> if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there, I have a dedicated server running…

Some people enjoy investing the time and energy into setting up something like this and maintaining it. I am one of those people.

However, it’s just not realistic to propose these things as solutions for the average user or even average developer. Cloud services like Discord are popular because you don’t have to think about it or invest time into maintaining anything. Click a few buttons and you’re in.

I think that fact is lost on a lot of devs who invested the days and days into setting up their own servers, learning things like Quassel, smoothing out all of the issues and so on. It’s easy to forget that every piece of that solution came with a lot of labor and learning spread out over years of time.

On the other hand, I suspect a lot of the people who propose these as alternatives actually like the barrier to entry that it all represents. If only the people dedicated enough to learn all of these steps and maintain their own infrastructure can fully participate, it represents a barrier to entry that makes the group feel more exclusive.

Also in general just because you have your history doesn't mean everyone else can easily get it. Which is part of the need. If we had working search engine, one could just browse through the history of chat and try to find existing conversations. Even if they are not part of the community and do not see need to be.

https://thelounge.chat/ seems a pretty good solution, but of course the average person would still need to know someone running an instance and trust them with their chat history.

I, for one, like the barrier entry, think I recently quit the company I was working for because asking for help was like the first thing in case of an issue instead of researching a solution, and I couldn't deal it with a paid job, imagine how could I deal with it by staying on a discord channel where people (I have the impression) think that documentation is lava ^^

I think you forgot "and never ever have internet or electricity issues" to your list. The big advantage of Slack/Discord is that once a message was sent, everyone will receive it. Maybe in some time if the user is not always up but it will be received. Not to forget, not everyone interested in this or that FOSS project is tech-savvy enough to setup what you said.

This is a very narrow and short-sided point of view. Push the logic of this argument a little bit further, why is the issue lnxg33k1's internet and electricity a problem? The reason is that of course Discord controls the servers and they pay for the infra, and they essentially own your ability to chat with your friends. That isn't a problem until it becomes a problem[0]. Until then it's buying time, hoping Discord doesn't get bought by Amazon or Meta and then daddy decides it's time to extract rent.

Again, going to highlight it's such a short-sided POV, this sort of thinking "today it's free, it's better, and thus it is the right choice for the investment of my time, my community's time, even my project's time." Such short sided thinking in favor of convenience right now is way too common leads to a lot of problems (in society generally but that's another discussion). I really want people to have a longer term view of utility for the sake of longevity and stability of things as important as our channels of communication.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29711001 this was just posted a few hours ago.

That's a very genuine problem with Slack where my email address is somehow unable to register with their site, so I've never been able to use Slack. I don't even think I've been banned or blocked - since I never used the service - I think there's just something broken at their end and it's been impossible to find anyone who can fix it.

I haven't said that I wouldn't prefer a free alternative, only that trying to say IRC is the solution to all this is short-sighted too.

In short, using IRC for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Ease of use matters — that’s why you’re writing code, after all. To make peoples lives easier. Using IRC partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the complicated, archaic client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about ease of use — i.e. your most self aware contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.

I do mentoring for LibreOffice and this year I've interviewed over 100 people on IRC and had over 200 further mentoring chats. Most have never used IRC before and KiwiIRC web chat seems to work fine as the first client.

But there is also IRCCloud, like I think it stands to support my initial point about it being omnipresent, which now makes me wonder if one of the main issues of IRC for many people is not just about the presence of choices

Perhaps we should get rid of command lines in open source software, too. It's just so uninviting!

I'm not against people choosing discord for some projects, but there's nothing so terrible or oppressive about choosing IRC. It doesn't deserve the "considered harmful" treatment. Hopping on IRC is a very low bar for a potential contributor to clear.

Using IRC is not oppressive, I agree, and it wouldn't come to my mind to complain on an IRC channel about it not being Discord, but the point of the article is to show you must not use Discord and you are bad for doing it.

In my experience slack/discord are close to unusable when you have a really bad internet connection (for example on certain trains). They will pretend to send your message, but it will not actually go through (if you even manage to start slack/discord in the first place).

Mosh is the only thing that actually works in those cases.

