I'll be tarred and feathered for saying this, but every time I see a modern chat app I pine for the days of ICQ (as it looked in the 90's).
It had a UI I prefer over anything since - compact, comparatively unobtrusive, information-dense, and fast. I could port my full chat history around with me between machines, and also search it reliably (no vanishing scrolling or lazy-loading handicaps). And it was handy you could advertise different presence states to different people/groups.
You might like the IRCv3 client I build at https://github.com/matt0x6f/irc-client. It's highly capable and modern but limited in its resource footprint and quite zippy. PRs welcome as well.
I still use mIRC. It pretty much works like in the old days and has aged very well IMHO, I've tried other clients but none would convince me to switch. Now I even have a license (when I started using it, maybe at 15 or so, I was too broke for that).
And apart from the advantages you mention, it was really configurable in terms of the level of involvement and openness you wanted. You could use it exclusively to chat with friends and otherwise be unreachable (as in MSN and their ilk later), or you could be open to chat with strangers. And you could find people by interests, I remember looking for coin collectors from countries whose coins I didn't have :)
Then MSN Messenger displaced it (at least in Spain) and it didn't have even 10% of ICQ's functionality.
I held off back in the day, for awhile but I remember my number 1202948; ICQ rocked! My sister had a much lower number and used to tease me about it, since I was the "nerd".
AOL instant messenger was bigger in USA, it was so big that AOL remained a major chat service even into the broadband years (though AIM clearly was under decline by that point)
My 90s and early 00s social circle was AIM, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.
Funny, that's always the impression I had of ICQ back in the day...
Surely we can agree that no one's experience is universal, and both regional and subcultural differences are likely to have materially shaped our views of the various chat services in the '90s and early '00s...?
Surely we all recognize that our own experience is not The Default Everyone Should Understand?
yes, I used AIM from 1999 until whenever it was shutdown (2017?)
At several companies, we used AIM for what many use Slack for today. We even coordinated prod deployments in a private AIM chat room!
Discord is incredibly noisy and information-dense and while maybe not for "normies", it’s definitely not just IT guys using it. Though I wonder how many people actually like to use it.
Discord is by far my favorite communication platform across anything I used in my entire life, nothing else comes even close in terms of feature set. It also helps that almost everyone I like is there. I'm forced to have whatsapp and telegram to communicate with the general population and I wouldn't use them if I didn't have to.
Yes I just love its patronizingly cute little animations everywhere reminding me not to think too hard
I cannot believe this stupid app is so popular when you can't even monitor multiple servers at once! When every brother and their mother has a discord server but I can only look at one channel on one server at a time??
I haven't seen functionality to view multiple channels at the same time in any modern chat application, so I can't exactly blame discord for not having that.
In Discord’s…defense? Description? At least for understanding—it’s gamer chat. And it’s been that from the beginning. That’s the design and the intent, and while it seems Discord-the-company is trying to adapt Discord-the-product for the increase in popularity for other uses, its roots are showing. Navigating it feels similar to navigating the menu system of a AAA game.
Yeah, I know. But they seem hell bent on adding more and more distractions in every update. I mean, it felt more manageable when it was still just a gamer chat.
Also using it since their first release, and all of the new features have impeded my usage. Server nicknames are fantastic but I couldn't tell you how to access that feature. I have to relearn where that option is every single time.
Right click on the server icon or header, then per-server profile. Completely reasonable to me, and I don't think it has ever not been there since they introduced it.
Shop is where they sell customization stuff.
Quests let you earn currency you can use to buy customization stuff or nitro instead of real money.
I don't think there's a significantly better way to do whatever they are doing, and I don't see anything particularly objectionable about any of it.
It's certainly dense with something. If it's information, it's not information I want though. I have no desire to know anything about their various Nitro sales or have a live feed to what my friends are playing or listening to. People I want to talk to are there, so I go there to talk to them. Anything outside of that just makes it noisy, like you said.
I can't understand this, it's just a name and a message. It's slack with a better threading interface. (Which is just IRC with better file transfer and image previews)
every single 'normie' i've seen use Discord can barely figure it out, they chase red badges across the UI all day and really have no clue about the paradigm at all.
They're there of course because some 'normie' thing of theres inevitably requires the sign-up of a discord for bonus game skins or some other such stupid shit, but the fact remains that they're clueless.
much like the average Outlook user, they're there because they were dragged into it by another element in their life (their job) and they really have no background or clue on how to use the piece of software, they just know they need to pretend and cite experience on the CV for a job.
As someone who's still on IRC daily and has built multiple IRC bots and clients over the years:
- most of the jank of IRC is client-side and can be fixed on the clients, IRCv3 protocol changes are nice, but not essential for a good experience.
- bots can make channels more engaging, just posting the titles of URLs pasted on the channels so even people without fancy rich clients can see what's behind a YouTube link or Reddit share url without clicking it open makes the experience more "discord/slack-like"
- IRC bots and clients are super fun and easy first projects for any language, you get to do permanently open sockets to multiple destinations (multi-server of course), asynchronous stuff and text handling.
I went with IRCCloud for the longest time myself until early this year, due to the November Revolution of AI models getting super good, I figured out I can build my own IRCCloud just the way I like it with the price of a single Claude Pro subscription.
And so I did. I think I had an MVP running in a week (evenings on my free time) and over the summer I cancelled my IRCCloud subscription and I'm fully using my own system.
Now I have a TUI, Web UI, native Swift client (with iOS, but haven't tested it yet) and a Tauri client for Linux - all sharing a common backend that I run on a VPS 24/7.
Timely! This weekend I spun up a little friends-only server on a VPS I had laying around. I used Ergo, enforced TLS, enforced authentication, and I hand-create accounts with temp passwords for my chums. For clients, I'm using Halloy on my Mac and Goguma on iOS. Their are other prettier clients, but Ergo and they all support a nice set of IRCv3. For example, they all have client history built in. Whenever I connect, the server replays all the messages I missed while offline (with a 30 day retention), no bouncer required.
Honestly, I'm trying to remember why we collectively moved away from this. I was terminally online in the 90s and the hadn't touched IRC in many years, but this is... actually quite nice.
The voice thing always sneaks up on me as a requirement, because I never, ever personally want to use that. I'm not saying it's not a good feature, just one that doesn't occur to me. You're probably right, though.
Tried Halloy on macOS for ~6mos, has some serious issues ...
(1) It silently disconnects from the server without indication, and does not reconnect. You might assume it is connected, until you send a message and see "message can not be sent". You will lose conversation history unless using a bouncer. Clicking around, all the buffers will clear indicating some major state issue, and you will have to restart it.
(2) Consistently uses ~5% CPU doing nothing at all.
(3) Doesn't behave like a macOS app, pressing the red "close window" button will close the window, but the main process goes ANR.
After leaving Textual since that was discontinued, guess I'm looking for a macOS IRC client again. Might give Mango a try.
Yeah, Halloy is "interesting", although I haven't personally run into issues yet. It just clearly not a native Mac app, which is fine, but not my ideal.
TL;DR someone bought Textual and are restarting development. It's not a PE-style purchase, like a Bending Spoons / Evernote kind of thing. According to the buyers, they bought it because they're heavy users and wanted to take it over so they could resume active development. I always keep a healthy skepticism, but I'm hopeful.
Does IRCv3 need new leadership to continue to drive it forward? Over at Parley/Ahoy (https://git.mills.io/prologic/parleyhttps://git.mills.io/fastidious/ahoy) we've managed to create a federated decentralized IRC chat experience with a Discord/Slack-esque feel but true to both IRC / IRCv3 (Ahoy being a fully featured IRCv3 client).
Rather than claim a Discord-esque feel, you should point out the features you're referring to explicitly. Discord is infamous for its absolutely awful UX and hostility to open source ecosystem. I'm sure you're referring to neither of those aspects, but consider that those reading your reference might be entirely unfamiliar with the (presumably) positive aspects that you're actually imitating.
It's laden with ads and microtransactions, but if you remove those (shady scripts abound for those who don't want to do it themselves), the UX is one of the best on the market. There's a reason so many alternative chat clients are basically Discord clones without the microtransactions (for now).
Its open source hostility doesn't really change how well it works. You can copy the good parts without the awful parts, like so many people and companies are already doing.
You are right. To be perfectly honest, the only thing I took from Discord at all (it's UI is generally awful yes, I agree!) is the support for multiple servers. But now that I think about it some more, that's not really even a unique feature.
Anyway, you are right. But that's more about Ahoy and less about Parley. Parley was just answering the question of "What if IRC was federated, and what if it borrowed some ideas from Salty.im -- DNS discovery + WKID".
Wasn't IRC always federated? There were different networks, but each network was a federation of independent servers.owmed by independent operators as far as I understand...
> A federated network is a system where independent networks, servers, or organizations agree to follow common standards so they can talk to each other without giving up control to a single central company.
In traditional IRC networks, you end up forming a spanning tree of servers that belong to a common name, "the network". However control remains in the hands of the operators of that network.
The "control" was basically permission to connect (and thus share messages/users/etc) between multiple servers. So I see your point, you couldn't just randomly connect your server to someone else's server in quite the same way email worked, but at the same time the servers could be easily owned by different people running different software.
