I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either.

I guess that makes me "average".

IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s era of protocol design. All are on their way out, some more gradually than others. Good riddance. How sad it would be if the Internet of 2020 looked the same as it did in 1995.

I don't use IRC. But I'd never use Slack either in a project I maintain/lead. We need a better alternative.

+m quiets all users in the channel and only allows you to speak if you receive the channel-user mode +v (voice) or have +o (operator status). Some ircds also have a +h etc.

You can setup bots like “RaiseYourHand” for people who want to ask questions and need temporary voice (+v).

Try that on slack, telegram, signal, etc. Its impossible.

IRC was ACTUALLY built for collaboration and communication. Slack was built to make money.

The difference in goals causes a different outcome.

Just imagine how much better Discord, Slack, et al. could be if you could host your own instances with your own rules and with your own extensions.

I do, and I think it's a good constraint (better than the 140/280 char Tweet restriction). No excessive notifications by default, no impatient people (at least largely not because they don't tend to hang around anyway). The pace is more predictable and consistent, and it's easier than ever to have a 24/7 detached client/bouncer.

For some years, fancier services like Facebook robbed creativity and time from me but lately I've returned to a more simple flow that isn't affected by Eternal September.

IRC has a certain barrier of entry, so that tends to keep a lot of the low quality noise away (where it remains on other platforms such as Discord and YouTube).

I recognise that Slack and Discord have their own objectives, but IRC covers its own niche well.

I setup Mattermost for my company. The deciding factor between Mattermost and IRC was effort to get non-technical users a nice GUI. Functionally, IRC would have won.

Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first.

In my world - if I could get away with less different clients I would. It makes it a nightmare to support.

Imagine this:

You have a bot in your channel that accepts an "upload-image" command followed by a base64-encoded string representing an image (or a series of these commands if line-lenght is limited, I'm not sure about this part of the IRC protocol). The bot checks that the image is actually an image (to avoid weird injection tricks), saves it on the server and returns a link you can share or sends the link directly to the user/channel of your choosing.

This can be automated with a irc client, of course. Users using old clients will receive an actual link, users of this supposed new client see a clickable preview of the actual image inline.

And of course it was automated. There are any number of such clients. Slack. Facebook Messenger. WeChat. Viber. Dozens of them. Of course they don't use IRC. But they automate file delivery. And media inlining. And dozens, if not hundreds of other things.

Meanwhile the "nothing stops you from implementing" crowd implements nothing and keeps wondering why basically no one uses these wonderful open protocols.

For example to provide authentication many servers provide a bot called NickServ. There could also be a mechanism called ProfileServ that implements these functionalities.

The beauty of IRC is that you can open telnet, connect to an IRC server and actually be able to chat by typing raw commands.

The problem with IRC is that there is no standard specification, and there are many many edge cases. Therefore in my experience most IRC clients implement a small subset of the IRC protocol.

I've been trying to write an irc client in Go for quite some time (https://github.com/terminalcommand/irc-v2). It's been a fun experience, but there is still a lot to cover.

RFC 1459

The situation is not unlike that of terminal control sequences. The core VT10x functionality is more-or-less mostly in place, ish, in every terminal emulator, but some of the VT10x functionality is no longer implemented, and lots of subsequent useful functionality isn't well documented, so implementors are left to crib from other implementations.

Irc also has a lot of -to me at least- obscure specifications for example involving channel modes. The functionality differs from server to server.

I have the impression that most irc servers are operated by programs with old codebases coded in C. New client implementations are continuing to get written, but I do not see a lot of server implementations around, probably because it is complicated to write.

I mean, this proposal is to build it on top of IRC, it doesn't need to change how the IRC protocol works. We're speaking a level above that.

IRC was, with the exception of simple clients, codable, scriptable, extensible.*

Software today is “what you get is all you get.” It’s pretty sad.

* It was a human body script that caused you to look at this “*”. Scripting is powerful.

That's a feature for me. If I wanted to be constantly barraged with images, I would have stayed using Facebook and Twitter. People on IRC posting imgur links gives me the opportunity to accept or decline (usually based on their reputation, the channel's response, or my boredom). With other social networks, images are almost always unsolicited and often only waste scroll space (good luck to those still on limited data plans and want to know the context of the latest notification).