I agree that SDiscord too is far from perfect in this circumstances (Though usually, the Discord client explicitly shows me when it acjieved to send the message as is it shown in light gray before this point)

But using Mosh means having a server, seting it up and so on. Yeah, Mosh+IRC is better from a FOSS perspective. But it comes with usability drawbacks too.

Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective but you're right, I have a UPS at home, so I solve that easily, for internet I've had a lot of problems in the past, but now I have a FTTH so that never happens, I guess if you have frequent issues with electricity and internet you have bigger issues other than saving IRC channel history :D, but I guess those are solvable with UPS, 4G modem backup connection and there are also some websites that save IRC channels history

Once again, the average user does not have all that. Discord has the advantage, for me as a user, of not having to pay hundreds of dollars simply not to loose messages because my connection go down ~5 minutes a day.

> Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective

It is, but the the average user's perspective is not that they'll set up an IRC bouncer (which odds are high they don't even know exists) so they can have message permanence and cross-device sharing.

Instead they'll say that IRC has no history / offline support (which is, technically, true) and will use discord because it does.

I bit the bullet and set up ZNC for my IRC connections this summer. Even by the standards of open source software, it was a chore, and the web interface is unbelievably clunky. I continued to use irssi in tmux instead.

What we learned from the Freenode implosion is that for most IRC users the concept of different networks was entirely alien. IRC was Freenode for those people.

It doesn't help that the authentication story for IRC is a bloody mess. In Discord, I have one account and can join any server^Wguild and have a different nick in each (and the nicks support unicode, and emoji). If I want to have different nicks on different channels on an IRC network I need 2 separate logins.

I tried ZNC a few years ago, but the replaying of chat history, that had already been received and seen, on every connection to the bouncer was frustrating and made it feel like a bad hack. Maybe I missed an option there, but I moved onto Quassel (and Quasseldroid), which was a game changer in ease of use, but I'm not personally a terminal IRC fan so I don't miss that aspect.

It's the same for me, I've used ZNC for a while and I think it being an agnostic IRC bouncer not forcing you toward a protocol and being usable from any IRC client is very big pro, but it also means that it always requires a bit in order to change anything, while quassel might be a bit less portable, even if it has clients for any platform I use (so it's personal), but being able to easily configure the server from the client easily for me was enough to stick with it

As the lead quasseldroid dev, and a contributor to quassel, it’s awesome hearing these success stories, as over the past months I haven’t heard anything from users.

I’m sorry that the new update for quassel and quasseldroid is taking so long :(

Hi, thanks for your efforts, it goes without saying, but I've read that some open-source software users started being rude with maintainers, so maybe it's not needed but I'll say it anyway, I really like your software, or your software is really useful for me, there is a thing I would like to have, but it is something that is given to me for free, so I will just say thank you a lot

Also IRC net splits used to happen often enough to be a concern a few years ago when I last used IRC.

And one big one just happened this year: https://ariadne.space/2021/06/14/the-end-of-freenode/

As sibling commenter said, that's not what I am talking about.

Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit

netsplit is a disconnection between two servers

Freenode imploding was not a netsplit.

So my biggest problem with IRC in 2009 was that it lacked newlines.

Is this now solvable? Okay.

I have limited time & limited yak-shaving energy. In the choice between something whose problems are solvable and something whose problems are adequately solved, I am going to conserve my time/energy by choosing the latter 95% of the time.

I think I've noticed this pattern about tech people today that for example is concerning for me, I am not sure how old are you or what is your background, but I feel that today people don't enjoy stuff as much as my cohort, I go at work, and then SQL is a waste of time, Regex are a waste of time, Linux is a waste of time, Email servers are a waste of time, setting up a bouncer that takes 30 seconds is a waste of time, I am not sure if everything has become a waste of time, but do you people have a passion for tech related stuff, not specifically related to your message but every now and then I wonder what is not a waste of time

You're just stepping into the stack at some arbitrary level and figure "everyone should know how to do (and do) this at least".

