Re:Slack's bait and switch
by scythe on Monday March 12, 2018 @10:06AM
(#16568186)
The problem with IRC is that it's technically capable of being so much more than what people think it is but it's actually a real hurdle to set up and nobody is very good at it, plus the clients are stuck in the past. The right way to use IRC is to SSH into a screen/tmux session on a remote server that's always up and running; in theory it should be fully possible to send any files (images, videos etc) over DCC and use terminal plugins to display them but no clients can handle this right. DCC is perfectly capable of this as IRC piracy has been a thing for years and those files are much larger. The trouble is that FOSS is so often made by ascetics for ascetics and so most clients won't help you with any of this and people sniff at you if you use one that does.
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So, how do I teach the non-technical users with whom I need to communicate to use IRC, SSH, TMUX, and and get the right things on their system?
We'd likely still need a client wrapper on top of it all.
I didn't say you should; rather, my point is that the problems with IRC mostly happen at the client level rather than the protocol level. Of course, it is also hard to ensure that a dominant client vendor does not start trying to add backwards-incompatible changes to the protocol. This has already happened once, and it's why the character U+0001 is now responsible for /me.
I think ideally such a client could be implemented as a plugin to an extensible terminal emulator, which might help to keep the project small and prevent Jabberification.
Re:Slack's bait and switch
by def_true_false on Monday March 12, 2018 @01:28PM
(#16569722)
Something like Quassel had most of this functionality more than 5 years ago, while looking at least as good as Slack. I haven't used it in a long time but I'm pretty sure the setup was simple (not one click, but certainly easier than tmux, etc). It's a Qt app, so might be a better fit for non-technical users.