There's more to a product than a protocol and foundational similarities. Whenever someone uses this to distract away from the success of Slack, for example, I question if they realize that UX, design, ease are all part of a product and can be independently innovated on.

Reminds me when you start working on a side project, get a PoC working on the weekend (like a to-be application/website that for now kinda works on the command line), and tell yourself "alright, the hard part is over!"

Then you realize you only finished the 0.01%.

That's about where IRC seemed to have stopped. "We're done. The clients can do the hard stuff that users actually want."

Naw, IRC was v1. It worked quite well, was well thought out, and standardized. Perfect? No. Good enough for the time and use-case? Yes.

Slack and its kin are v2, capturing the requirements that have changed with the changing userbase. I only wish they were standardized, so we could have non-first party implementations (with the benefits that come with that).

https://ircv3.net/ does exist although i’m not sure how competitive it can be.

It’s hard to see a future for IRC or something like it to beat the proprietary alternatives unfortunately.

Isn't mattermost an open source version of slack with most of the important features?

At least your friends don't need a whole lot of instruction to join. Inserting pictures is pretty easy. And it's mobile.

I remember IRC in the late 90s, early 2000s having A LOT (like 9 out of 10) of people who otherwise had no idea about computers (remember droves of people disconnecting after 'Press Alt+F4 to get @'?). People who didn't knew the difference between a file and a directory (or folder) were on IRC with channels having hundreds of people.

If someone can figure out Facebook (and trust me, Facebook is far from intuitive for someone who doesn't know) or any other web-based service, they can figure out IRC.

The main reason people do not use IRC much nowadays is that other people moved off IRC to Facebook and other social places. It isn't a technical thing, it is mainly a social thing.

Lack of conversation persistence is a real problem. It's 2019 and people expect to have it. If messages disappear into the ether while I'm not actively connected to the room, it's not going to work for participating in a group conversation.

Yeah you can set up some always-connected relay on a server and bounce your client through it to still get the conversation backlog when you weren't online, but it's not reasonable to expect an average computer user even have an always-connected machine to run it on, let alone actually get a relay working.

If they can use Facebook they could use IRCCloud, but that's $5/month and Messenger/WhatsApp/Discord/Slack are free.

Well that's the whole idea behind Snapchat, but I get your point.

Sometimes I wish I didn't have so many messages saved forever tho, honestly.

Not just persistence in terms of "exists after I read it", but in terms of getting the messages at all. When someone sends you a snap while you don't have snapchat open, you get a push notification about it and the message is waiting on the server for you to read it.

In IRC, anything that happens while you don't have an active session just doesn't exist.

That might work for some communities, like programming language groups where I can hop in, talk about something with whoever's online, and hop back off.

But if I'm chatting with my friends and we're trying to make plans for the weekend, everyone really needs to see that conversation regardless of whether they have the client running right this second.

Well yea, it's a sad fact that IRC requires a client side server running something like ZNC to work as needed. IRC is great in many, many ways, but this is a fundamental flaw. It's nice there are solutions, but they are technical, require hosting, and aren't perfect.

Other chat protocols fix this but lack the base, and are having trouble competing against the likes of Slack or iMessage in different use cases for example.

I'm excited to see how Purism's Librem 5 is going to play out with matrix as it's primary communications platform.

almost every single irc server since 94 or so have some sort of logger. if not, it's an intentional design choice for that one community.

You're suggesting people scour logs for missed messages as if that's seriously your pitch for "IRC has that, too."

This is exactly why people who are pro-IRC are watching the sun set on IRC and they don't have a flaming clue why beyond condescending suspicions like "it's the users who are idiots."

Maybe september is starting to end?

Yeah sure, conversation persistence is neat although personally i do not consider a must have. Regardless, my comment was really about how "noob friendly" IRC was/is.

Agreed, it's not that hard to use. But it's worse than other free solutions in some important ways, so whether people can use it matters less than whether they'll bother to.

As far as I can tell it'll continue to exist for communities that are on it, or maybe for new ones that are deliberately trying to select for the kind of person who's willing to deal with IRC's limitations. Those are both perfectly valid cases, not everything needs to be aimed at mass market adoption.

But beyond those groups, there are lots of nicer services that most people would prefer to use for one reason or another. And even if the self-hosted and/or free software leaning groups, Matrix looks more promising looking forward.

Your point about Facebook is spot on, if you have never used it before it's a nightmare

Especially hardening all the default settings to more privacy minded ones.

> Facebook is far from intuitive for someone who doesn't know.

I am a 30-somthing software engineer who doesn't use facebook. The few times I have tried it out it was indeed incredibly confusing.