IRC sure hasn't! Well, the IRC most people are using, anyway. You can work around these by using things like bouncers and third party HTTP hosts and assuming everyone else has a client that inlines media.
Multimedia transfer is still a practical impossibility, for better or for worse.
Mobile IRC works, sort of, if you don't mind spamming the channel every time you lose connectivity when you drive into a tunnel or when your phone goes to deep sleep. Again, you can set up a bouncer for that.
I welcome the new changes in IRCv3 and hope that one day soon all IRC users will be able to use the features everyone else has been using for fifteen years or so.
...But one of these things is not like the others.
"Anyone can start a server" is only true when you're lying about what a "server" is. (Or redefining it to the point of usefulness.)
A Discord "server" is just a defined chat namespace. All the Discord chat "servers" live together on the same actual load-balanced VMs or whatever on the physical servers they run.
It's honestly the thing that's annoyed me most about Discord from the very beginning, long before they introduced the ads and the microtransactions and the mandatory doxxing.
IRCv3 isn't a corporate body, its a semi-formal group of IRC developers. There's nothing prohibiting you from proposing protocol extensions if they are within the scope of the working group.
parley and ahoy both look quite interesting!
Retrofitting irc into a real federated protocol is cool.
Also like the idea of picking up discords ui/ux. How did
you manage to get avatars for ahoy? Is there a ircv3 protocol
i missed?
It's part of the IRCv3 Metadata spec: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/metadata -- It just isn't very well documented or prominently displayed on the spec's page(s) I think. Took me a while to find it too.
I think the main problem with IRCv3 is that there are a million optional extensions (see https://ircv3.net/software/clients for a feature support matrix of popular clients)
This can get especially confusing when people on different clients have divergent views of the same conversation. e.g. some can see the emoji reacts, others can't. some can see "replies", others can't.
Emojis and reacts are the only extensions that can cause people to have a meaningfully different view. It's part of why it took so long to ratify replies, and reacts still are not ratified.
We're also discussing ways for servers to provide a fallback to clients which don't support them.
Wow that is hilarious. This kind of fragmentation pretty much guarantees failure. I'm pretty sure it's what killed Thrift. See their similar "don't use this" table:
If you look at "old" internet: fidonet telnet bitnet ftp fsp wais netnews whois++ gopher relaynet ... i mean irc is one of the only ones that is still used, and mostly as it was 35 years ago. Pretty impressive.
People love knocking on IRC but people are still on it, still using it...
But, seriously, that got me curious. There are many protocols from that early era that are still with us today. NTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, BGP, SNMP, NFS, ICMP. If you allow the 1990's as counting as "old" we can add SSH and SSL, DHCP, LDAP.
Actually, its just inertia and lack of reliable forum hosting,
the actual "killer app" that replaced volatile and unarchivable
chat content, but no one learned from it and people flocked to Discord,
which is even more hostile to archiving/scanning chat history.
I am starting to wonder is archiving or scanning history even possible with how hostile internet has become. Especially when so many tech companies will scan and download same content countless times without single care of damage or cost the cause...
Just imagine hosting that history on your instance for users and then some vibecoder without care in his work starts scanning it automatically every 5 seconds just in case it might have changed...
Yeah, but the major upgrades for things like telnet and ftp were adding appropriate encryption layers and improved authentication to include things like certificates. IRC shoehorned those into the connections awkwardly but it's still not often mandatory and registration is painful.
Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.
> Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.
Except, unlike Reddit, it wasn't centralized nor owned by a single corporation.
Usenet users did not have to obey the rules and whims of any corporation and there was thriving ecosystem of feature rich, free and open Usenet clients.
I really miss having my own killfiles and regex search abilities that were common on Usenet clients, but is missing from the Reddit clients and its web UI.
I don’t believe it was or continually is limited to text only, but I do believe we had netiquette back then which helped to reconsider spamming internet with media and other decorators, only to have it all forgotten 72h later
Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.
The eternal September complaint comes to mind, but even eternal September was a jolly walk in the park compared to what modern social media has turned into.
> Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.
Spam filtering has improved a lot since the Usenet days, but even if it hadn't we had killfiles to deal with the spam and filtering out harrasers. Doing this today would be even easier with the help of LLMs.
This, which is not uniform across servers, and has more work if you want to do certificate-based auth. Additionally getting a nick cloak is good opsec and also extremely not uniform.
They are not confused. A lot of companies still use FTP internally and for B2B. Many people would be very uncomfortable if they knew how much companies including banks, payment systems, etc... and governments still depended on FTP and clear text authentication. That's even before broaching the subject of which of the applications and daemons in use are being actively maintained.
Hosting files to be downloaded via web browser isn’t what it’s useful for. If you’re going to do that, you might as well use… a web server.
FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).
> SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access.
Security-wise you set it not to run commands (and maybe chroot) and you're done, right? And difficulty-wise isn't granting SSH access very similar to FTP access?
Fair point, but I would assume the AWS S3 by itself is bigger than the FTP/SFTP traffic globally including banks. No idea if it’s true, and I’m not sure we can get reliable stats on this
There is still a niche community of people running Gopher servers. I wrote a small basic implementation of a Gopher server in Python before for fun once and it hosted a Gopher hole for a few years. I doubt even one person actually looked it at besides me, but the RFC is simple and can be implemented pretty fast.
I thought of that ... you could put it in the list but I wouldn't unless you're talking cron. I mean when I started it was like mail bob@froggy.ucla.edu and bob would open up pine or emacs and not get any spam or have to do anything crazy and we'd have a conversation.
that modality is long dead. we still have email but it's not that same ... I however could take mirc from like 1995 and still use everything.
Fired up the old mIRC license I've had for decades last week to explore old servers and channels. Many are dormant, but life is still teeming in many. I'll probably wind up re-donating to mIRC developers and investing some time into IRC communities. I find the experience preferable to Discord.
Anyone interested in exploring this segment of the internet, start with: https://netsplit.de/
Netsplit is a great and vital resource. But I'm wondering if it's actually the best entrypoint for people who just wanna chat with others about some topic. https://libera.chat/ seems a bit more user-friendly and "hand-holding", for the people who prefer that. If Libera doesn't fit their vibe, the huge network list on Netsplit will surely be of more use to them once they understand IRC just a tiny bit better.
Makes me wonder if moving away from discord back to IRC would be a fun move. But I think we'd miss mobile access and accounts on different devices maybe? Any thoughts?
I consciously use IRC like that: I don't have a bouncer, and connect only when I feel bored and want to see what is going in some channels (nowadays mostly just #emacs on Libera). I can only follow the conversation when I am online and there, and when I leave there is nothing to catch up to. In some sense it is like a digital third-space as oppose to a permanent dual presence that I have to share my attention with. Depending on your use-case this is not ideal, but for me it is a nice, relaxing addition to a lazy weekend evening when I have nothing better to do.
It’s just they need a bouncer (an always online irc server you run) for things like push notifications (and chat history on servers without the chat history extension).
Bouncers (and some IRC v3 extensions on newer servers) allow you to be logged in to the same account from different devices.
I’ve also had some fun writing a bridge from discord to irc for some personal discord servers (but it uses some account impersonation hijinks that make it impractical for other to use).
IRCv3 gives you all of that, and I'm working on an ircd that has builtin support for multi-device access & chat history (which covers mobile between the two --- there are improvements you can do on top of that, but those two are kind of the foundation).
I'm also extending it with support for Discord/Matrix/etc-esque communities (in a 100% standard-client-compatible way).
VoIRC is a joke project. It encodes your voice to base64 and sends that to an IRC channel at a rate that would get you kicked off most servers for spamming. Saved you a click.
Yes, but compared to "modern" apps IRC is very rudimentary and you would not get messages if you "close the app". You always have to run some secondary infrastructure like a bouncer to get offline messages or see what happened while you were away.
I know that's not the fault of the protocol itself, but that's always one of the biggest hurdle for IRC adoption when everyone is used to just open apps and see the full history at all times.
The protocol needs ugly extensions to have a variety of devices plug into the same user account. For me back in the day this was an ssh session running the IRC client in a screen, and it was no worse than whatever else was available.
Very bad is pretty harsh for the possibly least bad chat app that I have used. I don't like the centralization on Discord but the reason it is popular is because their app is better than the competition.
Slack is a very bad that is super slow no matter what time of day I use it. It completely locks up on a spotty network. Discord works way better and their voice chat is several leagues above.
IMO those are the main reasons IRC isn't still used. It's basically only usable on a desktop or always-stationary laptop, or with a bouncer which is obviously expensive to set up and doesn't provide a good user experience.
Just yesterday i was working on my game engine for the original Xbox using the open source NXDK kit (which is much lower level than the official XDK) and i finally, after literal years, managed to find and fix a couple of bugs that caused flickering (much more obscure than you'd expect and didn't show up even in the emulator).
So i decided to share it with a couple friends and retro enthusiast communities on Discord. I took a video capture of my engine working, showing the 3d rendering, audio, video, etc with an Xbox->HDMI->USB capture chain. Then attached the file on Discord's input field and posted it (i have a tab with the web UI pretty much constantly open in Firefox). People weren't around at the time but some saw it today and commented while i was sleeping (with my computer off).