For you it's configuring email servers and compiling linux kernels. Why not dig trenches for power cables or build towers for wireless communications? If the answer is "but I don't care enough about those things, I just build on top of them", that's exactly what others think about compiling linux kernels, writing boot loader configs or configuring email servers.

yeah but I think the context is important, if I am talking with developers/sysadmin there are some things that I would expect to be interesting, which I feel are matched when I speak with tech people in their 30s, but I have had many coworkers in their 20s that sometimes I have little in common with, but yeah I guess if I was an electrician or else I would be interested in that kind of stuff, I guess my mistake here is that I consider every one on HN either a dev or a sysadmin, but as my previous message, I was not talking specifically about that person specifically

Yea, my reason for not wanting to solve the problems of IRC isn’t a disinterest in solving problems. On the contrary, if I’m joining an open source project’s discord, it is most likely because

A. I’m interested in the problems that the open source project focuses on.

B. I was in the middle of solving a different problem and see the project as a path to achieve that.

My disinterest in solving the problems of IRC is because I want to avoid context-switching from my problems or your project’s problems to IRC problems I encountered over 10 years ago. If I’m forced to kerp context-switching, I lose hope that I can stay focused and get my current problem solved. I would rather have a way to pay money and get support than to try to solve an ever-growing yakstak of problems all at the same time. Progress is better than futility or overwhelm.

> if I am talking with developers/sysadmin there are some things that I would expect to be interesting

The cool thing about technology is that there is progress. We can do more, we can do it faster, easier, better, etc. Twiddling with the same shoddy tools from decades past is the opposite of that. A long time ago IRC was a cool new capability that was worth putting effort into setting up and using. These days all the hacks and workarounds involved are still required, but all they get you is an inferior chat platform. So, no. The tech that excites me are the new ideas and inventions that people are coming up with today, not some chat platform that is older than I am.

> I consider every one on HN either a dev or a sysadmin

Again. Even if 100% of people on HN are devs and sysadmins, why do you assume that your particular interests are a must for everyone on HN?

Or that everyone on HN would be interested in spending time to set up a Raspberry Pi with a media server and IRC bouncer?

I'm a dev. I have far more interesting things to do in my spare time than that. Far more interesting to me.

I mentioned multiple interests that I couldn't match, but yeah I think you're right, but also I was wondering, so you know we are social animals and try to find connections, and most of the times I hear that things are a waste of time, so I asked what is not a waste of time so that maybe I can learn it and find something in common :D

I feel like to have something in common with my coworkers I should have to watch unlimited amount of netflix and marvel movies.. which of course every one lives the way it wants, but I am more frustrated because loneliness is bad and not being able to find common passions feed that, I guess I gone OT ^^, but yeah I got your point, you're right I guess this argument is saturated now

> I mentioned multiple interests that I couldn't match

> I've noticed this pattern about tech people today

> I am not sure how old are you or what is your background, but I feel that today people

> I feel like to have something in common with my coworkers I should have to watch unlimited amount of netflix and marvel movies..

Step 1: stop being condescending and assuming moral superiority just because you have an interest in a random list of things you assume everyone shold be interested in.

Your approach is the classical "kids these days" that is so classical even Aristotle and Horace have said the same things.

Step 2: Accept that people are free to do in their spare time whatever the hell they want to. Watching unlimited Netlfix? Good for them. Setting up IRC bouncers? Couldn't be happier for them.

Step 3: if truly interested, you could try and figure out what exactly interests people in tech, and why they do it. Could be it's just because it pays more than the alternatives and they are much hapier carving out wooden dolls on the weekends.

If that's not your cup of tea, there are now communities around any and all things any person could be intersetd in, no matter how bizarre or "out of fashion".

I read this long thread of complaints as "Back in my day, we were nerds that managed to find jobs that would pay us for it. Today, new hires are just here for the money." I.e. the complaint is that our field is now a "normal" industry and not an esoteric hobby that only attracts hobbyists, which is an unwelcome change to them.

Common passions are great! If I’m joining a chatroom of your open source project, I’d be grateful to share in your passion for the open source project itself.

> loneliness is bad

You can say that again.

I'm in my late 40s now, and have been using computers for nearly 40 years (yeah, one of those kids.) Installed Linux on my 386 from floppies, and now in my day-to-day I write C# and maintain the linux servers where the .NET Core business application lives.

I've set up bouncers, ran my own email for years, and at some point I just became immensely bored of doing those things. There's an ungratifying sameness to having to fiddle with self-hosted email or hunt down why my irc bouncer crashed/went offline. This kind of friction extends up and down the stack, too, which irc client works on my phone? There are a few I might choose from, do I spend time trying them out over a period of days to see which is a decent one? Oh, well I still don't have threads, even if one client or another will auto-preview image URLs. And on and on.