AOL and mIRC didn't require any nongui commands as I recall.

Yes but I currently have discord, hangouts, slack, line, and messenger installed, and have used keybase, signal, and matrix on top of that. It's a bit extreme.

Try Franz to gather many of them in one program?

The ram and random cpu usage spike on a Mac is too much for me to handle. I’ll never use Franz again after giving it multiple chances.

There’s more native FBM options as well as Slack and Discord combined clients (Ripcord) though the latter might not look or behave the way people want.

Many irc channels are as easy to join as clicking a link. Webchat has gone a long way now.

That doesn't solve the problem of name registration, file/picture sharing, group membership/moderation, customization/emoji, planning, etc. that are handled easily with something like Facebook Messenger groups. IRC is super clunky by comparison.

I agree. The irccloud is trying to alleviate many of the problems in retro-compatible way. It has stuff like history, snippets, images and so on.

I pay for IRCCloud, but the problem is that it only fixes everything for you. It does you almost no good when nobody else can receive a message after they close their laptop or go through a tunnel.

The IRC communities speak for themselves. Pretty much all regulars, no new blood, tiny, and opinionated grouches that are kinda hard to stand. You'd think #javascript or #node.js on Freenode would be pretty big. Nah, I'm on there every day and it's about 10 regulars. I could list off the usernames off the top of my head.

To put that in perspective, my Slack community for people who like building MUDs has more regulars and it's hard for me to think of a smaller niche. If you're trying to set up a community and you think IRC is good enough and you refuse to offer alternatives, your stubbornness is only disserving your users and community.

I can think of many more options too, like how Elm's IRC channel makes you think nobody uses the language, yet Elm's Slack community is thriving and more fun to participate in than #javascript and #node.js, and is far more popular.

Ease of use is definitely a big factor. It would be interesting to see if it were possible to try to build a community using IRCCloud first and basically use it as "Slack but with an irc gateway that will never go away". Their free tier modalities seem a bit too restrictive to allow that though.

That used to be the story. I used to offer a Mibbit gateway to my IRC community that got a lot of use 10 years ago.

But today, it's a hard sell. IRCCloud doesn't compete on features against alternatives services, it's strictly worse since it has less to work with.

When a user adds your community, it gets added to a list of all their other servers on Slack/Discord. The question has become "so why are you making us use this instead of setting up a Slack/Discord/etc server like everyone else?"

And I think you'll be hard pressed to answer them in a satisfying way. And for no real gain.

No emoji/pictures/link previews is a feature to me. You know if someone posts a link nobody's going to click.

There are other groups who heavily use these features. We've got over a thousand custom emojis in my Slack at work. Our interactions would be just slightly less rich without :badpokerface:, :sadpanda:, or :superhero:.

Balls. Emoticons were plenty rich, they just require too much creativity for this lazy set.

For some reason these IRC vs X discussions always have the IRC party attributing character flaws to everyone else.

Like not being creative enough to read the same amount of information from ":)" and specific, rich, custom emoji like, I don't know, someone simply shrugging. That's some bizarre self-aggrandizement.

I encourage you to go on a Twitch channel and tell me the :) equivalent of all the custom Twitch/channel images you see in chat.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/14/17335670/twitch-emotes-mea...

Could you break these down for us?

You’re in the super tiny minority that actually likes IRC. Why would you think everyone’s the same way, even when all evidence points otherwise?

I agree. I know most people don't think the same way. But my friends and I do, that's why we keep using EFnet.

And that's fine. None of us want to take IRC away from you. And it's fine as well for you to advocate for IRC, so new people can find out about it and join it. Some of us like other chat services though, for various reasons, and we enjoy using emoji in playful ways and to supplement the lack of body language in written communication.

mIRC was probably as easy as slack. but you didn't have to force everyone to use mIRC.

Same for aim, icq... greedy killed all of those, not the ability to create better open clients. Namely msn and gtalk (not the jabber offering, which was a joke attempt of making federated icq for corporations, enterprisey java codebase and all)

You can use irccloud and you got irc on mobile, with easy picture integration and you don't miss messages when not online. (Like slack/discord).

HN has a very strange hate/love relationship with modern chat systems.

Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad.

IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it.

IRCCloud's privacy policy should be of concern:

"We keep logs of your IRC communications until you delete your account with us, or a connection, or channel. This means that, even if you stop using IRCCloud for a while, when you next log in, it will be as if you never went away."

So like any other messenger? You can delete your logs whenever you like, but they don't get deleted automatically.

This is probably because IRCCloud is not the one running the server the channel is hosted on; You don’t have to use it if your friends do.