Last time i checked, this wouldn't be possible with IRC because:
1. There is no video (or any other file) host on IRC servers.
2. IRC discussions are ephemeral, you either need to be online all the time or setup some sort of proxy that keeps the discussions around while you or others are away (or do what i used to do 15+ years ago - run a terminal-based irc client in a screen session in a VPS :-P).
AFAIK #1 is still impossible and #2 is an optional extension (that i've never seen in real life). Meanwhile i can now connect to a new Discord community and not only not worry about losing any messages while i do other stuff (i often check what people have talk about in Discord since my previous "visit" to be up to date) but also search what people talked about previously - e.g. did anyone brought up some XYZ topic i want to talk about?
IME the above two (also add images and audio to the mix - in two of the communities i'm in there are people who post WIP music they make) are basically 90% of how i see people use Discord: they post something (very often media-based) and very often others see/respond to it in their own leisure much later (in some channels people even live on different timezones so they can't do otherwise).
TBH nowadays if i wanted to set up some community in a self-hosted manned and wanted to stick with open stuff, i'd probably use RocketChat or something like that (Godot uses a self-hosted RocketChat instance that while a bit more janky than Discord, it seems to provide pretty much the same features i mentioned above).
You can use a bouncer on IRC to retain messages while you were offline. In reality, it's the same with every other network: you need a server which receives and retains messages while you're offline.
With WhatsApp, Discord, etc, that server is provided by Facebook, Discard respectively. With XMPP, Matrix, that server is the instance in which you have an account or where the channel is hosted.
With IRC, you use a bouncer. What makes IRC unique is that a bouncer is _optional_. You can even join a channel without an account and without a server which keeps logs while you're offline. This ephemeral level of joining doesn't exist in WhatsApp, Discord, XMPP, Matrix, etc.
And, btw, this is not a new thing: I first saw bouncers 15 years ago and they weren't even new back then.
I know there are technical ways to work around IRC's limitations, my point is that their mere existence adds more friction to using IRC so people move on to more frictionless places - and with chat apps being fundamentally social, that friction affects people who don't even mind the frictions themselves but their peers do (though personally i do mind these frictions - i do not want to bother with hosting anything or setting up bouncers or anything of the sort, i just want to pop in a channel, see what people were discussing, talk with whoever is there and/or share some of my own stuff and that's it).
Agreed. The lack of stored history for every user is a huge blocker for new users. They enter a pretty active chat but they see nothing. They wait 10 mins after asking a question and bounce.
All of our comms for https://pico.sh are on irc and we have tons of users join and leave immediately because the room feels cold / dead even tho we were chatting 10 mins prior.
Concord channels on Nostr (https://concordprotocol.org/clients/) are handy for avoiding the centralization and privacy issues of Discord while also avoiding the reduction in asynchronous and media-enhanced functionality you'd get with IRC.
That said I can't say it's hard to just run irssi inside of tmux and attach/detach as necessary remotely. Nor is it hard to throw my media I'm sharing onto a web server. But yes, you do need to mix and match your utilities, rather than have an all in one package.
I do often enough find this to be more of a feature than a bug -- being stuck with Discord's UI is gross, but the network effect does have me continuing to use it for some groups.
It isn't hard, as i wrote i used to run irssi in screen back in the day when there wasn't another alternative, but that required me to have a VPS (i don't nowadays and i don't really want one because i don't want to bother with the admin side of things) and it is extra friction - and that is for someone like me who already has the knowledge to do it. For most people it is an insurmountable obstacle.
I think you underestimate how hard it really is. I don’t think anyone I know who isn't a professional programmer (and some who are) would have found either of your examples easy.
The way some of us operated back in the day was to link to a forum post with a video upload or a chan board with a video upload from IRC. IRC was ephemeral, light-weight, fast and forums, chan boards were the semi-persistence, long enough for the majority of the intended audience to download. Some still do this today. [1]
> they post something (very often media-based) and very often others see/respond to it in their own leisure much later
who pays for the storage to keep the file on a computer somewhere, and the network to serve the file to the internet indefinitely? in Discord's case, it's the users
usenet iirc tried to do a sort of "torrent" the data across enthusiasts' / participants' computers?
What you are describing here is microblogging like Twitter or Instagram, not using a chat to do chatting. Chatting, by design, is ephemeral and text only.
And yet that is how people use Discord - or more precisely, a mix of the two in the same interface. I think telling people they're not supposed to do something they find working is always losing battle.
I'm not telling anyone what to do or not to on Discord. I'm pointing out that IRC is the way it is on purpose, not by error. If you want microblogging, use a microblogging platform. If that is Discord for you, use that. Just be aware that you aren't just chatting anymore.
There are draft specs to fix both of these but they haven't been worked on recently because nobody has the time or energy to work on it.
This is fundamentally the main problem with IRC development nowadays. People want IRC to have features but are unwilling to support IRC developers to actually implement them and as a result pretty much every single IRC developer (myself included) who isn't churning out slop is burned out because its a thankless job.
How? From a quick search don't see anything in the spec about files or images. The closest i can think of is attaching metadata (which is a draft), but these are meant to store utf8 strings and i doubt a base64 encoded video is what the writers of the spec had in mind.
Some of the actors that are listed on that page already implement many of the v3 features (Like https://www.irccloud.com), so it's not really something that will come with a big bang and we have to wait for a release, it's just that not all clients support it yet.
Many GUI IRC clients do image / video embedding, even 10 years ago. Voice chat / video / screenshare is probably not a good fit unless you run some kind of secondary infrastructure like Jitsi and make it look like it's part of the client. Doesn't seem like a great fit though.
Yeah it'd need to be some kind of secondary infrastructure - I don't see it being part of any official IRC spec any time soon. But it would absolutely make IRC more appealing to the "average" user.
I like IRC, and I am online all day on various servers, for nostalgia reasons mostly, but I think everyone knows it's dated, had its time and will slowly fizzle out if we like it or not.
I think the main problem there is that there's not really any motivation to build that on top of a simple protocol like IRC. The strength of the protocol is that it's distributed, easy to understand, text based and lightweight and I'd guess most current IRC users are people who use it for a very long time already.
Tucking all these mainstream features that people are used to this days to get feature parity with any other competitor (Slack / Teams / Discord / Matrix etc.) will not make IRC more popular, it will make the protocol more complicated and fragmented.
I have been using SourceHut’s IRC client to access it for a while, but never quite found a good iOS client, since Goguma is just the Android client compiled for iOS.
I wonder if I can find the time to build a native iOS IRC client that follows Liquid Glass, and works as well as Goguma. Not many people would use it, but it’d scratch my own itch, as they say.
The protocol is so simple[1] that it shouldn’t take that long or be that hard[2], I think.
I've been building my own (native) mIRC clone for MacOS as a side project, exactly on the scratch my own itch kind of thinking! :)
Didn't really look into iOS though, I'll have a think...
So far:
- Swift 6/AppKit built with SwiftPM only, no Xcode project. As a stack of modules.
- The default behaviour is native window(s), but have a classic MDI frame (with child windows inside one main window) that I really enjoy playing with and debugging.
- Behaves "the mac way" (menu bar, text editing, scrolling, full-screen, dark mode, VoiceOver), and anything that belongs to mIRC behaves the mIRC way. Still lots of rough edges though.
- Conversations are tabs in one shared window, the tab bar acts as mIRC's switchbar, the treebar becomes a sidebar. DCC transfers get their own standalone windows as I felt that makes it better as p2p.
- The options, defaults, and menus are an exact copy of mIRC 7.85 - I'll evolve it after "finishing"
- Only the top UI layer touches AppKit, so the parts that have to match mIRC exactly can be tested headless in CI.
- The IRC protocol, session state, mIRC formatting, a mirc.ini-compatible config, a scripting interpreter that copies mIRC's evaluation model (PCRE2 tuned to behave like mIRC's PCRE 8.45), DCC, and the display format strings are all pure Swift.
- Some decisions go beyond mIRC to fit MacOS: an untrusted server certificate is asked the user and pinned, never just trusted. Router port mapping uses MacOS's own port mapper. And also created a few new pixel icon sets I haven't fully decided on.
I didn’t, indeed. But I just looked and didn’t quite like the design, so it doesn’t seem to be what I’m looking for.
Still, better than Goguma for iOS as far as design goes. I wonder how the features compare through, as Goguma is the gold standard, akin to Conversations for XMPP.
I've ended up managing to vibe an IRC client for Twitch over the last couple of weeks to make following the sometimes flood of the [Hasan] 'Piker Broadcasting Service' stream chat a bit easier;
Some never left. Notoriously, some bigtech companies have an internal IRC network for tech discussions because that's one communication system that you can rely on to stay up even during catastrophic outages.
I've been using https://www.irccloud.com for years, it takes care of all these things and also has an app / push notifications. It's still IRC, but it takes care of a lot of the annoying parts of it that made it feel dated.
I never worry about presence in any form of chat. I don't care if people are there when I message them; it's up to them to pick up my messages at their convenience.
