[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.