I am disinterested, as you say, not because I don't want to learn it, but because I have.

just because someone is a dev (even a good one) doesn't mean figuring out IRC is worth their time

disclaimer: i have 80 buffers in my irssi session, but i know why most people aren't me

To me, this sentiment feels similar to "Oh you claim to like pizza? Can I see your wheat and tomato farm and your cattle? What, you buy those at the store? I don't think you really like pizza."

I believe you're halfway right.

The way I see the tech space today is that everybody likes pizza. Except back in the days, you'd have to go to the grocery store, buy your ingredients then cook it at home.

Today you have to drive for a 1-2 hours to find those ingredients, as people are simply not interested anymore in cooking, stores started just selling ready made pizzas.

In a few years you'd probably need to build a farm and start raising cattle. Or you could chose one of the five most popular pizzas from the supermarket. That's it, only five. It was deemed, by popular vote, or maybe "data shows", that those five pizzas are good, every other recipe is cancerous so it's outlawed.

I would add, that for the way I see things happening, I would expect someone to say "There are too many pizzas, so pizza are bad/fragmented/confusing, can't we just have one?" :D

As we know, everything is broken.

Most of the stuff is broken in known ways to a terrible degree. Usability sucks. You can literally see the brokenness. Most of the stuff does not work properly, is slow, insecure and just stupid. It does not do what it is supposed to do, at least not without risking you harm.

Some stuff is a little bit better and only broken in more subtle ways. Some edge cases might not work. Some obscure security holes might be in there.

Then there is some very rare stuff, which has exceptional quality. But even then, we all know it probably is still technically broken. On the unlikely chance that the thing actually works and no mistakes were made, there is certainly a bug deep down in the Kernel or somewhere in the CPU.

You take some of the very rare stuff of exceptional quality. Does it do all the things you want it to do? Probably not. So at best it somewhat works, does most of the things you want it to do and only has unkown brokenness, hopefully very deep down and hidden away as far as possible.

Now comes the biggest problem: Even if you choose the least broken stuff, you know have to start maintaining it. Things below it will start changing and reintroduce more brokenness. By using it, you sign up to fight it.

Now I have this superpower to actually fight it. I make things less broken. But I am fighting an ongoing avalanche of brokenness. My day has 24 hours, I need to sleep some of them and the avalanche just keeps coming. Some days I like the amount I have shovelled away. Some days are ending with me still up to me neck inside it.

I am not like Sisyphos, other people are using the space where I shovelled most of the brokenness away. So it does make sense and is fullfilling. I have fun, when I look at a small area, where the brokenness will stay away for some time, even though I know, it will come back at some point.

I am not immortal. I can probably do this for another 50 years. So 50 more years of shovelling but vast mountain chains all around me.

So I have to be very careful to only pick the most precious areas to clear.

> I've noticed this pattern about tech people today that for example is concerning for me

Why should "I don't want to spend time on stuff that's not interesting to me" be concerning?

> I feel that today people don't enjoy stuff as much as my cohort, I go at work,

Your "cohort" is apparently hardcore computer people who are fine doing computer-related stuff both at work and in spare time. Well, tech people toda is a much bigger "cohort" than that.

> but do you people have a passion for tech related stuff

Yes. Yes we do. And tech-related stuff is often emphatically not fiddling with Raspberry Pis to set up obscure servers to maintain chat history.

It is waste of time when most of you learn quickly becomes obsolete. Linux was a once crude heap of hacks patched together with shell scripts, but the knowledge was stable enough to ship HOWTOs and FAQs with distributions.

> setting up a bouncer that takes 30 seconds

Part of the problem is that I've been burned by enough hours spent on 30-second tasks.

> if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there

I can't believe how delusional some people are. And sorry for being so rude.

In 2021 everyone expects history and other things. You can't realisticaly expect everyone to "just have a fully set up always-on raspberry pi and install some server on it". That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead.

> I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put

Good for you. The absolute vast majority of users, however, don't.

I don't. I bugs the hell out of me when I open discord with hundreds of new messages in different channels that I am assumed to want to keep track of. Yes, you can disable notification but still annoys me when it doesn't immediately show me the last messages.

