Re:Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server
by norswap on Monday April 29, 2019 @09:54AM
(#19778346)
I'm part of those who don't really value "fighting for freedom via using IRC" so I use Slack & Discord. I have no stakes in saving IRC.
Also, building and maintaining a free IRCCloud clone is worth much more of 5$/month of my time.
And seriously, it's not that hard. I know people who master the ins and out of much more complex server stacks as a hobby. A nice example is the implementation of World of Warcraft private servers. IRC is nowhere near as complex as that. I do concede that it's a long-term effort though. It's certainly not just a "weekend project".
Still as far as "saving things" go, this one is easy enough that a single person could build the tech on his free time and then you just need (a) patron(s) to pay for the infrastructure bill.
(As a long time IRC user, I'd love a free irccloud with all the features of Slack and the freedom of IRC. However, setting that up scaled for "thousands of concurrent users" with normal, modern, administrator interfaces for all those tasks that the IRC RFC themselves left up to individual implementations is REALLY EFFING HARD, so no one has actually set up a service like that, to date)