Slack holds your old messages hostage until you pay their ransom. Reason enough not to use it
IRC per se doesn't hold any message when you weren't logged in. Reason enough not to use it.
Holding messages is a client side task in IRC. Which works because IRC is a protocol, not a product.
But slack actively makes it difficult to get logs out of it. Can't even save your own messages that you sent when you were logged in.
Easy to stay logged into irc, hard to fix slack's logging problem
Re:Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
by badpixelbr on Friday June 07, 2019 @06:25AM
(#20123168)
just use ZNC. why should us pay for something free?
Indeed, you're still paying for electricity to run a server somewhere of course. ZNC, Quassel, The Lounge, WeeChat if you want to do it yourself. IRCCloud if you want to pay someone to do it for you.
We used bots to do that, but in todays world it's so easy to just stay logged in all the time, just leave a screen or tmux session running as a background process on a server
Would people pay for for a cloud service that bridged some of the gaps between Slack and IRC. Like notifications and offline message retention. Or would you just use Slack in those cases?
How would you do it without using screen, or bots as you say?
I am using Riot messenger. It can sync both Matrix and IRC accounts.
Link - https://about.riot.im/
Re:Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
by EKSolutions on Friday June 07, 2019 @07:00AM
(#20123330)
I personally use an IRC Bouncer. ZNC for instance is a really good one
You can use the log command and then run in on a screen instance.
This may be inconvenient for some people, but for me this is a feature.
Re:Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
by scarface74 on Friday June 07, 2019 @08:41AM
(#20123943)
You mean they actually want people to pay for a product? Would you rather they insert ads based on your conversation?
This irc channel is brought to you by nerds who work at ISPs, nerds, they love IRC and have spare server capacity
Re:Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
by paulcarroty on Friday June 07, 2019 @02:44AM
(#20122197)
My bad Slack experience:
- you should register for every channel
- switching the channels is slow & non-intuitive
- tons of sub-channels and collaborations between are painful
you should register for every channel
Some would consider that a feature, you only see the activity of the channels you've joined (but you can search for others at any time and you can preview messages in them before joining).
switching the channels is slow & non-intuitive
isn't "/join #channel-name" the same way you switch channels in IRC?
Re:Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
by lifthrasiir on Friday June 07, 2019 @03:27AM
(#20122385)
Most IRC clients allow you to quickly switch to frequently viewed channels via shortcuts (even irssi, a terminal client, does that). With Slack it is a clunky Ctrl-K and a first few letters of the channel name that may or may not lead to what you really want.
Yep, must say I miss the Escape-sequences for changing channels. Works fine via wee-slack though but unfortunately you need permission to join via wee-slack since it requires an API-key.
Re:Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
by madeofpalk on Friday June 07, 2019 @04:25AM
(#20122655)
?? Slack has shortcuts for both of these. Cmd+0,1,2,3 to switch between orgs, opt+up/down to switch between channels. And also, as you mentioned, cmd+k for search-switching
Re:Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
by lifthrasiir on Friday June 07, 2019 @10:59AM
(#20125214)
I know Slack does support shortcuts, but search-switching is inferior to a direct shortcut. Let's say that you frequently use channels a and b in the org A and a channel c in the org B (this mode of operation is common). How do you get to a, b or c without even looking at the screen?
Discord is much better for collaboration simply by virtue of it being simpler, I've found. Web client works great
Re:Ask HN: Does anyone still use IRC?
by badpixelbr on Friday June 07, 2019 @06:27AM
(#20123175)
weechat > all
best client ever. and use ZNC.
Long answer: My colleagues don't want to so I use it mostly for forums. Some programming languages have chat channels and I have heard that for open source dev it is still somewhat common but I suspect it is declining. It's a pity because I think Slack is stupid. Slack does not have the transparency of IRC and frankly the fact that you can share files and use fonts and indents are not selling points for me.
EDIT: Slack is stupid for me. To each their own I guess?
EDIT2: Just to make it clear, judging from other answers a lot of programmers use IRC every day. But not all of my colleagues are programmers. Some fall in the chasm between "data science" and programming and for such people IRC is unfortunately unfamiliar.