[shp0ngle]

Yeah. I don't get why all this nonsense... over IRC network?

IRC is mostly dead. It's not like there is huge marketing opportunity or any way to monetize this. We are not in the 90s/early 2000s with random mIRC people joining...

There is no "vendor lock in", and the only "vendor lock in" - the user and channels - were now effectively deleted.

So... at this point, they just purchased the name? Congrats I guess?

[silly-silly]

IRC might be 'mostly' dead to you if that's your definition, but it is not 'remotely' dead to me and many others around the world.

I use it every day, and I use it for work, admittedly its not freenode but an internal server. I find IRC great for not having the focus of the general masses because of how disappointing the general masses really are.

[dwild]

> IRC might be 'mostly' dead to you if that's your definition, but it is not 'remotely' dead to me and many others around the world.

I'm not OP but how he phrase it isn't about dead to you, but dead in a "commercial" sense.

There was no value behind Freenode, except for the community itself (you), and it makes no sense for Andrew Lee to buy it, except for the name.

[_abox]

> I'm not OP but how he phrase it isn't about dead to you, but dead in a "commercial" sense.

There was never a commercial sense to IRC. In fact this is one of the things I really love about it. It's so cheap to run it can be run entirely for free by some enthusiasts. Some sponsors too, sure, but the costs of running it are never huge.

[nix23]

Since when are community's commercial? Debian Ubuntu anyone?

[mekster]

What is the reason to pick IRC?

It's technically far inferior to anything including the ones you can self host.

I don't understand why people don't migrate even if it means they don't like commercial alternatives like Discord.

[Syonyk]

> It's technically far inferior to anything including the ones you can self host.

This depends heavily on just what you value for determining "superior" and "inferior."

IRC takes, as a first order estimate compared to most other options, no resources.

It uses almost no RAM on the server side, almost no CPU on the server side, almost no bandwidth, and has actual native clients on just about any platform out there that also use no resources. It's trivial to host small interest-based IRC servers that people can join freely without registration.

Compared to most other platforms, which require fairly heavy servers to host (Matrix struggles with less than a gig of RAM if anyone joins large rooms) and use utterly absurd clients (hundreds of meg of download, many hundreds of meg of RAM to run), it's a nice breath of fresh air in the chat world. It's clean, simple, text based chat in a registration free form (mostly - larger networks do tend to require nickserv registrations).

If you don't care about any of that, OK, that's fine. If all you're doing is looking at the feature lists, sure, it's "inferior." But in terms of utility value on very limited resource uses (which I still care about greatly, and have done extensive work on making Raspberry Pis into quite usable little desktops), IRC still holds up amazingly well. Matrix lags on a Pi4. Discord... I'm not actually sure the client builds and the web app is heavy. IRC is light and crispy, just as it's been on everything I've used it on back down to a 486.

Also... that it's mostly an obscure backwaters means that it filters for the sort of people who like those things, which means that, especially on small little niche servers and very focused channels on larger servers, the signal to noise ratio is through the roof - there is an insane density of skilled people, far more than you'll find any other places I've looked. Having instant access to what often is quite literally hundreds of years of relevant experience in a field, at the tip of your fingers, is amazing.

[GekkePrutser]

Indeed, you describe so well what I love about IRC. It's no heavier than it needs to be. It's niche enough to be free of 'influencers' with nothing to say but on-topic enough to attract real experts. I can idle on 20 networks at the same time for little to no resources on my end. And nobody needs to pay anything as its resource use is just a rounding error. It is indeed amazing.

[ValentinPearce]

A lot of IRC networks didn't require registration. That was the use case chosen for Elite Dangerous' Fuel Rats [1]

The ability to just drop in, ask a few questions and log out is great.

If I join a even a medium sized Discord server, I suddenly get tons of notifications unless I manually change the settings for the server (God knows why discord hasn't set up a user side default setting for that)

Also, a lot of communities grew in and around IRC chats, which means a lot of people with the habit. With the usual Relevant XKCD [2]

[1] https://fuelrats.com/ [2] https://xkcd.com/1782/

[Macha]

> God knows why discord hasn't set up a user side default setting for that

It's not in discords interest to do so. More notifications leads to more user activity which leads to more VC money (and indirectly to more nitro income if users who would have forgotten about the service get drawn back in and eventually convert).

An open protocol allows decoupling the client and service provider which defuses these misaligned incentives, which is likely one reason this current wave of messaging services are against ilthem.

[GekkePrutser]

That's the thing. Commercial services like discord want you to pay for their add-on services. So, they try to make you use it as much as they can. They try to build 'user engagement'. Attract you with notifications just to make you aware of how much you miss them, and how much 'value' they can bring to you. In my case they accomplish the exact opposite but anyway... This is how they think.

IRC doesn't need to do that. It just does what it needs to do without all the BS.

[mekster]

Well, it has been well over a decade after competitions have become common and if people can't change the habit for the better, stuck in an ancient tech, not sure what to say.