IRC was great. But I don't think it can bounce back with the alternatives that we now have. A focussed effort to get Matrix working, or any of the open source alternatives would be better. Of course, people invest their time in what they think is fun and that is fine. But the already existing alternatives provide what people need and want today, so IRCv3 will have it infinitely harder.
At what point do we say matrix isn't going to work? It's been like this for years. It's so overengineered on an immutable chat history on a blockchain it has crossed the line into "way too expensive to run and maintain for streams of cat pictures and memes". Worse is better.
I don't get this, it is working. It's largely replaced IRC in open source spaces. It's not going to penetrate the mainstream but it's fine for what it is and people do use it all the time.
People have different definitions for "working". I assume that the people who claim that Matrix doesn't work are the ones comparing to alternative commercial solutions and all the polish that usually accompanies those.
A decade ago Moxie Marlinspike argued[1] that to develop Signal more quickly, he and his team could not be distracted by federation. At the time I wasn't sure what to think, but it does seem that the effort level of using the integrated approach of client/server/protocol may just logistically be easier.
I've been using it for years now, it's working just fine for me. It's no Discord or WhatsApp just yet, but it's lacking about a couple hundred million dollars of investment for that to happen to any open source chat solution.
I'll happily move over to XMPP or IRCv4 if they can get it right, I'm not married to the way Matrix does things. But it's good enough, open source, and federated.
I know, but it doesn't seems to be in the RFC yet. RFC creates specs and agreements between the protocol and it makes it officially acceptable for clients to start consider respecting it.
I'm running a Matrix server using https://github.com/matrix-construct/tuwunel as an alternative to IRC, but I missed the lean-and-mean of IRC since Matrix is full on event driven delivery like XMPP/Jabber.
IRCv3 are the consensus-based standards body for modern IRC and has ratified the WebSocket spec. Its very unlikely there will be another IRC RFC because getting anything through the IETF is a bureaucratic nightmare. I was a reviewer for the draft IRC-CTCP RFC and it eventually died because the IETF wanted external reviewers who didn't work on the spec and that just didn't exist.
I largely credit mIRC for getting me into computers and programming. But I haven't used IRC in a decade... I wonder if kids these days even know what it is.
I wish IRC supported images. It's weird that to share a screenshot I need a chat platform that also support VOIP when I just want to paste an image in the chat.
I built a terraform based box that runs ergo ircd with The Lounge as a front end. So basically irc3 as an app server, but you can still federate where needed. Works great. Cheap, performant, I can integrate services into it without all Slack’s bullshit.
I can't be bothered to sign up for both libera and oftc. When everything was on freenode, you didn't have to jump through any hoops just to ask a question.
Go linger in the ircv3 channel for a week or two, the answer is yes.
Mostly complainers who would rather see IRC stay the same. Right now one of them is complaining the author is a vibe coder, as if that somehow makes the critique that IRC continues to be far behind everything else less real.
I'll be tarred and feathered for saying this, but every time I see a modern chat app I pine for the days of ICQ (as it looked in the 90's).
It had a UI I prefer over anything since - compact, comparatively unobtrusive, information-dense, and fast. I could port my full chat history around with me between machines, and also search it reliably (no vanishing scrolling or lazy-loading handicaps). And it was handy you could advertise different presence states to different people/groups.
You might like the IRCv3 client I build at https://github.com/matt0x6f/irc-client. It's highly capable and modern but limited in its resource footprint and quite zippy. PRs welcome as well.
ICQ plus Winamp was peak PC
Add mIRC 4.51 to that list. Fit a 1.44M diskette. Launched fully before you let go of the mouse button, on an old POS 486.
For sure, mIRC was the good old days. Windows 98 and houndstooth wallpaper :P.
I still use IRC to this day, just the client and the OS are different.
I suddenly feel the urge to slap something around a bit with a large trout.
Can you whip a llama’s ass with it?
Don't forget to put on your robe and wizard hat
I still use mIRC. It pretty much works like in the old days and has aged very well IMHO, I've tried other clients but none would convince me to switch. Now I even have a license (when I started using it, maybe at 15 or so, I was too broke for that).
Winamp hasn't aged so well, sadly.
Ventrilo for voice chats. Finding others on Quakenet and playing 3vs3, sometimes making friends, sometimes making enemies, always having fun.
ICQ and MSN Messenger, yup. :P
It really did whip the llama’s ass.
And apart from the advantages you mention, it was really configurable in terms of the level of involvement and openness you wanted. You could use it exclusively to chat with friends and otherwise be unreachable (as in MSN and their ilk later), or you could be open to chat with strangers. And you could find people by interests, I remember looking for coin collectors from countries whose coins I didn't have :)
Then MSN Messenger displaced it (at least in Spain) and it didn't have even 10% of ICQ's functionality.
I held off back in the day, for awhile but I remember my number 1202948; ICQ rocked! My sister had a much lower number and used to tease me about it, since I was the "nerd".
Proof jic https://lists.apache.org/thread/09kv8twflgo3xoh16fxl6gfkgmjk...
pff more than 6 digits!
“Uh-oh!”
One of the grocery stores near me actually uses that in their POS system, so you can hear it as you check out.
And the fog horn launch sound that reminded you if your speakers were on or turned up... good times.
>information-dense
In other words, designed by IT guys. And a reason (among many others) normies would never get on board. Not saying I disagree personally.
Everybody had ICQ. You probably are too young to remember, but ICQ was as commonly used as Instagram today.
When ICQ was at its peak, users of any chat software were a rather thin layer of population. So "everybody" is more than exaggeration.
ICQ numbers got into 9, 10 digits. For a late 90s internet population that was practically everybody.
No it wasn't and it's not even close.
Definitely a regional thing. Where I grew up it was MSN Messenger all the way.
MSN Messenger was a bit after ICQ's peak
AOL instant messenger was bigger in USA, it was so big that AOL remained a major chat service even into the broadband years (though AIM clearly was under decline by that point)
My 90s and early 00s social circle was AIM, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.
I had AIM, ICQ, and a few others. Pidgin (originally GAIM) let you send and receive on all the services from one app, which was very handy.
By the time Pidgin existed I switched to something else. Maybe Jabber (today called XMPP). I don't quite remember though.
AIM and ICQ were the big ones back in the day, nothing ever was as big as that.
Nah ICQ was pre AIM. AIM was popular with some people but ICQ was king for a while.
AIM was filled with script kiddies using spam to "hack" people's computers. It just crashed the app when they spammed you.
Then stuff like trillium came out which meant you didn't have to use AIM's awful client.
Funny, that's always the impression I had of ICQ back in the day...
Surely we can agree that no one's experience is universal, and both regional and subcultural differences are likely to have materially shaped our views of the various chat services in the '90s and early '00s...?
Surely we all recognize that our own experience is not The Default Everyone Should Understand?
> even into the broadband years
I suspect part of that is because not everyone had broadband. I was still on dialup years after broadband ISPs were widely available.
yes, I used AIM from 1999 until whenever it was shutdown (2017?) At several companies, we used AIM for what many use Slack for today. We even coordinated prod deployments in a private AIM chat room!
AIM was not around when I was using ICQ. Like, it literally didn’t exist.
Once it did my local social circle used it. Gaming stuff stayed on IRC and ICQ.
ICQ was released only 6 months before AIM, not that big of a difference. :D
ICQ was incredibly popular amongst “normies”, at least in Brazil. Much more so than amongst nerds who were mostly still on IRC.
In Denmark it was MSN Messenger, the nerds were on IRC and also had ICQ.
MSN, mIRC and all other forms of chatting and comms (like Orkut) were also highly popular in Brazil. I guess Brazilians just like to chat.
Discord is incredibly noisy and information-dense and while maybe not for "normies", it’s definitely not just IT guys using it. Though I wonder how many people actually like to use it.
Discord is by far my favorite communication platform across anything I used in my entire life, nothing else comes even close in terms of feature set. It also helps that almost everyone I like is there. I'm forced to have whatsapp and telegram to communicate with the general population and I wouldn't use them if I didn't have to.
If someone from discord DM'd me wanting to move to telegram or whatsapp, they're automatically assumed to be a scammer.
Yes I just love its patronizingly cute little animations everywhere reminding me not to think too hard
I cannot believe this stupid app is so popular when you can't even monitor multiple servers at once! When every brother and their mother has a discord server but I can only look at one channel on one server at a time??
I haven't seen functionality to view multiple channels at the same time in any modern chat application, so I can't exactly blame discord for not having that.
In Discord’s…defense? Description? At least for understanding—it’s gamer chat. And it’s been that from the beginning. That’s the design and the intent, and while it seems Discord-the-company is trying to adapt Discord-the-product for the increase in popularity for other uses, its roots are showing. Navigating it feels similar to navigating the menu system of a AAA game.
Yeah, I know. But they seem hell bent on adding more and more distractions in every update. I mean, it felt more manageable when it was still just a gamer chat.
I've been using it since 2016, and none of the new features that I don't use have negatively impacted me.
Also using it since their first release, and all of the new features have impeded my usage. Server nicknames are fantastic but I couldn't tell you how to access that feature. I have to relearn where that option is every single time.
