Does IRCv3 need new leadership to continue to drive it forward? Over at Parley/Ahoy (https://git.mills.io/prologic/parleyhttps://git.mills.io/fastidious/ahoy) we've managed to create a federated decentralized IRC chat experience with a Discord/Slack-esque feel but true to both IRC / IRCv3 (Ahoy being a fully featured IRCv3 client).
If you look at "old" internet: fidonet telnet bitnet ftp fsp wais netnews whois++ gopher relaynet ... i mean irc is one of the only ones that is still used, and mostly as it was 35 years ago. Pretty impressive.
People love knocking on IRC but people are still on it, still using it...
But, seriously, that got me curious. There are many protocols from that early era that are still with us today. NTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, BGP, SNMP, NFS, ICMP. If you allow the 1990's as counting as "old" we can add SSH and SSL, DHCP, LDAP.
Yeah, but the major upgrades for things like telnet and ftp were adding appropriate encryption layers and improved authentication to include things like certificates. IRC shoehorned those into the connections awkwardly but it's still not often mandatory and registration is painful.
Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.
I thought of that ... you could put it in the list but I wouldn't unless you're talking cron. I mean when I started it was like mail bob@froggy.ucla.edu and bob would open up pine or emacs and not get any spam or have to do anything crazy and we'd have a conversation.
that modality is long dead. we still have email but it's not that same ... I however could take mirc from like 1995 and still use everything.
Makes me wonder if moving away from discord back to IRC would be a fun move. But I think we'd miss mobile access and accounts on different devices maybe? Any thoughts?
I consciously use IRC like that: I don't have a bouncer, and connect only when I feel bored and want to see what is going in some channels (nowadays mostly just #emacs on Libera). I can only follow the conversation when I am online and there, and when I leave there is nothing to catch up to. In some sense it is like a digital third-space as oppose to a permanent dual presence that I have to share my attention with. Depending on your use-case this is not ideal, but for me it is a nice, relaxing addition to a lazy weekend evening when I have nothing better to do.
It’s just they need a bouncer (an always online irc server you run) for things like push notifications (and chat history on servers without the chat history extension).
Bouncers (and some IRC v3 extensions on newer servers) allow you to be logged in to the same account from different devices.
I’ve also had some fun writing a bridge from discord to irc for some personal discord servers (but it uses some account impersonation hijinks that make it impractical for other to use).
Very bad is pretty harsh for the possibly least bad chat app that I have used. I don't like the centralization on Discord but the reason it is popular is because their app is better than the competition.
Yes, but compared to "modern" apps IRC is very rudimentary and you would not get messages if you "close the app". You always have to run some secondary infrastructure like a bouncer to get offline messages or see what happened while you were away.
I know that's not the fault of the protocol itself, but that's always one of the biggest hurdle for IRC adoption when everyone is used to just open apps and see the full history at all times.
The protocol needs ugly extensions to have a variety of devices plug into the same user account. For me back in the day this was an ssh session running the IRC client in a screen, and it was no worse than whatever else was available.
Many GUI IRC clients do image / video embedding, even 10 years ago. Voice chat / video / screenshare is probably not a good fit unless you run some kind of secondary infrastructure like Jitsi and make it look like it's part of the client. Doesn't seem like a great fit though.
Yeah it'd need to be some kind of secondary infrastructure - I don't see it being part of any official IRC spec any time soon. But it would absolutely make IRC more appealing to the "average" user.
Some of the actors that are listed on that page already implement many of the v3 features (Like https://www.irccloud.com), so it's not really something that will come with a big bang and we have to wait for a release, it's just that not all clients support it yet.
I can't be bothered to sign up for both libera and oftc. When everything was on freenode, you didn't have to jump through any hoops just to ask a question.
Some never left. Notoriously, some bigtech companies have an internal IRC network for tech discussions because that's one communication system that you can rely on to stay up even during catastrophic outages.
I've been using https://www.irccloud.com for years, it takes care of all these things and also has an app / push notifications. It's still IRC, but it takes care of a lot of the annoying parts of it that made it feel dated.
I never worry about presence in any form of chat. I don't care if people are there when I message them; it's up to them to pick up my messages at their convenience.
IRC was great. But I don't think it can bounce back with the alternatives that we now have. A focussed effort to get Matrix working, or any of the open source alternatives would be better. Of course, people invest their time in what they think is fun and that is fine. But the already existing alternatives provide what people need and want today, so IRCv3 will have it infinitely harder.
People love knocking on IRC but people are still on it, still using it...
But, seriously, that got me curious. There are many protocols from that early era that are still with us today. NTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, BGP, SNMP, NFS, ICMP. If you allow the 1990's as counting as "old" we can add SSH and SSL, DHCP, LDAP.
Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.
that modality is long dead. we still have email but it's not that same ... I however could take mirc from like 1995 and still use everything.
It’s just they need a bouncer (an always online irc server you run) for things like push notifications (and chat history on servers without the chat history extension).
Bouncers (and some IRC v3 extensions on newer servers) allow you to be logged in to the same account from different devices.
I’ve also had some fun writing a bridge from discord to irc for some personal discord servers (but it uses some account impersonation hijinks that make it impractical for other to use).
I know that's not the fault of the protocol itself, but that's always one of the biggest hurdle for IRC adoption when everyone is used to just open apps and see the full history at all times.
I appreciate its text-only nature and would never want to see image/video embeds and/or voice chat in my client.
So yeah, we are going to have the Dyson swarm before this is done.