A couple decades ago I remember somebody using awk in programming competitions, as a stunt, and doing surprisingly well. For tasks involving text processing it has a huge advantage, and it ends up doing ok with other stuff.
It's not terribly far from the truth. IRC is a pretty thin layer on top of a generic TCP server. On your classic ircds the notion of users and channels is about the minimum possible, and everything's tightly coupled to the network and DNS. Single-core servers back in the day could and did handle 10,000 active users.
Seeing hexchat always gives me a pang of nostalgia for hours spent as a teen on various IRC channels. I know that even if I went back to some of those servers I wouldn't be able to recapture the same "magic" since it was primarily the people there (and besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days), but I do miss the simplicity of IRC as a protocol and the massive variety of clients and interfaces.
Maybe matrix will recapture some of that platform-agnosticism? I haven't used it in a while and the general sentiment around the protocol seems vaguely negative these days (at least in channels like HN).
IRC is having its second wind as far as I can tell. Libera is very active and it offers an experience that is unlike the over-stimulating chat apps like discord.
Some projects have both a discord and an IRC channel and when you compare the two chats the conversations are wildly different — IRC being a more focused, on topic chat without floods of gifs, emojis, and off-topic channels.
The hardest part about using IRC is getting chat history and mobile notifications. As part of https://pico.sh we run a soju bouncer (soju.im) for our members to use to help with that. We have a bunch of daily active users.
> The hardest part about using IRC is getting chat history and mobile notifications.
Its not hard if the client isn't monolithic. I use ircs/ircx on Plan 9 which is a two part client: server that maintains connection to a network and channels the user joins. The server buffers incoming messages to a flat text file while the client just attaches to these buffers. I have a CPU server running 24/7 at home so it runs the server half and I can run the client on as many terminals as I want. It might be too simple but that is what I prefer.
I am such a fan of minimal, text-forward, straight to the point website designs like this. I feel like it makes it easier to quickly determine whether the text content is worth reading.
https://libera.chat is what Freenode turned into after Freenode imploded. Really great communities there - F/OSS-centric, yes, but there are good unofficial channels for cloud services, and even some proprietary software and services, like vscode, AWS, Azure, Oracle, etc.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] threadgawk is always best when served live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXHuygyyulE&t=53s
Maybe matrix will recapture some of that platform-agnosticism? I haven't used it in a while and the general sentiment around the protocol seems vaguely negative these days (at least in channels like HN).
Some projects have both a discord and an IRC channel and when you compare the two chats the conversations are wildly different — IRC being a more focused, on topic chat without floods of gifs, emojis, and off-topic channels.
The hardest part about using IRC is getting chat history and mobile notifications. As part of https://pico.sh we run a soju bouncer (soju.im) for our members to use to help with that. We have a bunch of daily active users.
Its not hard if the client isn't monolithic. I use ircs/ircx on Plan 9 which is a two part client: server that maintains connection to a network and channels the user joins. The server buffers incoming messages to a flat text file while the client just attaches to these buffers. I have a CPU server running 24/7 at home so it runs the server half and I can run the client on as many terminals as I want. It might be too simple but that is what I prefer.
ZNC is an excellent way to keep history between your IRC sessions: https://github.com/znc/znc And WeeChat is an excellent companion to ZNC and libera.chat: https://github.com/weechat/weechat And IRC for Android is an excellent IRC client that also plays well with ZNC: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.countercul... Cheers!