I found myself loving what this guy writes about IRC, and I think a lot of his words will go straight to the heart of specially the older nerds here on Lemmy.

Hope you enjoy.

  • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninjaEnglish
    14·
    1 year ago

    I used to love IRC and have a fair amount of nostalgia for it. That said, a post advocating for IRC that doesn’t even mention Matrix is failing to discuss the best replacement for IRC. Matrix is the IRC killer. After using Matrix, I don’t understand how anyone could want to go back to IRC with its net splits, non persistent chat history, lack of rich text, etc.

    • 1984OPEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      I’ve used matrix myself, it’s awesome. There is a good chance that it really takes off, the more people gets fed up with surveillance capitalism, which I guess is the best phrase to describe things right now.

    • jmp242@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Irc clients don’t need to be in a web browser, and personally I don’t want persistent chat saved forever. I also just want text much of the time.

      That said, I do find some of the features in discord (and hence in matrix) nice. I just currently have only a support for lemmy in Matrix and haven’t seen groups use those servers yet. Discord hasn’t yet caused a migration.

      • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninjaEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        There are a lot of Matrix clients to choose from; they’re not all electron web apps and there’s even a terminal app available. There could easily be a Matrix client that behaves the way you want, but I couldn’t tell you if one exists. You’d have to try a few and see if they have settings that work well for you.

        I guess I’m a little curious about why you wouldn’t want persistent chat history. Major IRC networks log all chats anyway, so it’s only you who’s missing out on having that chat history available if you are ever offline.

    • lnxtx@feddit.nlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I see the Matrix rooms being bridged with their IRC counterparts. So IRC servers can live a few more years, I think.

      • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninjaEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        They certainly can and will live for a while, but the IRC side is missing out on useful features and I honestly find rooms that are bridged to IRC a little annoying in Matrix because IRC folks generate a lot of join/leave events.

  • madsen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    For me IRC scores points on not having push notifications, rich text, custom emojis, embedded images/video, etc. It’s plain text communication — multiplayer notepad, if you will — and it’s great at what it does. I love that I don’t need anything but a terminal window for utilizing the full capabilities of IRC, and the lack of persistent chat history is a great counter to FOMO. (Yeah, you can stay online or have a bot that logs everything — the point is that most people don’t.)

    • 1984OPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Thats a nice point actually. Sometimes less is more.

  • AlternateRoute@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Still use IRC but it gets really clunky / complicated when you want to have push notifications / persistent history etc… You end up setting up something like ZNC (IRC Bouncer) to act as an always online server and then hooking clients to it persist your online status.

    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      It works out of the box and completely painlessly with The Lounge.

      It web based so some might not be a fan, but for mobile use it’s pretty great. Just install as PWA on Android or iOS and it’s pretty seamless.

      • 1984OPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        It looks nice. But I assume it’s sending messages in clear text? Im using Element a bit (https://element.io/) but it doesn’t feel as fun as Lemmy. I guess it can be great for general chatting in real time though.

        • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          It’s an IRC client, so yes everything is plain text. IRC is a very basic protocol, no encryption or anything other than TLS for your connection to the server.

    • 1984OPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yeah me too, I’ve been missing this. Personal websites that aren’t corporate are so cool.

      • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’m working on a decentralized free hosting protocol (hosts your stuff, help others host theires. It’s all automatic, you just share some stuff and people share yours. All encrypted and so on), it’s working, would you be interested in checking it out?

        • terminhell@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          So, like Geocities but, decentralized?

          Not to undermine your project, but what’s the difference with it, and just quickly spinning up a LAMP?

          • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Geocities, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time! Wasn’t that a 3D world or could you share files too?

            LAMP is centralised, that’s the real difference.

            With Tenfingers, you can shut your pc down and your site (or what ever data you share) will still be up.

            It’s also hard to shut down, files are encrypted (so you must have access to the link file to even know what people share) and possibly shared in lots of different countries.

            • terminhell@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              Geocities, at least how I remember it was a service from Yahoo for people to build their own websites. It was incredibly easy to use. I even had a diablo 1 fan page that was full of cringe XD

              • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                Cool, gonna check that out!

                One difference with Tenfingers is it’s built to be tamper free and takedown safe, so if you put up a video of the Tiananmen square protest or have an old (but somehow “owned”) song there, nobody can really know and even if, they’d have more than a hassle to just even limit the availability.

    • 1984OPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I get FormatException: “invalid radix number” when trying the link. But I think I saw that post right after I posted this post.

      One very nice thing about using Lemmy is that we are all reminded about all the technologies that exists outside of the corporate web. And maybe the interest for those grow again.