No voice, no proper file transfer and can't even see messages when you're offline meaning there's no reliable way of mobile notification means it's just getting too old.

[Syonyk]

> No voice,

A survey of IRC users would likely indicate that none of them care about it, and it's part of the appeal of IRC - I can only judge people by how they type and what they communicate. It's more or less impossible to tell anything about age, gender, nationality, etc on IRC unless someone cares to disclose it. It's far harder to mask anything like that in voice as opposed to text, so while you may consider it a fatal flaw, I consider it a feature. It's one of the better borderless sort of protocols out there for communication.

> no proper file transfer

What's wrong with DCC? Still works, last time I've used it. However, with a lot of the various free pastebin/image/etc hosting services out there, I don't see nearly as much of a need for that as I once did. DCC is a rare thing now, as opposed to a common way of shuffling files around as it used to be. So, again, based on "I literally make a living on IRC" sort of experience with it, it's not just a big deal anymore. Plus, an awful lot of people on IRC overlap with "I have my own hosting somewhere."

> and can't even see messages when you're offline

Bouncers exist, work well, and consume very little CPU or RAM. You can fit a freebie ZNC bouncer in the Google Compute Engine free tier (micro instance, 1GB transfer outbound), and might pay a few pennies a month extra if it's a really busy month. However, most channels are also entirely useful if you're only connected part of the time. I mostly use a bouncer to catch any PMs - I don't read scrollback unless I've been mentioned, and it works fine.

> meaning there's no reliable way of mobile notification means it's just getting too old.

Again, this only matters if you care about that. I know a lot of people, myself included, who have more or less rejected the modern "everything mobile" ecosystem with the constant stream of distracting notifications, and that IRC doesn't overlap with my phone is a feature.

However, there are plenty of ways to make mobile clients and ZNC interact such that you effectively have a modern style communication app, on a phone, with IRC as the backend - if you care to do so.

Yes, I'm aware I'm an older style greybeard at this point, but the very things you list as "ancient tech" are part of what makes it appealing. It's lasted for 30+ years so far, and I expect it will comfortably outlast most of the modern messaging clients, because it does what it does exceedingly well.

[GekkePrutser]

If you're into mobile, try out Quassel with QuasselDroid. It's a really nice client for Android that brings a lot of mod cons to IRC. It's basically a bouncer but with GUI multi-network configuration, unlimited scrollback on demand, and a really excellent mobile client.

[mekster]

You haven't answered why IRC still matters. The only benefit you mentioned to sticking to IRC is that people are forced to have no voice communication but you can always opt out of voice communication yourself.

As for the rest, they work well on other services and you can simply completely turn off notifications if you feel it distracting.

It's just IRC doesn't have modern features when one wants.

Still wondering why people need to stick to it other than just because especially even after such a hazard.

The only benefit of IRC in my opinion is that sign ups are optional and might keep you slightly more anonymous but the again, most people would stick to a same nick anyway.

[op00to]

I’ve been disappointed by IRC over and over. Too many racists. Like every damn channel.

[Doxin]

I mean if over 90000 active connections is dead to you I suppose.

> So... at this point, they just purchased the name? Congrats I guess?

And even that is debateable. I feel like this is the main point of confusion for most sane people involved in this whole thing. Who knows what Andrew Lees motivations are here.

[swiley]

What other chat protocol that you've decided replaces IRC handles misbehavior of network owners as easily as IRC does? Whatsapp certainly doesn't.

[corobo]

Isn't WhatsApp the same protocol as Signal under the hood?

[joepie91_]

No. Both use some form of double-ratchet for E2EE, but the messaging protocol itself is completely incompatible.

[corobo]

Fair enough, I don't even remember where I saw it. Some random internet guff information I guess.

Cheers!

[zimpenfish]

> Some random internet guff information I guess.

https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

"A year ago [2015], we announced a partnership with WhatsApp and committed to integrating the Signal Protocol into their product, moving towards full end-to-end encryption for all of their users by default."

Now obviously things may have drifted since 2016 but it definitely sounds like - at some point - WhatsApp was based on the Signal protocol.

"Over the past year, we’ve been progressively rolling out Signal Protocol support for all WhatsApp communication across all WhatsApp clients. [...] As of [Apr 2016], the integration is fully complete. Users running the most recent versions of WhatsApp on any platform now get full end-to-end encryption for every message they send and every WhatsApp call they make when communicating with each other. This includes all the benefits of the Signal Protocol – a modern, open source, forward secure, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems, designed to make end-to-end encrypted messaging as seamless as possible."

[marcan_42]

"Signal Protocol" here means the encryption design/specification (including the higher levels of key rotation, ratcheting, etc), but not the actual network protocol.

[spinax]

Your memory is probably remembering Facebook Messenger, who adopted the Signal protocol some 5 years ago: https://signal.org/blog/facebook-messenger/