[smodo]

Man, I wish I still knew people on IRC… Whenever I see a link to Discord I let out a deep sigh. We had it all and we blew it! We threw it all away for gifs and centralization!

So here’s a question: if I download this, what’s a good place to hang out?

PS I’ve never used this Ui toolkit (being an egui man myself) but that panel snapping looks amazing!

[542458]

> We threw it all away for gifs and centralization!

Simpler configuration, easy voice chat and screen share, simpler administration, user accounts and profile pictures by default, visually appealing and more noob-friendly client, persistent chat history, media embeds, file uploads, rich presence, etc...

[ok123456]

> Simpler configuration

Never had an IRC server want to verify me through SMS or FORCE me to update my client.

> simpler administration

IRC is just a ban list, an except list and an invite list.

> user accounts and profile pictures by default

Don't want it.

> persistent chat history

Liability.

[saulrh]

> IRC is just a ban list, an except list and an invite list.

Now use that to implement RBAC for a server with a hundred channels.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Less pithily, IRC's built-in permissions may be simple, but they're so simple primarily because they're basically useless for real moderation tasks. Every IRC channel I've ever seen handles moderation with a mod-bot, and "set up a bot" instantly blows the complexity budget.

[ok123456]

> Now use that to implement RBAC for a server with a hundred channels.

Don't want it.

[Filligree]

> Never had an IRC server want to verify me through SMS or FORCE me to update my client.

Which destroyed several channels through spam. The authentication is a feature.

[ok123456]

You can do authentication without something that's tantamount to someone's government ID. I love when companies make me give them my phone number, and then they get hacked.

[doublerabbit]

> user accounts and profile pictures by default: Don't want it.

You may not, but many others do, like myself.

Lets be frank, IRC is boring without content. There is no easy way to share any imagery, videos. Any form of simplification of media hosting is a tragic mess.

> Never had an IRC server want to verify me through SMS or FORCE me to update my client.

NickServ.

"If you don't register your nick in 1 minute you be renamed to "anonymous".

I've been on networks where mIRC has been banned which is my client of choice.

[ok123456]

> no easy way to share any imagery.

You share it the same way you share it on r*ddit. Upload it to imgur, imbb or whatever.

> NickServ. "If you don't register your nick in 1 minute you be renamed to "anonymous".

It's telling you exactly what you need to do. If you don't like having services, don't use a server that has services.

> "You can't use BitchX on this network" I've been on networks where mIRC has been banned.

You're free to make your client respond however you like.

> IRC is boring

IRC is just a tool. If IRC is boring, it's a reflection of you and your friends.

[doublerabbit]

> You share it the same way you share it on r*ddit. Upload it to imgur, imbb or whatever.

I can drag and drop with Discord, Slack and Teams. And look its there!

No one wants to click links. I updated my post, but to send any type of media is a tragic-mess for IRC. Including if its hosted on my own domain as my own nick!

> It's telling you exactly what you need to do. If you don't like having services, don't use a server that has services.

Right, sure.

> You can't use BitchX on this network" I've been on networks where mIRC has been banned. You're free to make your client respond how

And to a user who wants to join and connect, I don't have time to do that anymore. That it self is tech-savy stuff. Not so easy for the average user. It's not common, but networks have implemented.

> IRC is just a tool. If IRC is boring, it's a reflection of you and your friends.

IRC is a protocol, the client is the tool to connecting to the network. IRC as a whole provides the services to communicate and if no one is communicating as like "your not 1337 because your not using a znc bouncer with irssi"

Or those folk who already know each other in channel and don't want to reach out to new folk even introduce newbies to the channel.. you don't have a voice.

Or just a channel with a topic that's not been changed since 2017.

I -really- dislike Discord, it sucks. However at least it's easy and tacky enough to allow you to introduce yourself rather than black text on a white background. It allows you to enjoy media, show off stuff.

And up until recently could use any nick even if had been taken.

If you want to host your own channel on IRC you need to understand cryptic flags, Host a bot. Know how to operate chanserv.

YIM, MSN Messenger and all those services had it right, games, media and voice.

[smolder]

> No one wants to click links.

I actually prefer that my chat client doesn't auto follow links, so I have a choice of whether to look at them, and so they don't interrupt conversations by taking up huge space in the chat.

[progval]

> NickServ. "If you don't register your nick in 1 minute you be renamed to "anonymous".

Are you sure it was prompting you to register rather than to authenticate? It sounds like you were using a nick someone else registered, but you can usually use unregistered nicks freely.

[doublerabbit]

Some Channels enforce the flag for registered users.

I've visited networks where you have forced you to register nicks. You have the option to leave, but same principle.

[tredre3]

Some channels do indeed enforce registered users. But the message you quoted is 100% because you were using someone's nickname and they enabled nick protection.

[floren]

IRCv3 ticks a lot of boxes server-side; you get chat history, user accounts (you can even log with the same nick from multiple clients), replies, and a bunch of other stuff.

Some clients show link/image previews. I think the #1 thing that would make them better would be configuration options to drag&drop/paste images and other files, and have those automatically uploaded to a user-configured service with a link dropped into the channel. Hassle to implement, though.

[welterde]

Polari [1] seems to support automatically uploading images and text to some imagebin/pastebin and then posting the link to the channel. The Lounge [2] also supports it (with the files self-hosted in thelounge instance).

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Polari [2] https://thelounge.chat/

[ComputerGuru]

All the open source Discord rooms I'm in, absolutely no one uses the voice chat and I didn't even know there was a screen sharing option. The ratio of users to admins is probably 10,000:1 so ease of admin isn't really an issue (see also reddit where mod tools suck). There are plenty of visually appealing clients (e.g. this one!).

