Because Matrix basically has one decent server implementation and one decent client, both provided by the same company, and even that client is some godawful Element thing. I run a Matrix homeserver and use it daily but frankly, I prefer IRC.

Have you tried the CLI clients like gomuks[0]? They give a very IRC feel to Matrix imo.

[0] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/gomuks

> Because Matrix basically has one decent server implementation and one decent client, both provided by the same company, and even that client is some godawful Element thing

This is a fair criticism, but IRC is decades old while Matrix is what, 3-5 years old? Give it time and choice of clients and servers will only improve.

And by "improve" everyone understands "get more complicated and bloated" :-P

Features desired by modern users have a minimum complexity to them. It's just unavoidable. Classic IRC has many drawbacks and missing features:

- messages sent to you while logged out are lost

- no support for videos, images and GIFs

- (usually) not great support for emoji

- no support for file attachments

- no useful mobile clients unless with support from the server

Yes, those can be considered frivolous features, but they are used by people to express themselves (which is, in essence, what a chat protocol is used for), they are expected because IRC's competition has them, and some of them are an objective usability improvement that I'm not willing to go back on.

A lot of these features are normally handled by other services. So for videos, images, and gifs, these can be represented by a URL that's pasted in the channel that you can view with a web browser.

The advantage of doing it this way actually makes it easier to scroll back in the chat history when you're searching for something that was posted.

fwiw, these are all addressed by IRCCloud or The Lounge (and some others to varying degrees)

Yes, by innovating and giving people the user experiences they want.

IRC is a joke once you’re used to Slack, especially in an organization that uses it well.

I appreciate having a streamlined chat application, but understand that others feel differently. IRC applications are much better on resource consumption and snappier in my experience, but aren't all that practical on a mobile device.

Naturally, how each of us feels about that experience is subjective. So setting that aside, the part about IRC that I haven't seen handled with Slack is being a one-stop shop. With IRC, I can discover and access multiple communities within a single server at once. The most popular servers can be connected to and browsed with a click in most IRC applications. With Slack, I need to find a project's Slack workspace, request an invitation, then go through the process of adding it to each of my clients. I'd love to see the equivalent of a FreeNode workspace where I can join an OCaml channel and a Ruby channel without going through all of the above and dealing with walled-off communities.

Revisiting resource consumption, I've opted out of communities that moved to Slack because once I hit around 10 workspaces, the Slack app slowed to a crawl and guzzled RAM. To be fair, that's gotten a lot better in recent years, but I still find managing several workspaces to just be too much cognitive overhead. I may only be in one channel on each workspace, but I can't easily switch between them. With IRC, doing a "/join ##ocaml" is super fast, barely consumes additional resources, and adds a new tab to my main interface for fast switching between channels.

The big thing I miss in IRC is that I can't just open my IRC client, connect to a channel, type a few messages, close the client again, do other stuff, come back a few hours (or even days) later, and see if there are any replies to it.

I know about IRC bouncers and all that, but I don't want to set up a server just for that, and managing them is a pain as well. I know about IRCCloud too, but I don't use chat often enough to justify $5/month (I'm poor, and I just want to chat occasionally).

I don't care much for Slack for many reasons, but at least I can actually use it. I find IRC to be functionally unusable because of this.

From a quick glance, it looks IRCv3 solves this with the chathistory extension/specification.[1] But AFAIK most (no?) servers implement this (yet) and the specification isn't finished either.

https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory

That's fair. Async communication is not its forte. There are definitely times I wish I could communicate with someone that way. Some channels have a logger and that can be helpful. For the most part, I like the "inbox zero" approach. I can hop on and just start chatting and there's no cultural expectation that I've gone through pages of chat logs from the last time I left.

> I know about IRCCloud too, but I don't use chat often enough to justify $5/month (I'm poor, and I just want to chat occasionally).

I'd also add that I've often seen IRCCloud banned from many channels due to extreme amount of spam from their users.

I also abandoned Slack completely due to its horrendous performance and UX. I find comments like the parent above you utterly perplexing.

There are Slack gateways that exist for native applications. I currently use a Slack libpurple plugin with Pidgin, and although threading is slightly cumbersome, eliminating Electron and/or a browser has greatly improved my experience overall.

I didn't mind using slack when they had an IRC gateway.

IRC is a protocol

Slack is a product

There is a really big difference

The thing is, I don't want these experiences. Am I allowed to stop having them now? Turns out: Not if I want to keep doing my job.

Burn Slack to the ground is my considered stance at this point.

I use Fluffychat on mobile and Fractal on Gnome. Fluffychat is excellent, but Fractal is still lacking e2ee support (there's a rewrite on the way with support already in place).

gomuks is pretty good these days.

It helps that IRC is extremely simple. Most servers you can connect to and chat using telnet if you're so inclined.

Matrix is pretty simple too; one HTTP hit to send a message; one HTTP hit to receive a message. c.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20949477

As others have pointed out, there's also a pretty decent range of very usable "daily driver" clients these days (Element, weechat, FluffyChat, nheko, Quaternion, NeoChat all spring to mind). 2nd generation servers are also progressing well (Dendrite in Go & Conduit in Rust).

I've been interested in reading more about the Matrix client protocol, is there documentation anywhere? At least as far as sending/receiving text messages and maybe threading.

That linked message has a lot of good information though.

Thanks! I did look around the site quite extensively. That page says

> this is specific to a homeserver implementation

which suggests that it's not documenting a Matrix protocol. Unless Matrix has no standardized client protocol? Are all clients going to be homeserver-specific?

Even so I'd hope there's some document that says "Matrix standardizes server-server communication, client-server communication is out of the scope of this standard and is left to individual implementations" or something like that.

no idea who was smoking what when they wrote that paragraph; i've deleted it.

I've done that, but good luck joining a channel and writing a message before you have to answer your first PING and get disconnected again because you didn't respond in time.

Why should I care? I will never be inclined to connect to IMs via telnet. I just want something that works on mobile without holding a connection open and that supports media uploads.

Matrix seems to lack a good high density client. The only one that's really full featured is Element but it's very consumerish and uses lots of screen space. As soon as you bridge multiple IRC networks and have lots of other chats open, the chat list becomes really messy imo.

Element Web has various high density modes including a dedicated IRC style mode which looks and behaves like xchat?

Thanks Arathorn, I've now given this a try. However it's not nearly as compact as I would want. Especially the room list on the left, as it still uses the room avatars in this mode it will only show a pretty small number of rooms there. Making the font smaller won't fix that. When I move everything to Matrix I will have at least 50 rooms open at any one time (different IRC servers, whatsapp bridged, telegram etc etc) and I don't want to scroll too much.

Also, every time I have to expand the "Show xxx more" ones for each section, I can't just scroll to the bottom of the list. So that's an extra click.

When I mean a high density look I mean without avatars etc :)

Oh it does? I try Matrix on a yearly basis with all the bridges and I didn't see it last year. I'm giving it another try in the next month or so. Last time the bridges weren't stable enough yet. I didn't notice this feature that time. Thanks for pointing it out!

I'd prefer a light desktop client though. I didn't spend much time with the web version, perhaps this is why I missed it. But I will definitely give it a try!

By the way I understand the focus on consumer usability, as it's needed for wider adoption. I'd really love for matrix to become mainstream.

> The only one that's really full featured is Element but it's very consumerish

I heard that server is very consumerish too.