There are many solutions available to do this. Many channels publish chat logs publicly, which can be downloaded and searched using grep or your tool of choice. And there are web clients that can do this.
> Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out there, one person's IRC experience can vastly differ from another's.
That’s rather the point of a protocol, no? IRC isn’t a platform, it’s a standardized way in which various clients and servers can communicate. Much like email, different clients support features useful for different users.
> IRC also doesn't have any of the modern amenities like emoji reactions or reaction gifs, comment threads, code snippets, plug-and-play third party integrations and web hooks, profile pictures, voice/video chat, screen sharing, or any number of a plethora of other features that BOTH Slack and Discord have.
I consider this a feature. I expect many others would. Constant reaction gifs / emojis / etc seem to be a distraction. I don’t believe I’ve seen these used in a way that had a positive impact on productivity, or effectiveness of communication.
> If you want people to use an open source alternative to Slack or Discord, then people need to build that alternative. IRC, unfortunately, is not it (at least not in its current aged state).
matrix.org / riot.im is what you want. The matrix protocol supports all of these features. Riot is an open source web client for it. I use it regularly and would recommend.
Quite a few of us here work in software, of course we can just jerry-rig a lot of solutions based on existing tools, it doesn't mean it is sufficient to be a product or useful for a broader set of users...
grep is not a sufficient replacement for indexed search with fields. Just try to use Discord's search feature, you can specify constraints extremely easily. The equivalent in grep (if you even have logs going back that far) would be some gnarly regex that you have to reference what characters you need to specify unless you're very familiar with regex.
IRC isn't hard, but it has real shortcoming and real problems. The user experience hasn't meaningfully changed in 20+ years, but people's expectations and how they interact with chat platforms has. This is coming from someone who uses IRC every day, both at work and at home.
What we really need is most of the features of Slack without it's terrible threading mechanism and no GIFs.
Good search can be done with chat, it just tends to be hard.
How the fuck did people come to think of this as a negative? One of the stupidest things about "modern" IT services is that the public interface is a user interface instead of a machine readable iterface, so you can't build a user interface that fits your needs or preferences, you can't innovate features independently, and you can't use software to process the data, you have to interface everything with a human (or go to great length to scrape stuff 'n shit ... just the point of using information technology!).
Having many IRC clients is a good thing because I can have the experience I want, not the experience someone else wants me to have.
That's also the case with open protocols like IRC. Sure you can write an IRC client with reaction emoji support, and it will look great in your client, and anyone using a different client will just see garbage metadata. You can only innovate by getting "everyone" to agree on a new standard, and that's hard.
No, it's not.
> Sure you can write an IRC client with reaction emoji support, and it will look great in your client, and anyone using a different client will just see garbage metadata.
Then you are bad at protocol design.
> You can only innovate by getting "everyone" to agree on a new standard, and that's hard.
No, you innovate by being backwards compatible with established standards.
Now, maybe IRC has reached the limits of its flexibility and should be replaced, I dunno, but the idea that it is somehow impossible to evolve protocols incrementally with partial adoption of new features is just bullshit.
I don't really think so, but I don't really know, I haven't every tried to do anything in that direction.
> It has certainly had a lot of time to try.
Except that people have to do it? As far as I am concerned, IRC is good enough, so I don't feel like putting any effort into "improving" anything, and it seems like a lot of people using IRC feel this way. Those who feel it's not good enough, though, seem to prefer building non-interoperable systems or just using proprietary lock-in vendors. Obviously, that's not gonna result in anything new in IRC.
Hu? Because they won't take my contribution that rips out all of the web interface and replaces it with EMACS?
I mean, what does this even have to do with FOSS? Developing stuff as protocols instead of as user interfaces does not in any way prevent FOSS, very much to the contrary. There are FOSS IRC clients in all shapes and forms: Web interfaces, X GUIs, Windows GUIs, mobile clients, terminal UIs, EMACS modes, XMPP bridges, Matrix bridges ... how is any of that "reinventing the wheel", and how would we be better off if all those clients had to be part of one "IRC FOSS project" rather than independent projects with standards-based interoperability?
Free slack is on par with IRC here -- you need someone nerdy enough to run a chat history bot to get a full searchable history.
The thesis defended in the article is that Slack is not suited to communicate with the userbase of open source projects.
Capping a basic feature such as collecting message history at 250 users is a limitation that supports the author's thesis, as clearly it demonstrate that Slack is unable to handle the communication needs of a moderately popular open source project.
And I don’t even think it’s applicable - in the community I’m in we decided we didn’t want an eternal log of everyone’s discussions. More formal discussions in PRs and emails are recorded, but we rather let conversations fade away after some time.
EDIT:
Answered my own question: up to 85% discount, which is very nice, but still might be infeasible for many projects/communities.
Isn't Slack's cheapest plan around 8$ per user per month?
https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IR...
+1. But the solution is not to succumb to Slack. Matrix and https://about.riot.im/ is what we should be looking at.
The author doesn't equate them - they even list many critical things that Slack has that IRC doesn't. Which makes their conclusion even more silly.
After reading the article I feel you're misrepresenting what the author actually said.
The author lists a number of problems with Slack that in his opinion renders it "not a tool built for open source projects to use for communication with their userbase", and instead Slack is "a tool built for teams".
The author stresses that communicating with a community leads to entirely different usecases, and that "Slack has gone on record as saying that it cannot support this sort of use-case".
Afterwards, the author proposes IRC as a technology that mitigates some of the design problems that render Slack ill-suited for communicating with the userbase of open source projects.
The author enumerates arguments (technical and not so technical) to support his thesis. You've ignored them all.
There's literally a section called 'Problems with IRC that Slack solves'. And there's no 'but...' at the end of that section. It's just a list of things Slack solves. Maybe that's why people want to use it? It solves their problems?
> The author enumerates arguments (technical and not so technical) to support his thesis. You've ignored them all.
I think you've misread my comment or the thread. I wasn't providing a critique of their points... I was responding to the idea that they were equating them. They weren't - as you said, they have a list of ways they thinks IRC is better, and a list of ways they think Slack is better. So they weren't equating them.
There's literally web-clients available where all you gotta do is click a link and write a name that hasn't been taken by anyone yet, and you're in. No email address, no password.
History is even more straightforward — anonymous access to all IRC history is frequently provided by most projects. How do you get history for Slack without having an account?
Most projects? Really? I'd say at most 20% of IRC channels for open source projects I've been on have published history.
Shopping around for a log bot and figuring out a publishing channel is not straightforward. In fact nothing is more straightforward than builtin. While I'm not a big fan of using Slack for open source collaboration, saying IRC history is straightforward and provided by most projects is indeed delusional.
One of the biggest problems with IRC is that there is no immediately obvious way to jump into a channel and browse or search the history.
Also, because there are so many IRC clients, and so many servers out there, one person's IRC experience can vastly differ from another's.
IRC also doesn't have any of the modern amenities like emoji reactions or reaction gifs, comment threads, code snippets, plug-and-play third party integrations and web hooks, profile pictures, voice/video chat, screen sharing, or any number of a plethora of other features that BOTH Slack and Discord have.
If you want people to use an open source alternative to Slack or Discord, then people need to build that alternative. IRC, unfortunately, is not it (at least not in its current aged state).