If you head into the xorg channel, you will find yourself talking to all the people who were also attending conferences about xorg 5-10 years ago. Those are exactly the people I want to talk to, when I have questions about xorg.

Funny this is the worst possible IRC network to use - so many channels are overly restrictive which leads to a crappy user experience. The usual claim is to "combat spam" but most other networks (OFTC) don't implement these policies and have little to no trouble with spam.

Maybe you have to kill the ghost of your previous connection if it hasn’t times out yet?

Have you looked into Matrix? It still has a few kinks to work out, but it seems to fit the bill, and the idea of bridging to other protocols (namely IRC and Slack) is an interesting idea for reducing friction.

Though I would disagree with there being no need for reinvention - historically (and AFAIK unchanged) there are several real issues with XMPP [0]. The idea of XMPP appeals to me, but its complexity and UX are costly, whereas Matrix just works well and is easy to use, which hopefully will allow it to spread beyond tech circles.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040848

edit: found this https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bca2k2/matrix_riot...

The protocol itself, the implementations, and the rest of the Matrix network was unaffected.

Then you have to pay for a server and you have to admin that.

> or you could use Matrix

Sure. I wish Matrix well, and I hope they one day reach the point where they can beat Slack or Discord on the polish front.

> It feels like dropping IRC entirely is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

What baby are you throwing out? I appreciate that these services are proprietary but there's so little lockin in practice that I struggle to care. My gang already switched from Axon to Skype to Mumble to Discord, if and when Discord becomes onerous then we'll move again. Perhaps even to IRC. But for the time being, UX matters and IRC's remains extremely poor.

I get the feeling you or someone is going to use this to argue how all of this can be achieved on IRC in some way, but it's just too much work. If you're someone who is trying to make open source chatting cool again, please respect opinions like mine regardless of how stupid you think they are. If IRC isnt at least as easy to use as Slack, i'm not using it for the same things.

If another user asks a question, and you are apathetic or bored of the answers to that question, thats fine. You’re allowed to have different preferences and not obligated to care about others’ preferences.

But I implore you not to respond with an insult to an answerer as if they’d barged in with an unsolicited opinion.

For what it's worth, I do some things the hard way. I like digging into the nitty gritty. I'm not a different species. The fact that you think I am is the reason you'd never get any middle ground accomplished. Being "outnumbered 99 to 1" not only reveals how you think of yourself as some kind of victim, but also implies that you exist in some strange reality where being in the minority is the 'right' side to be on. Funny, usually it's the opposite.

I just don't get it. Why, why can't we have both? Why is decentralised, open source, configurable, modern and easy impossible to achieve all at once?

Ofc you can use IRCCloud Teams, create servers with one click, but also pay for that.

And what other modern features ate you looking for? This is IRC today: https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png and emoji reactions, typing notifiers as well as threads are already supported in some clients and being standardized.

The inability to structure text visually is my biggest reason for avoiding IRC.

Because you don't do it. If anyone who wants a different user experience than IRC chooses to use a proprietary system, then how do you expect that user experience to come about as Free Software?

Is open source and has lots of modern features like support for threading.