Nitro, Shop, and Quests. What are these even?
Even their changelog page is wtf (https://discord.com/tags/changelog)
Right click on the server icon or header, then per-server profile. Completely reasonable to me, and I don't think it has ever not been there since they introduced it.
Shop is where they sell customization stuff.
Quests let you earn currency you can use to buy customization stuff or nitro instead of real money.
I don't think there's a significantly better way to do whatever they are doing, and I don't see anything particularly objectionable about any of it.
Nitro is a subscription that gives you more customization for your profile (banners, themes, etc).
Shop is where you can buy additional customizations.
Quests get you exclusive unlocks for various games.
It's certainly dense with something. If it's information, it's not information I want though. I have no desire to know anything about their various Nitro sales or have a live feed to what my friends are playing or listening to. People I want to talk to are there, so I go there to talk to them. Anything outside of that just makes it noisy, like you said.
I can’t get into Discord. It’s just so messy and disorganized and too much information flying at my face.
I can't understand this, it's just a name and a message. It's slack with a better threading interface. (Which is just IRC with better file transfer and image previews)
We're you on IRC? Much more information dense.
Discord is incredibly popular among younger people in general now. It escaped tech people containment years ago.
every single 'normie' i've seen use Discord can barely figure it out, they chase red badges across the UI all day and really have no clue about the paradigm at all.
They're there of course because some 'normie' thing of theres inevitably requires the sign-up of a discord for bonus game skins or some other such stupid shit, but the fact remains that they're clueless.
much like the average Outlook user, they're there because they were dragged into it by another element in their life (their job) and they really have no background or clue on how to use the piece of software, they just know they need to pretend and cite experience on the CV for a job.
Is there any proof that normies would not be on board with it? Discord is information dense and huge among normies.
For the love of... can we stop saying 'normie', it's just so stupid. And intellectually lazy. And also dumb.
I’m surprised how popular Discord is for as “IT guy” and information dense the UI is tbh.
As someone who's still on IRC daily and has built multiple IRC bots and clients over the years:
- most of the jank of IRC is client-side and can be fixed on the clients, IRCv3 protocol changes are nice, but not essential for a good experience.
- bots can make channels more engaging, just posting the titles of URLs pasted on the channels so even people without fancy rich clients can see what's behind a YouTube link or Reddit share url without clicking it open makes the experience more "discord/slack-like"
- IRC bots and clients are super fun and easy first projects for any language, you get to do permanently open sockets to multiple destinations (multi-server of course), asynchronous stuff and text handling.
I went with IRCCloud for the longest time myself until early this year, due to the November Revolution of AI models getting super good, I figured out I can build my own IRCCloud just the way I like it with the price of a single Claude Pro subscription.
And so I did. I think I had an MVP running in a week (evenings on my free time) and over the summer I cancelled my IRCCloud subscription and I'm fully using my own system.
Now I have a TUI, Web UI, native Swift client (with iOS, but haven't tested it yet) and a Tauri client for Linux - all sharing a common backend that I run on a VPS 24/7.
I'm playing around with IRCv3 currently, specifically persistent channel history (no bouncer).
I've set up an ergo^1 server for experimenting. Channel history is currently in draft stage; and maybe it will be forever.
If any of you want to drop by for some reason and want to try it out: #hn on exp3.irc.basilikum.monster:6697
See here for a list of IRCv3 capable clients (draft/chathistory for history support): https://ircv3.net/software/clients
[1] https://ergo.chat/
Timely! This weekend I spun up a little friends-only server on a VPS I had laying around. I used Ergo, enforced TLS, enforced authentication, and I hand-create accounts with temp passwords for my chums. For clients, I'm using Halloy on my Mac and Goguma on iOS. Their are other prettier clients, but Ergo and they all support a nice set of IRCv3. For example, they all have client history built in. Whenever I connect, the server replays all the messages I missed while offline (with a 30 day retention), no bouncer required.
Honestly, I'm trying to remember why we collectively moved away from this. I was terminally online in the 90s and the hadn't touched IRC in many years, but this is... actually quite nice.
Back in the day you needed a bnc if you wanted chat history. The mobile experience has been abysmal until very recently.
Also when discord came out there was a certain appeal to having voip built into the same app, and not having to maintain a separate vent/mumble/ts.
The voice thing always sneaks up on me as a requirement, because I never, ever personally want to use that. I'm not saying it's not a good feature, just one that doesn't occur to me. You're probably right, though.
Tried Halloy on macOS for ~6mos, has some serious issues ...
(1) It silently disconnects from the server without indication, and does not reconnect. You might assume it is connected, until you send a message and see "message can not be sent". You will lose conversation history unless using a bouncer. Clicking around, all the buffers will clear indicating some major state issue, and you will have to restart it.
(2) Consistently uses ~5% CPU doing nothing at all.
(3) Doesn't behave like a macOS app, pressing the red "close window" button will close the window, but the main process goes ANR.
After leaving Textual since that was discontinued, guess I'm looking for a macOS IRC client again. Might give Mango a try.
Yeah, Halloy is "interesting", although I haven't personally run into issues yet. It just clearly not a native Mac app, which is fine, but not my ideal.
But Textual! I just stumbled across this yesterday: https://www.textualapp.com/news/a-new-chapter
TL;DR someone bought Textual and are restarting development. It's not a PE-style purchase, like a Bending Spoons / Evernote kind of thing. According to the buyers, they bought it because they're heavy users and wanted to take it over so they could resume active development. I always keep a healthy skepticism, but I'm hopeful.
Thanks for the heads-up on Textual!
Does IRCv3 need new leadership to continue to drive it forward? Over at Parley/Ahoy (https://git.mills.io/prologic/parley https://git.mills.io/fastidious/ahoy) we've managed to create a federated decentralized IRC chat experience with a Discord/Slack-esque feel but true to both IRC / IRCv3 (Ahoy being a fully featured IRCv3 client).
Rather than claim a Discord-esque feel, you should point out the features you're referring to explicitly. Discord is infamous for its absolutely awful UX and hostility to open source ecosystem. I'm sure you're referring to neither of those aspects, but consider that those reading your reference might be entirely unfamiliar with the (presumably) positive aspects that you're actually imitating.
> Discord is infamous for its absolutely awful UX
It's laden with ads and microtransactions, but if you remove those (shady scripts abound for those who don't want to do it themselves), the UX is one of the best on the market. There's a reason so many alternative chat clients are basically Discord clones without the microtransactions (for now).
Its open source hostility doesn't really change how well it works. You can copy the good parts without the awful parts, like so many people and companies are already doing.
The UX is pretty good. Significantly better than the older alternatives like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak.
But I am surprised there are no competitors in the space. It’s good but it’s not that good. I guess it comes down to adoption/network effects
You are right. To be perfectly honest, the only thing I took from Discord at all (it's UI is generally awful yes, I agree!) is the support for multiple servers. But now that I think about it some more, that's not really even a unique feature.
Anyway, you are right. But that's more about Ahoy and less about Parley. Parley was just answering the question of "What if IRC was federated, and what if it borrowed some ideas from Salty.im -- DNS discovery + WKID".
Wasn't IRC always federated? There were different networks, but each network was a federation of independent servers.owmed by independent operators as far as I understand...
I don't believe so, not in the strictness sense.
> A federated network is a system where independent networks, servers, or organizations agree to follow common standards so they can talk to each other without giving up control to a single central company.
In traditional IRC networks, you end up forming a spanning tree of servers that belong to a common name, "the network". However control remains in the hands of the operators of that network.
The "control" was basically permission to connect (and thus share messages/users/etc) between multiple servers. So I see your point, you couldn't just randomly connect your server to someone else's server in quite the same way email worked, but at the same time the servers could be easily owned by different people running different software.
but you could change networks, you could run your own.
Protocol was documented but each server is a silo.
Discord killer chat features are:
Message History
Channel Discoverability
Attachments
Mobile
Anyone can start a server
Add custom emojis and stickers to that.
Kind of baffles me that people still make chat apps without those.
You’re missing voice chat and video streaming
Every chat product has these things?
IRC sure hasn't! Well, the IRC most people are using, anyway. You can work around these by using things like bouncers and third party HTTP hosts and assuming everyone else has a client that inlines media.
Multimedia transfer is still a practical impossibility, for better or for worse.
Mobile IRC works, sort of, if you don't mind spamming the channel every time you lose connectivity when you drive into a tunnel or when your phone goes to deep sleep. Again, you can set up a bouncer for that.
I welcome the new changes in IRCv3 and hope that one day soon all IRC users will be able to use the features everyone else has been using for fifteen years or so.
IRCCloud or a $5 VPS if you're willing to pay gets rid of the join/part spam
...But one of these things is not like the others.
"Anyone can start a server" is only true when you're lying about what a "server" is. (Or redefining it to the point of usefulness.)
A Discord "server" is just a defined chat namespace. All the Discord chat "servers" live together on the same actual load-balanced VMs or whatever on the physical servers they run.
It's honestly the thing that's annoyed me most about Discord from the very beginning, long before they introduced the ads and the microtransactions and the mandatory doxxing.
Quick, lets restart the argument about "self-hosted"!
