[jjcm]

Die? No, but it is slowly degrading. More and more the people in my old freenode chatrooms are idle or simply leaving. We've gotten so used to phone notifications and a persistent history, that IRC has fallen behind purely from a convenience factor.

It's rock solid in what it does, I have zero doubt about that or your 15 year claim. But even if the protocol works, if the user base isn't being added to it will die eventually.

[johnisgood]

You can have both notifications and a persistent history with the majority of IRC clients. Many public channels keep logs, even. If someone pings me (hilight), then I get an urgency hint. Most window managers handle urgency hints. I use openbox + xterm + irssi. I do get notified if someone pings me, and I can also add any arbitrary words for which I would get notified. With a small Perl script I could use notify-send if I wanted (it probably already exists).

If you are really referring to phone notifications, well, you can use an IRC client on your phone, then you would get notifications on your phone. I use irssi even on my Android phone.

Let us not forget that there is the other side of the story: many people report that they have been enjoying life more without those phone notifications.

I love IRC. I have been using IRC ever since I was 11. It made me a more technical person. I find that IRC is not that easily accessible to the majority, which is a good thing, because of this, the conversations tend to be of higher quality, and technical in most channels. I would also like to add that IRC is the reason I understand English, and a zillion other things. :)

[Dylan16807]

Persistent history including things that happened when you weren't connected. Obviously logging is easy, this isn't about client logs.

With phone notifications, you not only need to work for things that happened while not connected, it's bad form to require a permanent connection on android and you can't do it at all on an iphone.

[Krasnol]

We have https://thelounge.chat/ running.

I don't miss anything.

[johnisgood]

Yeah, there is https://www.irccloud.com/ as well, and probably many other alternatives.

[johnisgood]

Perhaps what you need is a bouncer?

[Dylan16807]

It's doable but it's tricky, requires a very stable place to put the bouncer, and it makes things vastly more complicated than being pointed to the closest client or web interface and logging in instantly.

[zingmars]

> We've gotten so used to phone notifications and a persistent history, that IRC has fallen behind purely from a convenience factor.

I have that with a bouncer (znc) and a plugin. I've not used it, but it is my understanding that IRCCloud does this too. Problem is that there aren't many easily usable options for this apart from IRCCloud and even IRCCloud itself isn't all that well marketed.

Always seemed kind of weird how while IRC is full with FOSS people who are willing to use their time on various projects they're not getting paid for, most of whom also seem to worry about IRC dying out, nobody is really doing anything about it. A lot of the conveniences we miss could mostly be solved by making modern clients that are actually good.

[shantly]

I think free (spyvertising supported) and free or steeply discounted (operating at a VC-backed loss) commercial offerings both being so common dampens enthusiasm to work on and demand for open source software, especially the user-facing stuff. Earlier on in computing history (into the mid '00s, at least) such things were much less common.

I think it also dampens the same for traditional paid software in a lot of areas, incidentally.

[Avamander]

Quassel is being actively worked on and solves a lot of the woes for me.

[Insequent]

I've been using it for... around nine years. It used to have a lot of performance issues, notably around synchronising initial state/backlog fetch on first connection to the core/daemon, but those were eventually fixed.

It works very well now, and the Android client is pretty great too, but there are still some gaps. Mainly, the surrounding ecosystem is quite sparse, e.g.: - There is basically only a single web client for it (node-based, which is a con from my perspective) - There are only a handful of semi-functional log searching/browsing utilities around

[dole]

IRCv3 is still moving forward and gaining momentum.

[sliken]

Started in 2016 and still has no major IRC networks support it.

[tastroder]

> if the user base isn't being added to it will die eventually.

Which is, sadly, a lost cause. We had a simple, reliable, open, decentralized base that simply did not adopt to the needs of a changing userbase of the internet enough. Non-technical users have expectations that are incompatible with the text only format and they prefer platforms that feel more like their other social media tools. Technical users don't fix that and get riled up about nonsense instead, like non-TLS connections and other points that were addressed a decade ago, alongside people that just prefer a more decentralized system.

It feels like xkcd #927 is also relevant [0]. The open source world in chat/social platforms often looks like Googlers looking for a promotion instead of addressing real needs and most efforts seem to be drowning in irrelevance. Even technically sensible projects like Matrix, who's going to use that? Not the instagram crowd that's for sure, heck, many technically inclined people cannot be bothered with IRC when the alternative is convenient. I'd be really surprised if we see a widely adopted open messenger in 10 years, it's more likely that people just settle on a new random walled garden every 3-5 years.

[0] https://xkcd.com/927/

[radlad]

> We've gotten so used to phone notifications and a persistent history, that IRC has fallen behind purely from a convenience factor.

I noticed myself using IRC less for this reason. I'd always run weechat on servers so I had the history but never thought to look for notifications these days.

I signed up for IRCCloud and it's been nothing but excellent so far. I can even connect weechat to it like a BNC.