If that changed the average HN user’s attitude would probably change as well.

use The Lounge if you want to host something like that yourself, it is open source. I like it. https://thelounge.chat/

> HN has a very strange hate/love relationship with modern chat systems.

> Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad.

> IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it.

Who exactly is "HN"? How did you even decide "HN" has opinion X or Y?

I'm fine with Discord because its mostly used for gaming. Given the previous options (Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Mumble, Skype), it is miles better. And of these, only Mumble is fully FOSS. A clear disadvantage is however privacy-related, but for gaming that isn't a huge issue.

What I'm not fine with is being forced to use Slack for work-related material. You don't want such sensitive data centralized. You want to host such yourself, or have the private keys yourself.

IRCCloud, whatever it is, probably does not have the same amount of users as the previously mentioned two. But if it uses the IRC protocol (which the name suggests), at least that is open and there's no vendor lock-in like with Slack/Discord. Which, given that Slack is used for commercial endeavors, is worse for Slack.

> What I'm not fine with is being forced to use Slack for work-related material. You don't want such sensitive data centralized. You want to host such yourself

and immediately:

> IRCCloud, whatever it is, probably does not have the same amount of users as the previously mentioned two. But if it uses the IRC protocol (which the name suggests), at least that is open

IRCCloud is a centralised, closed-source entity that stores all your chat logs in the cloud. So, no different than Slack/Discord (with the exception of the protocol).

> Which, given that Slack is used for commercial endeavors, is worse for Slack.

How is it worse for Slack? Slack clearly provides value that IRC (and XMPP) don't. I really wish people would try and see why Slack etc. are popular and used (including in commercial settings), and why IRC/XMPP are not.

> IRCCloud is a centralised, closed-source entity that stores all your chat logs in the cloud. So, no different than Slack/Discord (with the exception of the protocol).

(A very important exception.)

IRCCloud just appears to be akin to a BNC. If Bob decides to use IRCCloud or a BNC that is his choice. The rest of the team or group can still use their preferred IRC client because the protocol is an open standard. Would it be my choice for an IRC client? Hell no. But thanks to the protocol being FOSS: to each their own. Try that with Slack/Discord...

> How is it worse for Slack?

Because whatever gamers discuss is much less privacy sensitive than whatever businesses (with for example other people's data) discuss.

I'm also not really sure why anyone would compare Slack/Discord with IRC or XMPP when its clear that these are so vastly different while there are FOSS, open standard solutions for Slack/Discord in existence such as Mattermost (Slack alternative) and Mumble (Discord alternative). You can't even do audio or video over IRC.

> (A very important exception.) IRCCloud just appears to be akin to a BNC. If Bob decides to use IRCCloud or a BNC that is his choice. The rest of the team or group can still use their preferred IRC client

If just one team member uses IRCCliud for chat, all tgat sensitive info is now stored on IRCCloud’s servers.

So, hiw exactly does “open FOSS protocol” help in this case?

Because as owners of the server and/or channel you are free to implement a protocol on top of it. On Discord and Slack you do not have such liberty. Heck, Slack killed IRC gateway.

Again Back to this statement:

> What I'm not fine with is being forced to use Slack for work-related material. You don't want such sensitive data centralized. You want to host such yourself

The moment you use IRCCloud all that sensitive data is on IRCCloud’s servers. How does “building a protocol in top of that (on top if what?)” help?

The point is that those who own the channel and/or server can enforce E2EE. They own the data. Its also possible someone on an IRC client is running a compromised server. Then you're also back to square one.

Given we're talking in circles I'll withdraw from this discussion.

How can they enforce E2EE if IRC protocol doesn’t support it?

How can they enforce E2EE if very few if any IRC clients support it?

What good does “owning the data” do if the data ends up on IRCCloud’s servers anyway (companies who use Slack also own their data).

It’s quite telling that people have such a strong belief in the magic of protocols.

I'm not fine with Discord as a replacement for TeamSpeak. I recognise some of its advantages, but the voice quality is absolute garbage when compared to what you can get TeamSpeak to do.

Can you be specific? I don't need high quality voice quality for gaming. I need it to be good enough. I've been content with Ventrilo's GSM voice quality as well. My issue with Ventrilo wasn't the voice quality; it was the lag!!

All generalizations are bad. :D

You say "HN has a ..." but I use Discord for fun and have no problem with it.

There's no one type of person on HN. :)

> You say "HN has a ..." but I use Discord for fun and have no problem with it.

See comments to every mention of Slack, or other modern chat software. you will see a lot of people saying that IRC/XMPP was better and suggesting open protocols and IRCCloud :)

Still with a lot of this tech, if someone sat you down for an hour and helped you, the barrier wouldn't be there.