The general idea of group chats was to facilitate ad hoc real time communication. People were not assumed to be always online and messages were only of interest for the discussion happening in the moment. There are much better options for sharing information that might have a longer lived scope of relevance anyway. Plus remembering some chats that I hung out with friends, it had a sense of intimacy, sometimes I wanted to share the information exactly with those online at the moment, so no history was a feature. Popular open source IRC channels have archives that one could look up if need be anyway.

Of course there is also the modern idea of work-oriented chats like slack that have a powerful search function and are mostly about async communication, being a bit of everything, a way to share information with lots of people, a documentation system, discussion and so on.

> I bugs the hell out of me when I open discord with hundreds of new messages in different channels that I am assumed to want to keep track of. Yes, you can disable notification but …

I really don’t understand how people can think that having everyone self-host and maintain things like Quassel on a Raspberry Pi is a perfectly reasonable solution to the UX shortcomings of IRC, but then also insist that having to spend 30 seconds adjusting the basic settings in Discord is an unacceptably difficult task.

At some point, this conversation isn’t actually about UX or functionality. It’s about hating the new thing and clinging to the old ways.

People argue against discord for different reasons. You are making a straw man.

I would argue that those Raspberry Pi based solutions are nice to have but not needed. In fact I argued you don't need history most of the time and that not offering central storage of history can be reasonable.

The irony being that discord is absolutely horrible for discoverable/searchable history. I would argue the main value of searchable history for FOSS projects is not that you yourself can go back and look at the chats you had, but that it gets indexed by search engines, so one can find the solutions when encountering problems.

That's the big value of mailing lists over most of these chat solutions.

I think another value of mailing lists is asynchronicity of conversation and the time that can go in the thought process enriching the conversation, and I think that is unmatchable by any chat protocol/client

Yes but it's also the problem. Email is, for the most part, horrible to use. Even the crappiest chat app is nicer in almost every way than email.

People are more thoughtful about email only because it's slow and relatively low volume. You see the same on stack exchange.

I think there was a misunderstanding about my message, I wasn't forcing anyone to use IRC, I was offering a solution in case someone wants, I am quite happy if people want to use Slack or Discord, I use IRC, and a lot of people use IRC with or without a bouncer be it quassel or znc and talk every day, works for us and everyone is happy, but if other people is happy other ways so be it, was just mentioning that if those are issues, then there are solutions, so I didn't take the rudeness personally, as I don't feel that I have to convince people to use something or what people wants is my concern to be worried about?

> And sorry for being so rude.

You freely chose to post the insult, so you are not.

> In 2021 everyone expects history and other things.

I should hope I am included in "everyone" and I do not expect that. I think IRC rules and I think chats are better when they are ephemeral. I know people disagree with me; that is the point of discussing it. It's strange (a cheap rhetorical trick, really) to point out the expectations of a group of people in the current year as if that was an inevitability and that is how things always shall be unto the ages.

They didn't. They are saying that if you poll 100 in the grocery store about whether they expect to eventually receive messages sent to them during the period where they were riding through a tunnel or lost power in a thunderstorm, 90 of them will say "yes" and 9 will say "I don't know" and then there's you.

> That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead.

IRC is still used by countless open source projects and there are many public XMPP servers everyone can use. I switched my family and most of my friends to XMPP this year and no-one runs an XMPP server at home.

> I think most of the points about IRC are solvable

See - it's "solvable" versus "solved". People seek solutions, not possibilities.

> solvable

Ask ten people and they’ll likely tell you ten different solutions (not to mention the feasibility of such solutions). Most people just want to set up a chat space for their project, or ask a question and get an answer; they don’t want to make a million choices about something they don’t understand before they are allowed to do what they set out to do.

> I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put a `ghcr.io/linuxserver/quassel-core` docker container, and it doesn't consume anything

It's still consuming your time and energy and that's a running cost by itself. I'm also a long-time Quassel user in addition to be a long-time IRC user, but I have no more energy to manage my own Quassel server and my current instance has been long neglected.

Having to run server or access to one where you can run your own client has always been worst thing about IRC in my mind. Made sense back then and make sense for what IRC is. But really these days we should have something better.