Post · bonfire.mavnn.eu

IRC is bad, and the reason every time a new chat service collapses people seem to go "literally everywhere except IRC" is that "literally anything except IRC" is what people want

@mcc IRC is bad, but that doesn't mean that anything else is any better.

IRC still feels snappy to use, enormous flexibility in clients, better culture (in terms of community management), and also seriously reliable. I really can't think of /any/ other chat platform that meets those criteria.

@mcc
I agree with you, but I'm still going to set up my own IRC when I finally get things set up to stream movies. Because I miss this very experience of my old MST3K group. Nostalgia is bad for me, I know this.

@mcc To be fair, IRC was made in 1988. I doubt they intended for it to last this long, but wow does it ever keep on kicking. It's so simple, open, and minimal that it's easy for any random person or company to keep a server going. It's absolutely lacking in practically every single amenity, so in the end, as one might expect, the only thing it truly has going for it is that sheer, utter, absolute reliability.

It's kind of sad that we don't have a modern equivalent: something reliable, minimal, and simple like that. I wonder if partially we have the whole move to centralization to blame.

(I do really wish that could be something like Matrix, but I know that it just isn't going to get there as things stand. Not even that specifically, just... something...)

I don't know, I really miss IRC. I would go back to it in a heartbeat.

@mcc

@mcc IRC feels like it was great when people had only fixed devices. but uh...... no push notifs, no file upload support integrated, no integrated media, no reacts....

@freya irccloud adds a lot! If we're all going to become dependent on irccloud we can become dependent on mattermost or something

@mcc now we just need clients that aren't trashfires and have work accessibillity. and I mean working as in continues to work, not "we added basic accessibility and then rewrote the client with a new UI framework 3 months later because for some unknown fucking reason our app now needs GPU acceleration"

Re: I am going to hurt you

@mcc so mean... 😭

@mcc @mayintoronto All systems are great until you add people.

@mcc
I think IRC is good for a very specific style of ephemeral communication, but certainly not as a Discord replacement: that's closer to a web forum (although not as good as a web forum a lot of the time for text communication) combined with a videoconferencing utility...

@mcc as a long-time IRC user I endorse this take

@mcc Thank you for saying this.

People complain about various aspects of, say, the usability gap between Mastodon / The Fediverse and what Twitter used to be, and they raise a variety of good points, but on every one of those axes the gap between Discord/Slack and IRC absolutely dwarfs them.

I get that it's beloved of a vocal minority, but they are largely people whose lives have literally grown around IRC! Ivy asking sun-starved ground-cover to just climb a tree already.

@mcc Discord/Slack/etc proves that people want IRC, but only if there's a lot of other stuff bolted on to make it pop.

Plain-IRC is a milkshake which will bring precisely zero boys to the yard in this, the Year of our Glorb Twenty Twenty Whatever.

@mcc point: fediverse idle rpg

counterpoint: the need for an idle rpg

@mcc I think there are some _characteristics_ about IRC that are definitely desirable (being based on a protocol, not tied to a specific service etc) and that's probably what people think when they think they want IRC

@radgeRayden all of the "common" alternatives are protocol based too (matrix, xmpp). My impression is that it's mostly nostalgia. @mcc

@radgeRayden @pitbuster an interesting unique thing about IRC is you can participate in it with "no client", just a telnet program. Of course, good luck finding one of those.

@mcc Speaking as someone who has the fondest possible memories of IRC...

yep, sorry to nostalgia, mcc is right here

@vampiress You know what I like, is being able to close my laptop lid without leaving the conversation

@vampiress @mcc Quassel lets you do this, but you're still in the "host this thing on a VPS and do recreational sysadmin" territory to make it work. It's not quite BNC/ZNC levels of bad, unless you consider Qt usage cruel and unusual punishment (I personally don't, but I don't think those who do are being unfair).

There's also irccloud and such but that still only fixes one complaint among a litany of them.

IRC was cool. There's a reason most folks left it.