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by fouc 2474 days ago
Lately I've been thinking about how amazingly successful IRC has been. I mean, it survived the "web" and smartphones as long as it did.

Up until slack appeared on the scene. I was a heavy IRCer from '96 to '13, and then switched almost immediately to slack.

Slack sucks in a lot of ways but it happens to hit the sweet point of convenience. It allows me to be a purely 'casual' chatter, I can close and open slack anytime. I don't have to keep irssi running in a screen in the background. I don't have to have a bouncer.

Anyways I think that if a new version of IRC came out with extra convenience for the pure 'casual' user, then we'd all go back to IRC.

2 comments

> I don't have to have a bouncer.

By some odd twist of fate, WSL is what enables my IRC use. My only 24/7 PC is my HTPC/Plex server, which I also run ZNC on via WSL.

> It allows me to be a purely 'casual' chatter, I can close and open slack anytime. I don't have to keep irssi running in a screen in the background. I don't have to have a bouncer.

What's the barrier to a SaaS IRC solution like irccloud?

I paid for IRCCloud for 2 years (I think)

* General instability - I got plenty of notifications that the connection to Freenode had been dropped

* A couple of channels outright banned me for connecting from an IRCCloud host.