Well, yeah. When I was a teenager my group of friends used to use a QNet IRC chat for communications. Most on mIRC and such clients. Today it's pretty much all nerds. I do enjoy IRC, and pretty much live inside my tmux session, but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone who isn't already probably using it.

>Today it's pretty much all nerds

Probably says more about your social circle than IRC. There's a lot of channels and if hookers and blow are more your speed than say, gentoo, you can certainly find a channel primarily discussing them.

First off, I don't believe there's anything even remotely wrong with being a nerd. Quite the opposite. I do hang around in channels focussing on a diverse range of topics, from various freenode foss-channels to torrent trackers to radical politics and also, yes, shadier communities.

I just believe that even the most benign, non-techy use of IRC poses demands that are incompatible with the vast majority of users today. But that's a strength to me. IRC is filled to the brim with some of the smartest, most creative, exciting people I could think of.

And a ton of awful shitheads, too. Freenode for example is about 25% toxic lowlifes lording over each other in popular channels.

i'd just like to mention that hookers/blow & geek/nerd/gentoo are not mutually exclusive.

that is all.

see also: DEFCON, HoHoCon, pretty much any alt-Con.

All you need to have hookers and blow is money. Don't need to be sexy, smart, interesting, or good looking.

Sounds like nerds and hookers and blow can go together just fine.

In fact, most men who enjoy hookers or blow suffer from low social standing. It takes a loser to seek fulfillment through the perverse.

Let me get this straight... you keep IRC running all day but you wouldn't recommend it to others because it's all nerds?

> but I don't think I can recommend it to anyone who isn't already probably using it

I wouldn't recommend it to my friends, who were hard enough to get off WhatsApp and into Telegram at least. To my parents, who have trouble enough running Skype. To the girlfriend, who's happy with Snapchat. IRC, even at the very basic level with a GUI or Web client, demands things from users I don't consider realistic to expect from them.

I'm very happy with it the way it is though. Just saying that I won't waste time recommending Arch Linux as a desktop OS to friends who have trouble keeping a Windows install useable for six months.

You have to take it step by step. Otherwise people keep in their backward systems or habits forever.

The Web interface, Vector, works surprisingly well. Last I tried it, it still lacked polish on the surface but it functioned excellently.

Now riot.im

Glad to hear they updated the name. Riot.im sounds better for telling others to use it.

It's a wonderful name, indeed. "Let's riot!", I totally approve.

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

Absolutely not. It's got a bit of an edge without seeming like something an angry teenager came up with - murder.im or so, "Riot" doesn't have only inherently negative associations -, it's short, easy to remember... it would've been a great name for many software projects, but especially for collaborative, communicative software I find it to be a stellar choice.

I actually wrote a reply explaining why it was a great name and vector somehow fell flat before understanding that you were being genuine. I agree. Riot has that edge but a Riot is always a group activity. And it's something anyone can join. They only need jump into the riot.

> "Riot" doesn't have only inherently negative associations

???

Could you provide some, I can't think of any.

Also Vector seemed fairly decent (with the small plus of the matrix/vector association). Riot isn't much shorter then Vector, it has violent/negative association, and changing names (unless its a major improvement) seems like a bad idea for a piece of software relying on network effects and trying to become popular.

Riots often occur when groups feel they have no other recourse. There is sometimes a positive fallout from the riot but at such an extended time that it isn't clear the riot had anything to do with it. It's a group activity that shows a group of people all feel similarly about a subject. An expression of which is usually considered positive except for the presence of destruction and violence during a riot.

irccloud.com and get permanent chat history, and done.

There's irccloud for that, or if you want to host yourself shout-IRC is really good.

Shouts actually outdated, I'd checkout the fork The Lounge - https://www.github.com/thelounge/lounge

irccloud keeps going down every time freenode netsplits. It got so bad lately I actually canceled my subscription and instead set up weechat+glowing bear, which is not as polished, but it works fairly well on both desktop and mobile. (And cheaper)

It's also free software and easy to set up so I encourage everybody to check it out.

Does it still work if you've got WeeChat customised or does it need to be vanilla? I'd like to keep using it from a shell while on a decent machine, but would absolutely not mind the option to connect from mobile clients.

Dev here. It's completely independent of your config. Indeed many things carry over to Glowing Bear automatically, such as scripts that modify the lines (colorize_nicks.py) or create new text buffers (like highmon or grep.py), filters, triggers, etc.

Did check it out. Absolutely amazing project and if anyone still reads through this chat, absolutely what a modern IRC experience should be like in my view. Effortlessly does a lot of the things people on here like about Slack.

I like WeeChat as a client, it's fast and lean and works inside the tmux session that pretty governs my digital life both private and professionally. Alas, it's not always accessible. Getting Putty to reliably work with tmuxed ncurses apps is a nightmare for example, imho.

Glowing Bear solves this brilliantly. It looks great, you get features like inline display of media and is easily secured with certificates from Let's Encrypt.

Thank you, devs. This'll make my "newly discovered FOSS projects of the year" list for sure.

Thanks a lot for your kind words :)

Honestly, if I need to use a third party service like irccloud, isn't the benefit of IRC lost at that point? Why use irccloud when I can just use Matrix or Slack?

Because you could swap off irccloud at any time, to another IRC services provider or self-hosting, and not lose touch with the people you're chatting with, because the network layer is independent from your interface (irccloud).

By contrast, if you want to switch off Slack, can you still talk to people who stay on Slack, or do you have to get them to switch too?

I like IRC over Slack for the same reason I like email over Slack: I can just use my client with the interface I like, and the network takes care of getting my message to someone using a different interface, that they like. It doesn't require we compromise on a shared, fixed interface, a la Slack.

I have a raspberry pi server that does just that. No need for ec2.

Yup. Sadly. The hassle to get a fully working setup is too much, even for technical people.

But it fits the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well and small, composable tools!