Sitting down for an hour and talking about tech /is/ the barrier.

I'm reading this as you'd prefer something inherently intuitive. Which yes would be great. Some tools need at least some instruction and guidance.

Well the point is that Whatsapp doesn't.

I didn't see Whatsapp singled out in the article or by the parent. But good to know it has a simple UI.

There is a comment in the story about cross platform woes and incompatibilities.

I've never managed to install Whatsapp on my computer.

You don't /need/ to install it on your computer. Most users won't use it that way anyway, but if you want, you just use the web interface. That doesn't even require any riddles about adding another end-to-end encryption keypair.

For sure, it piggybacks off the mobile device you connect with. It's a really solid, seamless, and easy way of starting a desktop client. I wish Telegram would adapt it as well but the current way it handles isn't terrible (1 time code).

I think telegram should def add it as another way. But as a more power user of Telegram and Whatsapp I would def prefer native sleek clients for both. Whatsapp issues go beyond that like not being able to log into a tablet.

But none of that goes away from the point of both being intuitive.

About as intuitive as comic chat - seems you need a mobile and phone number to get going with Whatsapp.

This is a common meme on HN, but it's reductionist to the point of being meaningless. You could also say Google reinvented Altavista.

Google is an improvement on Altavista. Slack is a downgrade on IRC in everything except the lowest common denominator UX and pushing ops to someone else.

The new SaaS companies integrate what used to be two (three) separate things - the client and the protocol (and the server). The way they do this forces everyone to use the common client that's not optimized for power users. Which is kind of nasty, because it's the power users that have to suffer the interface the most, as we use it day in, day out at our dayjobs.

But power users are a very small minority also, nobody argues that IRC should disappear but is still not a replacement for most other messaging platforms.

I too would have liked an open protocol in principle, but looking at emails I am not sure it would have been a good thing. (As in eternal backwards compatibility and unchangeable architectural choices that might not suit a very different future use)

Channel discovery feels like a feature here; safe intimacy is what the article is enjoying. Invitation only.

> 30 years later and we have reinvented IRC

Are you saying these messengers have a feature that splits the group in half at random intervals?

You should really submit a bug report to imessage and friends if they don't do that-- otherwise it degrades the reinvented IRC experience.

It's taken 30 years for someone to find a way to own the community around it. AOL sort of did this with their own DALnet software (AOL chatrooms).

Amusingly, I couldn't see why slack stopped doing IRC, essentially that's what it was. The one and only thing that let IRC down was the message limitation. Some clients didn't make it very clear when those messages were not sent.

I'm not actually convinced any of those things legitimately make internet communication better.

Difficulty of finding channels is sort of the point isn't it? Exclusivity and tightly knit communities?

Most other platforms have private groups. Or even private groups with moderation support.

Slack is IRC for millennials. Just reinventing the world.

This completely fails to capture the nuance in the differences between IRC and modern chat apps, as well as failing to understand an entire userbase and its needs. I know this because i'm a part of the userbase of both slack and IRC.

Yes exactly. In what type of bubble does the author live? "Group Chats" predate the web. So how can they make the internet fun "again" when they have never stopped making it fun?

It's just a more fun and personal way to "be online" than regular Instagram/Facebook where there's the expectation of producing content and performing for your followers that you're living a good life, mixed with FOMO from others' posts. That's what group chats are being compared to. Bringing up IRC is a red herring since most people haven't heard of it and couldn't join if they wanted to.

> it's harder to discover channels.

IRC never had any channel discovery, so how does modern breed of group chats make channel discovery harder?

IRC does make a lot of things we now take for granted harder (file/image/video sharing, search, persistent history, mobile support...)

> IRC never had any channel discovery

wot? It didn't have server discovery, but once you connected to a server, you could definitely discover channels.

I remember back in the days of IRC being megapopular, a lot of servers would kick me out because they had too many channels and listing them triggered flood protection :-P

How different is it from modern chats? The original claim was that "it's harder to discover channels."

Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).

The article is about WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, etc. group chats. What you said is inapplicable to all of those.

1. Those have all started as individual one-on-one chats. So, their roots show

2. There are many more “group chats” for the midern era. Ignoring them isn’t wise.

3. Even among those listed you have channel discovery, for example, in Facebook Messenger.

And no, a discussion on modern chats does not end with “IRC was better end of story”. It wasn’t.

As long as the channel doesn't have the +s (secret) mode, you can list all channels on a server, and that feature has existed since the first RFC iirc.

How different is it from modern chats? The original claim was that "it's harder to discover channels."

Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).

I think Op referred to /list