IRCv3 isn't a corporate body, its a semi-formal group of IRC developers. There's nothing prohibiting you from proposing protocol extensions if they are within the scope of the working group.
What would "new IRCv3 leadership" do to get all the different independent IRC client and server software developers to support IRCv3?
parley and ahoy both look quite interesting! Retrofitting irc into a real federated protocol is cool. Also like the idea of picking up discords ui/ux. How did you manage to get avatars for ahoy? Is there a ircv3 protocol i missed?
It's part of the IRCv3 Metadata spec: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/metadata -- It just isn't very well documented or prominently displayed on the spec's page(s) I think. Took me a while to find it too.
I think the main problem with IRCv3 is that there are a million optional extensions (see https://ircv3.net/software/clients for a feature support matrix of popular clients)
This can get especially confusing when people on different clients have divergent views of the same conversation. e.g. some can see the emoji reacts, others can't. some can see "replies", others can't.
Emojis and reacts are the only extensions that can cause people to have a meaningfully different view. It's part of why it took so long to ratify replies, and reacts still are not ratified.
We're also discussing ways for servers to provide a fallback to clients which don't support them.
> We're also discussing ways for servers to provide a fallback to clients which don't support them.
Uh. I feel like this should be something that's done before it's ratified. What if you find out that there is no satisfactory way?
I visited the site to see what the extensions are and at first i thought that there might be a few of them but it doesn't look that bad.
Then i noticed the horizontal scrollbar :-P
Wow that is hilarious. This kind of fragmentation pretty much guarantees failure. I'm pretty sure it's what killed Thrift. See their similar "don't use this" table:
https://thrift.apache.org/docs/Languages.html
If you look at "old" internet: fidonet telnet bitnet ftp fsp wais netnews whois++ gopher relaynet ... i mean irc is one of the only ones that is still used, and mostly as it was 35 years ago. Pretty impressive.
People love knocking on IRC but people are still on it, still using it...
HTTP is also still somewhat popular.
But, seriously, that got me curious. There are many protocols from that early era that are still with us today. NTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, BGP, SNMP, NFS, ICMP. If you allow the 1990's as counting as "old" we can add SSH and SSL, DHCP, LDAP.
I feel the need to be pedantic, but I do not mean it to be rude.
What we sometimes call SSL is not the same SSL as back then. That said, TLS was released in 1999, so it just barely makes the cut. :D
Telnet still very popular with embedded. SSH is not a spring chicken either.
TCP
Actually, its just inertia and lack of reliable forum hosting, the actual "killer app" that replaced volatile and unarchivable chat content, but no one learned from it and people flocked to Discord, which is even more hostile to archiving/scanning chat history.
I am starting to wonder is archiving or scanning history even possible with how hostile internet has become. Especially when so many tech companies will scan and download same content countless times without single care of damage or cost the cause...
Just imagine hosting that history on your instance for users and then some vibecoder without care in his work starts scanning it automatically every 5 seconds just in case it might have changed...
> I am starting to wonder is archiving or scanning history even possible with how hostile internet has become.
Future generations are going to be looking at a historical black hole.
Yeah, but the major upgrades for things like telnet and ftp were adding appropriate encryption layers and improved authentication to include things like certificates. IRC shoehorned those into the connections awkwardly but it's still not often mandatory and registration is painful.
Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.
Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.
> Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.
Except, unlike Reddit, it wasn't centralized nor owned by a single corporation.
Usenet users did not have to obey the rules and whims of any corporation and there was thriving ecosystem of feature rich, free and open Usenet clients.
I really miss having my own killfiles and regex search abilities that were common on Usenet clients, but is missing from the Reddit clients and its web UI.
I don’t believe it was or continually is limited to text only, but I do believe we had netiquette back then which helped to reconsider spamming internet with media and other decorators, only to have it all forgotten 72h later
Still is, but a bit empty. https://eternal-september.org/
Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.
The eternal September complaint comes to mind, but even eternal September was a jolly walk in the park compared to what modern social media has turned into.
> Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.
Spam filtering has improved a lot since the Usenet days, but even if it hadn't we had killfiles to deal with the spam and filtering out harrasers. Doing this today would be even easier with the help of LLMs.
What about the registration you find so painful? It takes a single command to register a nick, if that's what you mean.
In his defence, its a single command, if you know the command
This, which is not uniform across servers, and has more work if you want to do certificate-based auth. Additionally getting a nick cloak is good opsec and also extremely not uniform.
Also funny watching peopel mistype the command in the wrong window and expose their "password for everything" to everyone in the chat.
The entire premise of cloaks as optional seems like broken UX to me. I'd like to see a new version make your connections details private by default.
FTP is still used quite a bit. For what it’s useful for, nothing has come close to replacing it.
SFTP? Don't confuse it with FTP or FTPS - SFTP is a different protocol which runs on top of SSH.
They are not confused. A lot of companies still use FTP internally and for B2B. Many people would be very uncomfortable if they knew how much companies including banks, payment systems, etc... and governments still depended on FTP and clear text authentication. That's even before broaching the subject of which of the applications and daemons in use are being actively maintained.
What do you mean, "for what it’s useful for"? For me, WebDAV has replaced FTP where SFTP hasn't.
like in enterprise? the browsers stopped shipping with ftp support I think 5 years ago.
Hosting files to be downloaded via web browser isn’t what it’s useful for. If you’re going to do that, you might as well use… a web server.
FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).
> SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access.
Security-wise you set it not to run commands (and maybe chroot) and you're done, right? And difficulty-wise isn't granting SSH access very similar to FTP access?
I don't understand the issue.
You might be surprised to learn there are dedicated ftp clients.
sarcasm?
Don't know of a client with that name, but there are plenty of others.
HTTPS has largely replaced it. Pretty much all files uploaded or downloaded from the internet is going to be done via HTTPS and not FTP.
Only if you ignore the banking industry.
Fair point, but I would assume the AWS S3 by itself is bigger than the FTP/SFTP traffic globally including banks. No idea if it’s true, and I’m not sure we can get reliable stats on this
Everything decentralized will keep being used. Stuff is sticky.
More illuminating: To what (relative) extend? And what's the trajectory?
Looking at Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fm%2F03t2s%2C%2Fg%2F11...
There is still a niche community of people running Gopher servers. I wrote a small basic implementation of a Gopher server in Python before for fun once and it hosted a Gopher hole for a few years. I doubt even one person actually looked it at besides me, but the RFC is simple and can be implemented pretty fast.
I wonder if the LOC Gopher is still around; I used to use it as a "jumping off" point.
what about SMTP?
I thought of that ... you could put it in the list but I wouldn't unless you're talking cron. I mean when I started it was like mail bob@froggy.ucla.edu and bob would open up pine or emacs and not get any spam or have to do anything crazy and we'd have a conversation.
that modality is long dead. we still have email but it's not that same ... I however could take mirc from like 1995 and still use everything.
But as IRC has a social network component, it's more of a social thing than anything inherent to IRC.
I'm here looking for other telenet (not telnet) oldheads, finding nobody.
COBOL is still used 50 years later.
COBOL is definitely a hallmark of this type of argument.
reminds me that fortran has a modern website: https://fortran-lang.org/
Logo too!
Fired up the old mIRC license I've had for decades last week to explore old servers and channels. Many are dormant, but life is still teeming in many. I'll probably wind up re-donating to mIRC developers and investing some time into IRC communities. I find the experience preferable to Discord.
Anyone interested in exploring this segment of the internet, start with: https://netsplit.de/
Netsplit is a great and vital resource. But I'm wondering if it's actually the best entrypoint for people who just wanna chat with others about some topic. https://libera.chat/ seems a bit more user-friendly and "hand-holding", for the people who prefer that. If Libera doesn't fit their vibe, the huge network list on Netsplit will surely be of more use to them once they understand IRC just a tiny bit better.
Any companies running an internal IRC server instead of wasting money on slack?
Makes me wonder if moving away from discord back to IRC would be a fun move. But I think we'd miss mobile access and accounts on different devices maybe? Any thoughts?
I consciously use IRC like that: I don't have a bouncer, and connect only when I feel bored and want to see what is going in some channels (nowadays mostly just #emacs on Libera). I can only follow the conversation when I am online and there, and when I leave there is nothing to catch up to. In some sense it is like a digital third-space as oppose to a permanent dual presence that I have to share my attention with. Depending on your use-case this is not ideal, but for me it is a nice, relaxing addition to a lazy weekend evening when I have nothing better to do.
There are irc clients that work on mobile, like this one from the original author of sway: https://codeberg.org/emersion/goguma
It’s just they need a bouncer (an always online irc server you run) for things like push notifications (and chat history on servers without the chat history extension).
Bouncers (and some IRC v3 extensions on newer servers) allow you to be logged in to the same account from different devices.
I’ve also had some fun writing a bridge from discord to irc for some personal discord servers (but it uses some account impersonation hijinks that make it impractical for other to use).
IRCv3 gives you all of that, and I'm working on an ircd that has builtin support for multi-device access & chat history (which covers mobile between the two --- there are improvements you can do on top of that, but those two are kind of the foundation).
