It's an example on the trivialness on using it, you can get a client anywhere, like gopher.
SSL/TLS is broken and you need help over IRC? No problem. Your main PC broke and all you have is a 486/Amiga/Atari or even some PDA connected to the router with a gateway? No issues again.
You just have a installed base, your pkg manager is broken and all you have is netcat, a shell and Unix utilities? Go on.
>SSL/TLS is broken and you need help over IRC? No problem. Your main PC broke and all you have is a 486/Amiga/Atari or even some PDA connected to the router with a gateway? No issues again.
>You just have a installed base, your pkg manager is broken and all you have is netcat, a shell and Unix utilities? Go on.
I understood what you meant. But when would any of those scenarios occur and you don't have your phone, and thus access to Matrix/Discord/whatever?
IRC has awful UX on a phone, and I say this as a guy with a sophisticated weechat+Pushbullet setup going on. The benefits of being able to get on IRC from your NetBSD toaster aren't really benefits at all because you always have a phone. Users want slack/discord-like presence. They want push notifications on hilights. They don't want to have to futz about with znc or tmux+irssi.
IRC failed to keep up with the tastes of modern users and that's why it's been slowly hemorrhaging users for 15 years.
Huh? Pretty much all mobile irc clients have that though?
And if you are running weechat anyway, something like weechat-android might be an better option for you? That connects back to weechat using the weechat relay protocol.
>Pretty much all mobile irc clients have that though?
Sure but the connection drops a lot if you roam, if you close the app you don't stay connected, etc. Discord does not have this problem.
>And if you are running weechat anyway, something like weechat-android might be an better option for you?
You're missing the point. I already run weechat-android but it's not about me. It's about people who have grown up accustomed to more modern and mobile-friendly applications. If the only way to get multi-device sync with push notifications is to run weechat in a tmux on a shell and install/sign up for Pushbullet, that's awful UX. Too much friction, to say nothing of the idea that the best way to use IRC is to sign up for a third party shell account.
I hate discord but it's a breeze to onboard people to your server.
> Sure but the connection drops a lot if you roam, if you close the app you don't stay connected, etc. Discord does not have this problem.
Yeah that mobile networking is completely broken is a bit unfortunate.
But at least the staying connected in the background part works just fine for me (Also works fine with my jabber client).
Not sure why you still need pushbullet if you are already using weechat-android though (and not saying that I would recommend that for everyone.. something like IRCCloud is more suitable for non-technical people I would say).
Or is it weechat-android specifically that has the problem of not being able to run in the background for you?
Weechat-android might not drop because it's a relay client. But try running a non-relay client and see how it goes.
Anyways it's like you're intentionally missing the point. I'm not here for tech support with my setup. I'm trying to explain why IRC's user experience is inferior to Discord for most users.
SSL/TLS is broken and you need help over IRC? No problem. Your main PC broke and all you have is a 486/Amiga/Atari or even some PDA connected to the router with a gateway? No issues again.
You just have a installed base, your pkg manager is broken and all you have is netcat, a shell and Unix utilities? Go on.