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by Karunamon 3033 days ago
...and push notifications, and offline message history, and a mobile client, and services that aren't hacky god-clients, and content storage, and previews/inlining, and....

About the only thing IRC has going for it is decentralization, and that's not very valuable in the market it seems.

Seriously. IRC has had 30 years to get with the times. It's stagnated and been lapped by its competitors, and the efforts to improve it didn't properly start until Slack and friends simultaneously re-cooked and ate everyone's lunch and dinner.
2 comments
pimeys 3033 days ago
> push notifications, and offline message history, and a mobile client

https://irccloud.com has all these, done really well.

Offline message history you get also by running a server somewhere and just having an irssi in a screen/tmux.

Still my favorite protocol and I have some channels that I consider to be my favorite social network for about 10-15 years already.

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always_good 3033 days ago
I pay for irccloud, but most people don't. It's annoying trying to talk to someone who disconnects when they shut their laptop and will never receive your message. Not very good tooling to build a community or relationships, that's for sure.

Having to pay for basic features that competitors like slack/discord have is exactly why the slack community for something is often much bigger these days. Even the larger communities like #node.js are really just 10 regulars.

For example, Elm's slack is vibrant. Elm's IRC channel is dead. This is the reality for most communities I've been joining these days.

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pimeys 3033 days ago
Depends where you chat. Some rave/techno channels are still very active since the last 25 years. For English speaking crowd, at least #haskell, #rust and ##ibmthinkpad are having lots of discussion every day. But maybe it's just me. I've been using IRC since 1995 and I see it much nicer compared to the centralized bloat of a chat Slack is.
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squeaky-clean 3033 days ago
Great point. You can add these features for yourself with IRC, but Slack guarantees that the other party also has those features.
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Karunamon 3033 days ago
But it gives up decentralization (and privacy) and still requires that you have a server to connect to anyways (read: server to set up and manage).

And on top of that, the behavior of irccloud from the standpoint of everyone else is identical to that of a bouncer like ZNC. It's yet another hack around the fact that clients don't exist in IRC unless they're online.

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ranza 3033 days ago
sooo convor/grove? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove.io
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