I'm also extending it with support for Discord/Matrix/etc-esque communities (in a 100% standard-client-compatible way).
really need the simple voice chat for me to use it.
If you really insist, it can be hamfisted into IRC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R--_ATzE6o. (Though besides the official PoC https://github.com/asiekierka/voirc and my reimplementation https://spectra.video/w/vBd8cUmo9yYD5CtKbyjrL6, I have never seen this actually being used).
VoIRC is a joke project. It encodes your voice to base64 and sends that to an IRC channel at a rate that would get you kicked off most servers for spamming. Saved you a click.
ok, that is funny at least!
It’s a matter of having a good client. Mango will give you everything you mentioned … https://mangoirc.chat
Goguma is an IRC client which runs on Linux Mobile, iOS and Android.
I mean, it seemed mobile enough for that tv presenter to get caught on a plane being a pedo on IRC
why wouldn’t mobile access work? Its just a protocol
Yes, but compared to "modern" apps IRC is very rudimentary and you would not get messages if you "close the app". You always have to run some secondary infrastructure like a bouncer to get offline messages or see what happened while you were away.
I know that's not the fault of the protocol itself, but that's always one of the biggest hurdle for IRC adoption when everyone is used to just open apps and see the full history at all times.
It is the protocol's fault, and there is a solution at the protocol level: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory . So now, you can get messages while offline when using a modern server (eg. https://ergo.chat/) with a modern client (eg. https://codeberg.org/emersion/goguma)
Ergo looks really cool, will have to take a look at that. Thanks for sharing.
Oh thanks for the note about ergo.chat, need to have a play with this!
The protocol needs ugly extensions to have a variety of devices plug into the same user account. For me back in the day this was an ssh session running the IRC client in a screen, and it was no worse than whatever else was available.
Mobile devices are different devices with different constraints. The main blockers are intermittent connectivity and the need to save battery life.
in general discord has a very bad app and usability, irc regardless of client is a clear upgrade
Very bad is pretty harsh for the possibly least bad chat app that I have used. I don't like the centralization on Discord but the reason it is popular is because their app is better than the competition.
imo Telegram is the least bad chat app that I've used. Discord has a lot of UX and performance issues.
Slack is a very bad that is super slow no matter what time of day I use it. It completely locks up on a spotty network. Discord works way better and their voice chat is several leagues above.
Try alternative, native, Slack clients like msga.app or similar. They tend to use Slack's API pretty efficiently.
IMO those are the main reasons IRC isn't still used. It's basically only usable on a desktop or always-stationary laptop, or with a bouncer which is obviously expensive to set up and doesn't provide a good user experience.
Just yesterday i was working on my game engine for the original Xbox using the open source NXDK kit (which is much lower level than the official XDK) and i finally, after literal years, managed to find and fix a couple of bugs that caused flickering (much more obscure than you'd expect and didn't show up even in the emulator).
So i decided to share it with a couple friends and retro enthusiast communities on Discord. I took a video capture of my engine working, showing the 3d rendering, audio, video, etc with an Xbox->HDMI->USB capture chain. Then attached the file on Discord's input field and posted it (i have a tab with the web UI pretty much constantly open in Firefox). People weren't around at the time but some saw it today and commented while i was sleeping (with my computer off).
Last time i checked, this wouldn't be possible with IRC because:
1. There is no video (or any other file) host on IRC servers.
2. IRC discussions are ephemeral, you either need to be online all the time or setup some sort of proxy that keeps the discussions around while you or others are away (or do what i used to do 15+ years ago - run a terminal-based irc client in a screen session in a VPS :-P).
AFAIK #1 is still impossible and #2 is an optional extension (that i've never seen in real life). Meanwhile i can now connect to a new Discord community and not only not worry about losing any messages while i do other stuff (i often check what people have talk about in Discord since my previous "visit" to be up to date) but also search what people talked about previously - e.g. did anyone brought up some XYZ topic i want to talk about?
IME the above two (also add images and audio to the mix - in two of the communities i'm in there are people who post WIP music they make) are basically 90% of how i see people use Discord: they post something (very often media-based) and very often others see/respond to it in their own leisure much later (in some channels people even live on different timezones so they can't do otherwise).
TBH nowadays if i wanted to set up some community in a self-hosted manned and wanted to stick with open stuff, i'd probably use RocketChat or something like that (Godot uses a self-hosted RocketChat instance that while a bit more janky than Discord, it seems to provide pretty much the same features i mentioned above).
You can use a bouncer on IRC to retain messages while you were offline. In reality, it's the same with every other network: you need a server which receives and retains messages while you're offline.
With WhatsApp, Discord, etc, that server is provided by Facebook, Discard respectively. With XMPP, Matrix, that server is the instance in which you have an account or where the channel is hosted.
With IRC, you use a bouncer. What makes IRC unique is that a bouncer is _optional_. You can even join a channel without an account and without a server which keeps logs while you're offline. This ephemeral level of joining doesn't exist in WhatsApp, Discord, XMPP, Matrix, etc.
And, btw, this is not a new thing: I first saw bouncers 15 years ago and they weren't even new back then.
I know there are technical ways to work around IRC's limitations, my point is that their mere existence adds more friction to using IRC so people move on to more frictionless places - and with chat apps being fundamentally social, that friction affects people who don't even mind the frictions themselves but their peers do (though personally i do mind these frictions - i do not want to bother with hosting anything or setting up bouncers or anything of the sort, i just want to pop in a channel, see what people were discussing, talk with whoever is there and/or share some of my own stuff and that's it).
Agreed. The lack of stored history for every user is a huge blocker for new users. They enter a pretty active chat but they see nothing. They wait 10 mins after asking a question and bounce.
All of our comms for https://pico.sh are on irc and we have tons of users join and leave immediately because the room feels cold / dead even tho we were chatting 10 mins prior.
Ergo has that built in now. It Just Worked when I installed that server and connected with Halloy.
Concord channels on Nostr (https://concordprotocol.org/clients/) are handy for avoiding the centralization and privacy issues of Discord while also avoiding the reduction in asynchronous and media-enhanced functionality you'd get with IRC.
That said I can't say it's hard to just run irssi inside of tmux and attach/detach as necessary remotely. Nor is it hard to throw my media I'm sharing onto a web server. But yes, you do need to mix and match your utilities, rather than have an all in one package.
I do often enough find this to be more of a feature than a bug -- being stuck with Discord's UI is gross, but the network effect does have me continuing to use it for some groups.
It isn't hard, as i wrote i used to run irssi in screen back in the day when there wasn't another alternative, but that required me to have a VPS (i don't nowadays and i don't really want one because i don't want to bother with the admin side of things) and it is extra friction - and that is for someone like me who already has the knowledge to do it. For most people it is an insurmountable obstacle.
I think you underestimate how hard it really is. I don’t think anyone I know who isn't a professional programmer (and some who are) would have found either of your examples easy.
The way some of us operated back in the day was to link to a forum post with a video upload or a chan board with a video upload from IRC. IRC was ephemeral, light-weight, fast and forums, chan boards were the semi-persistence, long enough for the majority of the intended audience to download. Some still do this today. [1]
[1] - https://altchan.org/sh/8
> they post something (very often media-based) and very often others see/respond to it in their own leisure much later
who pays for the storage to keep the file on a computer somewhere, and the network to serve the file to the internet indefinitely? in Discord's case, it's the users
usenet iirc tried to do a sort of "torrent" the data across enthusiasts' / participants' computers?
What you are describing here is microblogging like Twitter or Instagram, not using a chat to do chatting. Chatting, by design, is ephemeral and text only.
This is actually a really good point and perspective. Couldn’t agree more.
And yet that is how people use Discord - or more precisely, a mix of the two in the same interface. I think telling people they're not supposed to do something they find working is always losing battle.
I'm not telling anyone what to do or not to on Discord. I'm pointing out that IRC is the way it is on purpose, not by error. If you want microblogging, use a microblogging platform. If that is Discord for you, use that. Just be aware that you aren't just chatting anymore.
There are draft specs to fix both of these but they haven't been worked on recently because nobody has the time or energy to work on it.
This is fundamentally the main problem with IRC development nowadays. People want IRC to have features but are unwilling to support IRC developers to actually implement them and as a result pretty much every single IRC developer (myself included) who isn't churning out slop is burned out because its a thankless job.
> There is no video (or any other file) host on IRC servers.
Ircv3, the thread title, supports file sharing
How? From a quick search don't see anything in the spec about files or images. The closest i can think of is attaching metadata (which is a draft), but these are meant to store utf8 strings and i doubt a base64 encoded video is what the writers of the spec had in mind.
It is in draft https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/562
Good v3 clients like The Lounge also offer it
Some of the actors that are listed on that page already implement many of the v3 features (Like https://www.irccloud.com), so it's not really something that will come with a big bang and we have to wait for a release, it's just that not all clients support it yet.
An IRC client with an extension for image/video embeds and a voice chat (with video/screenshare support) would go far.
Many GUI IRC clients do image / video embedding, even 10 years ago. Voice chat / video / screenshare is probably not a good fit unless you run some kind of secondary infrastructure like Jitsi and make it look like it's part of the client. Doesn't seem like a great fit though.
