In short there are other new technologies, but most of them are corporate walled gardens, or small open source projects that only have one server/client implementation, and few servers under control of single entity.
The Matrix ecosystem is the only thing I can think of, that could eventually replace IRC. (There might be others, I am just not familiar with them)
End even if they are somehow similar, discussions on Discord and Slack and other similar platforms are different than on IRC, at least in my experience.
One defining future of IRC at least channels I frequent and Discords/Slacks/Matrix is less memes and animated things grabbing your attention.
Another big thing is, that new stuff like Discord/Slack/Matrix are combination of messenger and discussion forum, while IRC is discussion only.
I almost never bother reading chat history in IRC, but in Slacks/... you are expected to keep up with @mentions and on "important channels" etc.
IRC is more of a tavern room, you come in have discussion with people currently in, some people come some people go during that and then you leave and that is that.
While on newer apps you are expected to keep up. I don't know how to describe it better, but fore me that's the biggest difference.
This seems like it should have been the logical conclusion. While IRC is a free protocol, this whole controversy has shown that you aren't ultimately in control of your channels. With Matrix/<other-federated>, it simply wouldn't be possible for a hostile actor to claim ownership of their channels (unless Gentoo itself were somehow the victim of a hostile takeover).
Libera certainly has a good few decades of trustworthy service, as Freenode once did, but the protocol is itself built on vulnerable assumptions. There's no way to guarantee that Libera won't have a dramawave of its own 15 years down the line.
> While on newer apps you are expected to keep up.
I completely agree with this. I've been auto-kicked from Matrix channels for inactivity/lurking, which is ridiculous. This could be solved with more client and server diversity - it wouldn't be hard to create an IRC-like experience on Matrix at all.
Can't matrix.org staff hijack rooms hosted on the matrix.org homeserver?
You may be suggesting that matrix.org could, for example, block access to the gentoo.org server (or a subset of its rooms). In that scenario users could choose a new homeserver (and not necessarily the same one) in order to regain access, instead of the entire channel having to migrate.
In the incredibly unlikely event where every homeserver on the internet is blocking gentoo.org, gentoo.org could simply allow user registration.
With IRC you are forced to trust the network operator with both your account and channel. Matrix gives you the option to trust someone else with both, neither, or either.
Isn't that more of a feature of the kinds of environments that run Slack vs IRC?
If my office used IRC for communication, I'd still be expected to keep up on all important channels and pings.
Dendrite is another homeserver that is good enough to run as a daily driver, and there's a community developed Rust one, Conduit, that's making steady progress.
There are plenty of alternative clients - FluffyChat, NeoChat, Fractal, etc. Making a basic client is pretty easy (I've written several), and my friends and I have been making a more fully-featured one in our spare time.
Federation is not fake, I was there on my own homeserver when matrix.org went down and had fun happily continuing to chat through the biggest test of matrix's federation resiliency.
Every time I've seen Arathorn interact in threads, he has been very professional and patient, even when others spread FUD (cough, cough). He certainly doesn't spread lies or FUD about anyone else.
Modern XMPP is not better in every way - Matrix is an eventually-consistent distributed event graph, which makes it better at handling big federation testing events like the matrix.org downtime.
Can you elaborate on this, or link to some relevant resources?
Matrix's federation is no worse than any other popular federated system I've used (eg. email and xmpp). I'm not saying it shouldn't be better (I dislike the matrix.org centralization, too), but that's not something inherent to Matrix, and I think it's not honest to bring it up as 'fake federation' in this context.
Additionally, Matrix is significantly better at this in one way than the alternatives: even if matrix.org goes down, all rooms can continue working, even ones with a :matrix.org label. The same can't be said about XMPP MUC, IIUC.
I do think that federated systems tend to become centralized, because the federating links tend to be unreliable. I think people confuse federation and decentralization, when they're very different things.
> Google has found IRC to be a huge boon in incident response. IRC is very reliable and can be used as a log of communications about this event, and such a record is invaluable in keeping detailed state changes in mind. We’ve also written bots that log incident-related traffic (which is helpful for postmortem analysis), and other bots that log events such as alerts to the channel. IRC is also a convenient medium over which geographically distributed teams can coordinate.
Also, irc can still be up when Chat, Hangouts or other tools are down. It's simple tech that is easy to interact with.
iChat internally at a site was not a replacement.
IRC isn't really unencrypted in transit though, you can connect via SSL (most people do so, probably) and there are channel modes on some networks that prevent people from joining if they aren't using SSL to connect.
You can also encrypt messages yourself and then send those on top of the IRC protocol.
As for anonymity, most IRC networks allow you to use a cloak to hide your IP (requires user registration, which would require one email interaction), some IRC networks hide your IP (or parts of the reverse DNS) and some IRC networks allow you to join using Tor.
Servers and channels can have passwords. Channels can also be invite-only.
If whatsapp, or apple, or google, or facebook does anything like this then all you can do is shrug and accept it.
But if you have $5 a month then you can run an IRC network with a VM.
> IRC is still unencrypted in transit
Sometimes. But there's also a lot of TLS, and it's trending upwards.
> users have no anonymity
Less anonyminity against each other, but more against the central powerful provider.
And while you may have my IP on IRC (depends on the network), what are you as a private individual supposed to do with that information?
Whereas when centralized it becomes monetizable.
Plus, there are some controls for users and channel admins to make sure they are talking over TLS only, such as +S channel mode, which only lets in TLS-using client connections to join.
Equilibrium.
An old essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" explains this idea in an enlightening way: https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...
> Some pieces of social software, like IRC channels and mailing lists,are self-moderating with scale, because as the signal-to-noise ratio gets worse, people start to drop off, until it gets better, so people join, and so it gets worse. You get these sorts of oscillating patterns, but the overall system is self-correcting
Newer protocols are more feature rich and don't have some of the legacy drawbacks of IRC, of course.
I got used.to discord but it's not the same
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8nbgyu/messages_in_i...
Remember also that subpoenas rarely permit “fishing expeditions”, so if they want your iMessages, can convince the judiciary you have potentially committed a crime, your key not being stored and the E2EE nature doesn’t always mean a judge is going to let LE go after Bob, Joe, Bill and everyone you have messaged with and demand Apple hand over all their iMessages (if they have backups enabled).
TLS is an option, not ideal but better than no TLS at all.
I understand that many of these channels are intentionally private, but IRC is still unencrypted in transit, so everything is exposed and users have no anonymity.