Andrew is passionate about IRC and has been for a very long time. This is just another outflowing of his vision and gratitude, not some kind of cash grab.
Re: University: It's a 'University' ON IRC, not ABOUT IRC. There will be partnered educators and developers teaching classes about many topics, likely a good portion development focused.
Re: Ventures: This isn't ventures FOR IRC, it's an incubator. The communication, application, and interaction will be centered on IRC, but the ventures will be varied.
The team working on irc.com has extensive experience of IRC communities and networks and will be opening the door to collaborations with others within the IRC environments, whether network operators or ircd developers and seeks to work closely with the wider community on these endeavors.
I know most of the people involved personally, feel free to ask questions if you want!
IRCCloud implements it but servers don't, and IRCCloud feels kind of dead development wise. And it doesn't really solve the problems that Discord solves, for example.
The dream of instant messaging being built on top of open protocols, just like email, doesn't feel terribly far out of reach but it also doesn't feel like we're making progress towards it and the efforts spent on keeping IRC alive feel, at least to me, kind of futile compared to say, efforts spent on Matrix.
I don't think it's crazy to leave IRC behind, and most people who mourn it will either do so out of nostalgia, or because of the loss of an open protocol. I'd rather centralize on something that has a future though.
Well, it is, but it's slow. IRCCloud and KiwiIRC both use it, and IRC.com will support it as well. There are some exciting new plans surrounding encrypted voice and video on the Kiwi side, for example.
>doesn't really solve the problems that Discord solves
What specifically? Hard to address that one without more granular discussion points.
>it also doesn't feel like we're making progress towards it
It could be argued that IRC.com is going to be a major step toward more rapid progress, between the foundation funding development, and the likelihood that it will be an enormous network that's V3 compatible.
My biggest issue with the protocol is that if I want to develop for an advanced data interchange protocol there shouldn't be any optional extras. Everything should be in the spec and required of real clients. (I can, however, envision a protocol in which 'relay servers' exist that don't need to fully understand a message to pass it's content.)
Trust me, I attempted to veto a few things in IRC's early life, they are all in there now, can't stop them.
I can say that London Trust Media does not impact freenode in any way - they purely fund it to keep it running so that they can focus on other areas.
As for the issues with IRC - I agree. Major improvements has happened already but it has a long way to go and that's why were putting money into it to boost these efforts. We have open source projects and fund open source projects, each one focussing on what the project communities and developers believe in.
What really is needed IMO is a place that can work on these things full time, prove that IRC can in fact work at scale and solve these problems, then others may hopefully follow. We fully intend on growing the IRC community as a whole - not just ourselves.
There are some seriously paranoid people on HN these days, and it is rather disenchanting to have to sift through all the negativity. Failure to embrace new things and new ways of doing things is a surefire way to irrelevancy.
That’s the fear.
The IRC protocol isn’t great, nor worthy of protection. The users, the community are.
If tomorrow freenode and snoonet went down, IRC would be forever changed.
he's also brought on board the disgraced mt. gox CEO as CTO -- what on earth is he up to?
[1] https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn: "Some of you might also find yourselves dealing with me in my new role as Director of Sponsorship and Events at Private Internet Access"
[2] https://kiwiirc.com/blog/Kiwi_IRC_gets_sponsored_by_PrivateI...
[3] https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/04/19/disgraced-ceo-of-mt-gox-a...
Andrew is very passionate about IRC as you can see from the post. Most people developing IRC projects do it in their spare time which makes progressing them difficult. This was my personal position back in November. Since I was hired, I have been able to work on Kiwi IRC, introduce many new features and grow the project, all while the project is still open source. The biggest part - Andrew/LTM does not own kiwiirc. That is purely a separate project that he wanted to grow and he did so without taking ownership of it.
I have always been pushing for open sourcing projects - especially in the IRC community as it needs projects to flourish to compete with alternative and closed sourced messaging systems. I am now starting irc.com with funding from Andrew and London Trust Media with the exact same mindset. Hopefully we can combine and push IRC standards with the existing IRC community - that is, existing IRC server and client developers that may not have anything to do with irc.com.
For the IRC networks such as freenode, they are a vital network for open source developers and communities which I think we can all agree would be very upsetting if that was to be interrupted. London Trust Media has had no interference with the running of the network and does not plan to, other than providing sponsor support to keep the servers running.
it's not normal for a self-described businessman to give out money for free: so what's his long term plan behind all of this?
> For the IRC networks such as freenode, they are a vital network for open source developers and communities which I think we can all agree would be very upsetting if that was to be interrupted.
this statement is so disingenuous it sounds like the product of a PR department
running a large IRC network in 2018 can be done on AWS/GCP for hobby scale money, so it's not as if freenode risks disappearing without his patronage... however your/christel's income would, hence my (and others) concerns about the purchase of influence
(personally: if my "employer" hired Karpeles as their CTO I'd be out of there so fast it'd make your head spin)
As for running a large IRC network, it's not just about the cost. It's the management, the running of the network, dealing with its users, etc. Protecting yourself from DDOS that still unfortunately happens amongst other attacks. It's not as simple as throwing it on "AWS/GCP for hobby scale money". (I say say that even though I don't run freenode).