I personally think persistent message history (XMPP botched that rollout terribly) - which goes hand-in-hand with multipresence - and the extreme dearth of any - let alone actually good and usable - IRC (or XMPP) mobile clients (esp. on iOS) was the real reason they lost mainstream use.

Multipresence is more than just a checkbox; doing it correctly involves actually setting up a SSO system with actual first-party user account support (not just relegating it as a stateful detail of the underlying IRC library you are using). IMHO actual account integration would have bound users more loyally to IRC and would have created more of a "network effect".

Inline attachments, emoji reactions, etc are all just icing on the cake.

[jeltz]

Not sure why you are downvoted because you I feel you are pretty much correct for many non-gamers. I do not use voice chat and it is not what made me start using Discord. But I still see why voice chat is very useful to many gamers. Different groups missed different features from IRC.

Message history on the other hand is a huge Discord feature for me as is inline attachments (e.g. being able to post code snippets without having to use s pastebin).

[ComputerGuru]

I'm not sure either, but it's HN :)

Native attachments support was personally a big thing for me (inline images or gifs.. not so much) but what I meant to say is that I think the ecosystem could have survived without it if that were the only issue - just look at how long Reddit went without any sort of image or video upload support. Ultimately and "at some point," attachment support would have "just happened" naturally. I just really think multi-presence w/ history and the lack of a good web or mobile client was the bigger deal. Unlike attachments which you can just staple on to the UI and squint at it the right way, these were actual, fundamental issues that required a rearchitecture (or even rewrite) of existing servers and clients, and despite how obvious their importance was (at least to some of us) the mainstream client/server options didn't really relish the idea or jump on board.

I still vividly remember being locked out of a hacker space maybe seven years ago and needing to figure out how to get on the irc from my iPhone. I scoured the app store looking for a good (free) client for this one-time need I had and found nothing. I searched online and found a really shady, insecure, and ad-infested website that would open an IRC connection in the backend and then stream the text to your browser in an interface intended for desktop use. The interface was neigh impossible to use on a phone, all the UI bits were overlaid atop of one another, text wrapping was broken, etc.

I was able to use this to post on the IRC channel and get someone to let me in, but every time I changed tabs or my phone timed out and turned off, the connection would be severed and I would have to start again.. and ask "sorry did anyone reply to my earlier message, I am logging in from a web frontend and was forced to refresh, I might have missed your reply if you did."

[MisterTea]

Discord is far from simple. Simple is a text based protocol I can interact with through a telnet session.

A few channels have Matrix-IRC bridges attached so that is an option for servers who want to enable multiple interfaces for those who prefer not to interact with discord.

[Halfwhit]

I completely agree with your definition of simple, but to less technically minded people Discord is simpler in that it's a "batteries included" experience

[anthk]

Jabber.

[distcs]

> Man, I wish I still knew people on IRC

IRC is still alive. I still know people on IRC. Most opensource channels have thriving communities on IRC with 100s of regulars logged into the channels everyday. The people I knew in the IRC world in 2010 are still very much there in 2023. The only big change has been that all of us moved away from Freenode over to Libera after the Freenode takeover. And everyone has become older and more mellow and more friendly to beginners.

If you've been away from IRC recently, I urge you to get back to Libera chat network and see for yourself. The IRC world is much better now than it was before.

[sho_hn]

There's a fair amount of enthusiastic or expert communities that remain the most vibrant in their IRC edition.

I recently looked for an active chat for hobbyist/DIY EE stuff, and I joined around half a dozen Discords and they were all nearly completely deserted. Part of it is that each individual Discord aims to be a complete lifestyle, replate with completely redundant #general rooms and what not - it's too hard to sustain that kind of thing.

##electronics on Libera, meanwhile, is alive and kicking every time of the day.

I've made similar experiences with non-tech topics like e.g. cycling.

[culinary-robot]

Iced is awesome. Slightly biased being a contributed though :) I would recommend https://libera.chat/. There are a ton of great channels: ##rust, #linux, #networking, #security to mention a few.

[TkTech]

There are many, many IRC networks that are still very active with tens of thousands of active users. Libera.chat is probably the best one I can suggest at the moment for a wide selection of topics. Politics, news, every tech group and subject under the sun, etc...

I've run https://n.tkte.ch/ for the last decade and it's bots are currently connected to over 200 unique, active IRC servers. Still very much alive!

[Groxx]

And chat history. Chat history is huge. And so is integrated search.

Yeah, you can run a bouncer... but then it depends on that bouncer working, and wtf is a bouncer, why is it necessary, and how do you explain that to normal people? And splits?

IRC is a ridiculous experience comparatively. Its big benefit is that it's super cheap to run.

[jacobsenscott]

I hate chat history. That's corporate mentality invading your non-work brain. IRC should feel like walking into a bar full of nerds, and you just join the conversation wherever it is. Even at work, if I'm out for a few days I definitely don't "catch up on slack" - that's not what chat is for. Long lived conversations belong somewhere else - email, or PR, or (god forbid) jira.

[gochi]

I don't see how chat history prevents that feeling. There's no requirement to read through history every time.

[jacobsenscott]

I mean the lack of history on IRC is a feature, not a bug.

[tcmart14]

No kidding. I miss IRC. I still use it, but yea, its mostly silence. About the only time I've seen interaction is on something like #fedora or #freebsd where people just ask support type questions.

[mrits]

The feeling I got of IRC in the mid 90s is that it was more centralized than it appeared. Most of the server operators hung out in the same channels.

[bluejekyll]

The simple story here is hosting. Self-hosted IRC while not hard to maintain are not easily discoverable, and ad-hoc communities.

[MisterTea]

I'm idling on OFTC, Libera and two private servers.

[iforgotpassword]

#xkcd on slashnet? ;-)