Besides, text often can have more substance and precise meaning (even if it's not perfect all the time). After all, we're all communicating with mostly just text right here. Another example of something else that features mostly text are books, so it's certainly not deprecated.

Give me all the text please - in fact, if you give me an image with a caption, I'll read the caption first. I can happily find images through other mediums so IRC without embedded images isn't a problem at all here.

Maybe I'm missing the point here: But IRC does have a file transfer feature, so what would stop people from sharing images just the same way like plenty of "content" has been shared over IRC?

Then again, if you want to equate the badness of IRC and FTP, which is much earlier than IRC and much more of a security problem, you're making a poor quality argument anyway. Dumpster fires and garbage dump fires are different orders of magnitude.

IRC being an open protocol and having the option to run your own servers is what makes it decentralized. The various "major" IRC networks (EFnet, Freenode etc) are decentralized too, since they are isolated networks.

Slack offer neither of these - they own all servers, the protocol and controls the API (which is not the same as an open protocol).

IRC on the other hand allows ephemeral usernames, you have the option to use e2e encryption if you choose, etc.

I mean, you do need an Apple ID to do it that way. But I don't think there's anything stopping you from creating throwaway Apple IDs.

Why is that? IRC supports SSL, of course, and many IRC networks offer "cloaks" (to hide your IP address from other users) and/or permit connections via Tor.

I've never seen an ircd cloak instruction page misrepresent what they can and cannot do. While protecting IP addresses is important (which the GDPR also believes in), I think it's also important to not lose perspective of the bigger dangers out there right now such as default user behaviour and conditioning. For example, IRC has never led to huge numbers of people publicly humiliating themselves by bitching about their employers, etc.

Like what outside of taking the scope outside of the IRC client (external link, etc)

An IRC cloak is programmed into the ircd itself ensuring that ones IP address is not exposed. I don’t think you can just hack that. If you use the external link trick, everyone is susceptible to that no matter what app/platform they use unless you use a VPN or Tor.

In any case there are some really obsessed people who probably know a hundred ways to take over your channels at the very least. Seeing some of these people do their thing is one of the reasons why I steer clear of IRC these days.

The Freenode decloak trick still works, though.

1) There are a number of ways to decloak somebody purely via irc/ircd fuckery - though it's liable to require several minutes of dedicated effort to do so.

2) There's a non-zero likelihood that if you try any of those ways we will spot you and k-line you.

3) That likelihood is not a guarantee, so when cloaking people we always make sure to warn them first that cloaks aren't 100% reliable and if users really want to protect their IP address they want a VPS, a VPN, or tor.

4) No, I'm not going to be any less vague about 1, just because it's not actually hard doesn't mean I want to encourage it.

Some networks only let people connect via SSL.

I faced the same problem with IRC that I am facing with Signal today. Though this analogy doesn't really seem that coherent but I hope you see where I am coming from. No one I would like to communicate with via such apps/platforms seems to use it. IRC is great but I would like to connect it with people I know, are part of something I like or do, or are from the place I belong to. They don't. They have moved to other platforms, long back, or never really used IRC.

I believe a lot of existing IRC users, including me, are still around just because of the nostalgia.

For the last 10 years, been working on open source software for a living. Been an IRC user for equally long; `mutt` for the last five years. Thank goodness I do that. Nothing comes close to its effectiveness.

Lack of images on IRC is a feature; not a bug, dammit. It keeps me productive and removes utterly distracting crap. I'd be loathe to see IRC showing images and animated poop emojis (although the unicode 'pile-of-poo' renders just alright on my command-line IRC client, `irssi`).

I can handle video chat and in-person communication equally fine. But I prefer the clarity and vigor of the text-only approach.

"Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking."

I remember channel takeovers.

I remember the flooding and the script kiddies with their obnoxious scripts.

In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles.

This sounds vaguely familiar and I'm not talking about IRC.

You know, I have a hard time blaming "average" people for not wanting to use bitchX. That's a pretty huge unforced error in terms of marketing.