Yeah it'd need to be some kind of secondary infrastructure - I don't see it being part of any official IRC spec any time soon. But it would absolutely make IRC more appealing to the "average" user.
I like IRC, and I am online all day on various servers, for nostalgia reasons mostly, but I think everyone knows it's dated, had its time and will slowly fizzle out if we like it or not.
I think the main problem there is that there's not really any motivation to build that on top of a simple protocol like IRC. The strength of the protocol is that it's distributed, easy to understand, text based and lightweight and I'd guess most current IRC users are people who use it for a very long time already.
Tucking all these mainstream features that people are used to this days to get feature parity with any other competitor (Slack / Teams / Discord / Matrix etc.) will not make IRC more popular, it will make the protocol more complicated and fragmented.
I know it is a different protocol, but doesn't Mumble provide this to some degree?
only voice and subpar text chat.
I feel like this is completely missing the point of what IRC is.
I appreciate its text-only nature and would never want to see image/video embeds and/or voice chat in my client.
I agree. Part of the beauty is the limitations, the simplicity and transient nature of it.
Give Matrix a try.
I have been using SourceHut’s IRC client to access it for a while, but never quite found a good iOS client, since Goguma is just the Android client compiled for iOS.
I wonder if I can find the time to build a native iOS IRC client that follows Liquid Glass, and works as well as Goguma. Not many people would use it, but it’d scratch my own itch, as they say.
The protocol is so simple[1] that it shouldn’t take that long or be that hard[2], I think.
[1]: Which is the beauty of it, ofc.
[2]: Famous last words.
I've been building my own (native) mIRC clone for MacOS as a side project, exactly on the scratch my own itch kind of thinking! :)
Didn't really look into iOS though, I'll have a think...
So far:
- Swift 6/AppKit built with SwiftPM only, no Xcode project. As a stack of modules.
- The default behaviour is native window(s), but have a classic MDI frame (with child windows inside one main window) that I really enjoy playing with and debugging.
- Behaves "the mac way" (menu bar, text editing, scrolling, full-screen, dark mode, VoiceOver), and anything that belongs to mIRC behaves the mIRC way. Still lots of rough edges though.
- Conversations are tabs in one shared window, the tab bar acts as mIRC's switchbar, the treebar becomes a sidebar. DCC transfers get their own standalone windows as I felt that makes it better as p2p.
- The options, defaults, and menus are an exact copy of mIRC 7.85 - I'll evolve it after "finishing"
- Only the top UI layer touches AppKit, so the parts that have to match mIRC exactly can be tested headless in CI.
- The IRC protocol, session state, mIRC formatting, a mirc.ini-compatible config, a scripting interpreter that copies mIRC's evaluation model (PCRE2 tuned to behave like mIRC's PCRE 8.45), DCC, and the display format strings are all pure Swift.
- Some decisions go beyond mIRC to fit MacOS: an untrusted server certificate is asked the user and pinned, never just trusted. Router port mapping uses MacOS's own port mapper. And also created a few new pixel icon sets I haven't fully decided on.
Nice! Got any screenshots?
Sadly https://x.com/palaverapp is no more, it was a great iOS client. I just tried to find it in the app store and saw it got removed.
Seems you never found Mango IRC on iOS
I didn’t, indeed. But I just looked and didn’t quite like the design, so it doesn’t seem to be what I’m looking for.
Still, better than Goguma for iOS as far as design goes. I wonder how the features compare through, as Goguma is the gold standard, akin to Conversations for XMPP.
I’ve been using mango on ios recently, and I’m really impressed: https://mangoirc.chat/ - native ios/macos irc client with many ircv3 tags enabled.
What is the use case for IRC these days? Honest question.
Same use case as for Discord and Slack, only it's not centralized or owned by any corporation.
I've ended up managing to vibe an IRC client for Twitch over the last couple of weeks to make following the sometimes flood of the [Hasan] 'Piker Broadcasting Service' stream chat a bit easier;
https://hasanabi.neocities.org/?theme=nightshade
Note: Twitch chat isn't real IRC, but exposes an IRC-compatible interface.
fair point
fwiw, I was logging in with Quassel for several weeks before I started that project, that needs an OAuth token for the IRC login
https://github.com/mxmilkiib/hasanabi.neocities.org
Maybe with all the age verification spyware around its time I finally went back to IRC chat.
Some never left. Notoriously, some bigtech companies have an internal IRC network for tech discussions because that's one communication system that you can rely on to stay up even during catastrophic outages.
That's exactly what my tech teams did during outages of other channels. Spin up an ircd and carry on.
That’s just nostalgia. You wouldn’t miss bouncers, worrying about presence, multiple devices, file sharing, and more.
I've been using https://www.irccloud.com for years, it takes care of all these things and also has an app / push notifications. It's still IRC, but it takes care of a lot of the annoying parts of it that made it feel dated.
I never worry about presence in any form of chat. I don't care if people are there when I message them; it's up to them to pick up my messages at their convenience.
Which is never if the person you messaged did not have a bouncer or their bouncer crashed.
Presence is the defining feature of chat. Without it, you're using a forum.
The Lounge https://thelounge.chat/
IRC was great. But I don't think it can bounce back with the alternatives that we now have. A focussed effort to get Matrix working, or any of the open source alternatives would be better. Of course, people invest their time in what they think is fun and that is fine. But the already existing alternatives provide what people need and want today, so IRCv3 will have it infinitely harder.
> A focussed effort to get Matrix working
At what point do we say matrix isn't going to work? It's been like this for years. It's so overengineered on an immutable chat history on a blockchain it has crossed the line into "way too expensive to run and maintain for streams of cat pictures and memes". Worse is better.
I don't get this, it is working. It's largely replaced IRC in open source spaces. It's not going to penetrate the mainstream but it's fine for what it is and people do use it all the time.
People have different definitions for "working". I assume that the people who claim that Matrix doesn't work are the ones comparing to alternative commercial solutions and all the polish that usually accompanies those.
A decade ago Moxie Marlinspike argued[1] that to develop Signal more quickly, he and his team could not be distracted by federation. At the time I wasn't sure what to think, but it does seem that the effort level of using the integrated approach of client/server/protocol may just logistically be easier.
[1] - https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
I've been using it for years now, it's working just fine for me. It's no Discord or WhatsApp just yet, but it's lacking about a couple hundred million dollars of investment for that to happen to any open source chat solution.
I'll happily move over to XMPP or IRCv4 if they can get it right, I'm not married to the way Matrix does things. But it's good enough, open source, and federated.
On this topic: https://robustirc.net/
It's a server side change, robustifying the server-to-server links and its effects on connected clients.
I really hope IRC supports WebSocket transport
All the IRC server hosts I've talked to said they would never enable WebSocket support from fear of bot spam :(
Mango IRC does! So does Halloy I think
I know, but it doesn't seems to be in the RFC yet. RFC creates specs and agreements between the protocol and it makes it officially acceptable for clients to start consider respecting it.
I'm running a Matrix server using https://github.com/matrix-construct/tuwunel as an alternative to IRC, but I missed the lean-and-mean of IRC since Matrix is full on event driven delivery like XMPP/Jabber.
IRCv3 are the consensus-based standards body for modern IRC and has ratified the WebSocket spec. Its very unlikely there will be another IRC RFC because getting anything through the IETF is a bureaucratic nightmare. I was a reviewer for the draft IRC-CTCP RFC and it eventually died because the IETF wanted external reviewers who didn't work on the spec and that just didn't exist.
I largely credit mIRC for getting me into computers and programming. But I haven't used IRC in a decade... I wonder if kids these days even know what it is.
No mIRC on the list, oh well.
It's still active.
Great! There is a whole generation raised on ICQ, Y! Mensager, MSN and naturally mIRC.
I wish IRC supported images. It's weird that to share a screenshot I need a chat platform that also support VOIP when I just want to paste an image in the chat.
You don't need protocol support for uploading images to storage, and then rendering it inline. Many clients have been doing that for years.
You are using wrong client then, try Mango. It gives you image uploads and other modern features
if you look at the linked roadmap, most issues are from 2020/2021, with one from 2017, when Discord appeared.
So yeah, we are going to have the Dyson swarm before this is done.
I built a terraform based box that runs ergo ircd with The Lounge as a front end. So basically irc3 as an app server, but you can still federate where needed. Works great. Cheap, performant, I can integrate services into it without all Slack’s bullshit.
IRC is dead to me, you can thank Andrew Lee (of Freenode infamy) for that one.
Isn't exactly the beauty of IRC that one person doing something to one node in the network isn't affecting the rest at all?
I can't be bothered to sign up for both libera and oftc. When everything was on freenode, you didn't have to jump through any hoops just to ask a question.
You don't need to "sign up". You just open your client, connect to the server and ask your question.
all of the Freenode staff just rebranded as Libera Chat, bought a new domain and continued on as usual.
Your loss.
Go linger in the ircv3 channel for a week or two, the answer is yes.
Mostly complainers who would rather see IRC stay the same. Right now one of them is complaining the author is a vibe coder, as if that somehow makes the critique that IRC continues to be far behind everything else less real.