notifications of things said in Teams chats.

Integration with company directory for looking up who people are.

IRC is for people whose reaction to those is to complain or sneer about how they don't want them.

    > 2.2 Character codes
    
    >   No specific character set is specified. The protocol is based on a
    >   set of codes which are composed of eight (8) bits, making up an
    >   octet.  Each message may be composed of any number of these octets;
    >   however, some octet values are used for control codes, which act as
    >   message delimiters.
    
    >   Regardless of being an 8-bit protocol, the delimiters and keywords
    >   are such that protocol is mostly usable from US-ASCII terminal and a
    >   telnet connection.

We looked at it, at some point, but why bother when Google Chat came for free in Gsuite?

It really depends on your needs. IRC can work just fine, and all the "problems" become features. Decentralized everything, free choice of clients, extensible via bots, hosted or managed networks are available.

If you wanted to build your own chat thing, maybe base it on XMPP instead.

The is only 1 reason for me: slack connect.

Whenever I sign up a new customer, they get a slack channel where they can talk with our team. By far the best way to do this is to connect our slacks. With anything else they'd have to log in to another system or download a new client which means it won't happen.

I would love to try any of the other open source improved chat solutions out there. But the network effect, alone, keeps me on a paid plan.

IRC is amazing but it's hard to have persistent login, sharing of pics, threads, etc. These days I'd recommend matrix for a non-geeky but self-hosting audience. Definitely not something like discord that constantly tries to datamine the hell out of you.

For IRC I use Quassel which fills in all the missing gaps quite smoothly but it's on the user to set that up. Thus it's not for everyone.

At work we used to have irc servers around though because it allowed us to speak freely without HR constantly looking over our shoulders. But sadly the cybersec team hates these with a passion.