If that’s not normal then I don’t want to ever be normal.
I don’t.
I’ve gotten an "offer" once, too, inofficially, but I assume it was just a joke from them.
As said, I assume they didn’t mean it seriously.
it's up for your input method to allow inputting them, and up for your fonts to display them, and up for you to not force a stupid encoding.
It doesn't preclude from the issues of slack being solved by another group.
edit: For the IRC uninitiated who enjoy drive-by downvoting: Slack is IRC-inspired - the concept of channels, usernames, private messaging and bots.... in slack is almost all directly inherited from IRC.
In a lot of ways, I think Slack's biggest advantage has just been ease of use in modern times: you don't need to know anything about downloading a client and configuring it -- even the friendliest IRC clients I've found are still pretty fiddly compared to "enter your team name, your email address, and your password, boom, done." But this seems like it'd be a relatively easy problem to solve.
I suspect downvotes are from people who aren't comfortable with the idea of what's new... Is actually old and improving.
It's kind of laid out like some irc clients, have you used an irc client before?
Besides taking my comment literally (I now have clarified), lets look at it from a higher level:
The concept of channels, usernames, private messaging in Slack is almost all directly inherited from IRC. There is some great new functionality on top of this core, IRC inspired experience.
You can do that with a bouncer. Slack and Discord are essentially a chat server with an integrated bouncer.
> mobile-friendly data usage
How is IRC not mobile-friendly? It only transports the raw text, not even "X is writing a message" notifications.
> first class support for emoji
Most clients support UTF-8, isn't it only a matter of fonts?
Znc+mirc did work for me but things like scrollback and access from multiple devices are much nicer now with just my Weechat instance.
If you look at Twitch, as an example, I say that emoji support is absolutely fine. Though, I guess you somehow excluded that when you said: "[...]in its current form"? Nevertheless, it does show that implementing such a thing is not that much of a problem.
I'm sorry. Even in 2018 I cannot take seriously any claim that "support for emoji" is being used to make business case decisions.
All because someone included a smiley emoji while making a donation to a local community foundation. Lessons were learned because of poor planning admittedly but if you don't take emoji support seriously it's probably because you haven't suffered through a critical outage from poorly supporting character encodings.
We aren't a chat company. We don't even write email clients. We process transsctions. And we lost millions because of a single emoji.
For me the parent commenter's phrasing of "first class emoji support" goes rather beyond that, e.g. with friendly emoji pickers, maybe reaction emojis, custom emojis, different skin-tone emojis, etc.
I'd view that bigger level of support as extremely optional for a transaction processing company like yours, though less so for a chat system intended for broad appeal in 2018.
How is it better than just having upvotes and downvotes like what's done on websites like HN, reddit, and Slashdot? Personally, I don't see much value when seeing 5 different reaction emojis right under a comment I post in a Slack channel.
Slack just happens to express reactions using emoji.
Just like you don't hear me wishing that PHP or Fortran had certain features.
It's not very good evidence.
IRC is fine.
Almost. They still use IRC - but they extend functionality "outside of IRC" with bots. You don't hear this because people make bots with .tell commands that supplement this functionality. The next time a user logs in the bot will /msg them something like "You have 1 message. Use .read list to see a list of unread messages" then they ".read 1" they can then .reply or send their own .tell
Anything IRC "needs" gets supplemented by a bot that takes care of the functionality.
London Trust Media is colossal. They seem to have control over freenode and Snoonet, two networks basically unchallenged in their niche. Snoonet hasn't been doing so well since Discord, but that's another story. They also seem to own Private Internet Access. If a player becomes too big, they'll change the rules of the game. Just look at the state of Internet advertising: A few corporations probably know a lot more about most better than you wish they did.
Re "IRC University": Practically every non-trivial network has its own software stack of some sort. Trying to teach people every kind of IRCd/services combination is more or less doomed to fail. Mainly because people usually just don't want to know.
Re "IRC Ventures": There's no money to be made on IRC, at least in its current form. Slack, Discord, etc. gained traction because IRC is fundamentally inaccessible. It does not meet any of the common needs of today: server-side storage of history, mobile-friendly data usage and session management, built-in uploading, profiles and profile pictures, first class support for emoji. Though whether addressing them is correct is another story. However, these would all need to be addressed to try and make IRC competitive on any kind of market. The IRCv3 team, which does have a decently broad amount of adoption, has had issues pushing through much more trivial issues. Hell, we don't even have everybody on the same page about TLS – QuakeNet and UnderNet are still plaintext only. QuakeNet undeniably intentionally so[1].
Mark me highly skeptical of this undertaking.
[1] https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive...
EDIT: Seems I misunderstood some points, see also neatnosleep's response to this comment.