> Email, IRC, HTML, FTP

FTP sucked back in the day and it still sucks. Otherwise, yeah.

It was also a great place to vent anonymously when I was at the lowest points of my life, in a judgement free environment. I don’t think any social network will come close to capturing the effect of IRC. Decentralization and federation are what makes it a great protocol, IMO.

BBSs were more of the than not local, with some federation in that the operator or someone he trusted would exchange data between the local BBS and some distant BBS.

Similarly IRC used to house a high number of very local channels back when i first came online (and one tried to pick a server on the network that was in one's own nation or a neighboring one to avoid finding oneself on the wrong end of a net split).

Social networks offers much the same via various means (groups on facebook, sub-reddits on reddit, etc).

Honestly IMO, what killed IRC was IM and SMS. This because now the schoolyard cliques could once more ostracize.

IM definitely took the bite out of IRC because it was far better at creating beginners that never made it to IRC, and a lot of IRC users got pulled to IM. ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, MSN created a new type of connection.

Write an IRCv3 scrollback and search extension, and you’ll win the hearts of millions.

Kiwi IRC actually implements this and has a ZNC module being released soon for it. Hopefully soon, other bouncers.

These type of specs and actually getting them implemented in clients and servers is exactly the type of things the irc.com foundation will be supporting.

I never understood this sentiment. In the '90s and the previous decade, I corresponded with many people over IRC and usenet who were definitely "non-engineer users". What changed in the last 10 years to make many people believe that one has to have a technical/engineering background to be capable of using things like IRC?

Twenty years ago, you would need to know where to plug a cable in to even have a computer turn on. For better or worse, the barrier for entry these days is a lot lower.

IRC has remained relatively the same while other services like Facebook or even MSN Messenger promised the world.

I don't agree that IRC is dead. It will continue to outlast many companies.

I'm an average person (with 17 years of professional programming career behind me). I wouldn't give two craps about IRC in 2018. Yes, I really enjoy having a smooth cross-platform experience with inline media, public and private chat rooms, search, file transfers etc. without having to set anything up and without having to deal with half-baked poorly implemented clients who can't even agree on a feature set between each other, and can't produce a single decent mobile client.

Same goes for XMPP.

BTW, it's extremely hard to make a decent product for the "average user". Self-proclaimed über-men should try it sometime.

I like things with open standards, so that people can use the tools that work for them. Bob can use the Gmail web interface to send and receive email, and Sally can use gnus in Emacs to send and receive email on her own local server.

"Back in the day" they had no choice or little other choice but.

And even then "normal people" would prefer things like AIM and ICQ for reasons obvious to anyone except the self-proclaimed not-normal above-average über-men.

AIM, Discord etc. have the 'word-processor problem': the protocol and the interface are inexorably intertwined. You're stuck with whatever user interface they provide.

And this 'word-processor problem' is compounded by the 'normal people' issue, or, even worse than that, the 'lowest common user' problem. It's optimisation not for the best or the most powerful or even the prettiest interface, but rather optimisation for ease-of-immediate-use. (I.e. the interface for word-processors, whether LibreOffice or Word, are miserable environments for actually creating in, because they're tailored to not even 'average users' but to 'inexperienced and lazy users' - those who want to be able to sit down and use it without any training.)

With an open standard, you can have good interfaces for 'normal people' and an interface for 'lowest common users' and interfaces for other types of users, and this enables all of these types to be able to interact.

Please show me a cross-platform good interface for "normal people" for either IRC or XMPP: that supports all the latest standards and is on par with, say, Slack. Where cross-platform isn't Windows-Linus-Mac, but desktop-mobile.

For IRC I'm aware of none (except the ... closed-source web/electron-based irccloud, the irony). For XMPP there's just Conversations for Android, and that's it.

I also like the tech bro considers "normal users" to be bad, be cause there's "even worse than that, the lowest common user". There is a reason why people don't use the crappy half-baked barely usable crap that tech-bro non-normal above-average über men produce.

But hey, XMPP is passé so everyone prefers a vendor lock-in.

So, with Conversations I'm locked into a single client on a single platform. Yay, XMPP :-/ (There's no desktop client I'm aware of that supports Conversations' features).

Oh, and I can have that only if I go through the trouble of setting up all the moving pieces myself. Because I really really really want to spend my time picking which flavour of end-to-end encryption to use (in which clients?) and how to make sure that a server-side searchable archive exists (accessible through which client??) or that media and files reach even offline clients (which clients???) etc.

Server-wise you want either ejabberd or prosody for the latest features. Yes, you need to set up a server once and read some docs, as with every self-hosted service. And if you don't care about encryption enough to read about it you can just enforce TLS for client-to-server and server-to-server connections. On the desktop, Gajim (win/linux/bsd/mac) supports all of the XEPs I mentioned. There are clients for iOS too but I don't know how they work as I don't own any Apple products.

Of course, if you'd rather spend money than time hoping that your provider won't have your conversations stolen, misused or disappear with them that's your prerogative too.

> You need to set up

> clients for iOS too [nope, no clients beyond the very basic abandoned ones — dmitriid]

So.... Why would I want any of that? To feel "not-normal" "above average", as this entire thread seems to imply?

> stolen misused yada yada

Let's leave these scary strories to the kids, shall we? We're supposed to be all grown ups here.

I sense a contradiction in this statement...

This delusion is what stops such people from understanding why Slack/Viber/WhatsApp/iMessage/WeChat etc. won and XMPP and IRC lost.

> Email, IRC, HTML, FTP

These protocols are anything but simple. “Be liberal in what you accept” was a huge mistake we’re still paying for. E-mail effectively can’t be made private. There’s lots of room for improvement in open protocols. (Start by not making them text-based, please.)

unless you had spent years and could read the protocol in its binary form

- one advantage, not “a lot”

- very slight, because the tool to convert to and from text gets made

- vastly outweighed by the disadvantages

It definitely can be both in transit and when stored.

> There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great.

Here is XKCD[0] for this ;-)

[0] http://xkcd.com/1782

Do you take a horse and cart to work or are you an average person who drives a car or catches the train?

Do you mill your own bread, or are you an average person who eats machine milled and produced bread?

Do you pump and sanitize your own water, or are you an average person who turns on the tap?

Calling people "average" for not using outdated and poorly designed applications that were written by 1 or 2 people in their spare time, versus applications and services designed by tens-to-hundreds of people, with the input of designers, UI and UX engineers, etc is moronic.

IRC, FTP, SMTP, Token Ring, etc are as good as they could have been at the time, but they are awful by modern standards. We should learn from them and design better successors.

Slack has been excellent at introducing irc inspired, and irc borrowed concepts of bots, channels, aliases to the masses.

Oddly slack had a pretty painful sign up in the beginning to keep people on different subdomains.

I'm not sure if today's modern standards are going to look much better looking back in 5 years.

Maybe the measure of old techs is how much they still dominate from what is transferable and endures, like the concept of IRC->Slack, email->messaging, and forums to social media.

There is a fair question to ask how many new things are novel, vs rebooted or reincarnated. Bittorrent maybe, blockchain for sure.

Neither thanks. I ride a bicycle with an internal gear hub (IGHs, which are a technology that are over a century old,and put modern derailers to shame). I sometimes also walk.

Newer and more horsepower is not always better.

IRC being awful doesn't automatically make current alternatives not awful. I use IRC within my expectations, just as I do with other services.

Just because I expect a certain demographic in IRC doesn't mean I exclude myself from interacting with other ones too.

Without engaging the parent comment directly, the IRC user demographic is no longer average but that's okay. Average is also okay - there's room in this world for both.

Facebook and Twitter though, are trash as far as time sinks go.

Newer is not necessarily better.

https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

"this service is only usable on your phone if you also sign up for another service" pretty much makes it a non-starter.

IRC has had literal decades to be improved and only now do people get serious about it after Slack and friends sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

Older isn’t necessarily better either. IRC has stagnated hard, about the only thing it has on the competitors is that it’s free.

And doesn't require 8 GB of RAM to run a client.

It's more than 'free'. It's an open standard. You can write a slack client in your favorite language and it will continue to work for years.

Slack does not compete with that.