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.
IRCv3 (ircv3.net)
315 pointsby basilikum12 hours ago268 comments
rkagerer 9 hours ago
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).
Flere-Imsaho 9 hours ago
ICQ plus Winamp was peak PC
hurril 9 hours ago
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.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago
Ventrilo for voice chats. Finding others on Quakenet and playing 3vs3, sometimes making friends, sometimes making enemies, always having fun.
dollylambda 6 hours ago
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.
lbreakjai 6 hours ago
I suddenly feel the urge to slap something around a bit with a large trout.
doubled112 4 hours ago
Can you whip a llama’s ass with it?
drusepth 4 hours ago
Don't forget to put on your robe and wizard hat
hurril 3 hours ago
I love this thread. We spent so much time in mIRC, about warez, weirdness but obviously tons of programming. Fun was had :)
Al-Khwarizmi 5 hours ago
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.
PetahNZ 18 minutes ago
mIRC scripting was one of the first languages I learn't.
stackghost 6 hours ago
It really did whip the llama’s ass.
johnisgood 6 hours ago
ICQ and MSN Messenger, yup. :P
da_chicken 8 minutes ago
I still can't believe there isn't an open source Winamp 2.91/2.95 clone.
Everything wants to make a "universal media library manager". Jesus, doesn't anybody just want to name their MP3 correctly and then use file management, and then have an audio player that just plays audio?
bluebarbet 9 hours ago
>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.
doublepg23 9 hours ago
I’m surprised how popular Discord is for as “IT guy” and information dense the UI is tbh.
cassianoleal 9 hours ago
ICQ was incredibly popular amongst “normies”, at least in Brazil. Much more so than amongst nerds who were mostly still on IRC.
kawsper 7 hours ago
In Denmark it was MSN Messenger, the nerds were on IRC and also had ICQ.
cassianoleal 7 hours ago
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.
Sharlin 9 hours ago
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.
Arubis 8 hours ago
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.
Sharlin 7 hours ago
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.
Aozora7 7 hours ago
I've been using it since 2016, and none of the new features that I don't use have negatively impacted me.
nyanmatt 5 hours ago
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)
esseph 4 hours ago
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.
Aozora7 4 hours ago
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.
quietsegfault 8 hours ago
I can’t get into Discord. It’s just so messy and disorganized and too much information flying at my face.
esseph 4 hours ago
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.
bombela 3 hours ago
It's the too much completely useless information flying at my face that I despise. So much empty space, the UI is so weirdly verbose for everything but the actual content. You need discord in full screen to manage reading messages properly. It's also slow switching channels and server.
Maybe I may officially old now, but I recall I could converse on IRC, not full screen, on a 800x600 15" monitor. Yes I know today we have tons of pictures and emojis and so we obviously need a bit more room. But common. Even slack takes slightly less room that discord for the same amount of information.
And yes, I enabled compact mode.
internet101010 7 hours ago
Discord is incredibly popular among younger people in general now. It escaped tech people containment years ago.
Aozora7 7 hours ago
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.
DeluluDon 5 hours ago
If someone from discord DM'd me wanting to move to telegram or whatsapp, they're automatically assumed to be a scammer.
pdntspa 4 hours ago
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??
Aozora7 4 hours ago
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.
progval 3 hours ago
Weechat does it: https://weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_quickstart.en.h... I don't use this feature, though.
However I like that I can see all the channel with unread messages at once, and can switch between them quickly. On Discord if I'm chatting in three channels spread across two servers then switching takes two clicks.
RunSet 2 hours ago
> 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's just yahoo groups that requires your phone number.
saghm 5 hours ago
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.
serf 8 hours 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.
purerandomness 8 hours ago
Everybody had ICQ. You probably are too young to remember, but ICQ was as commonly used as Instagram today.
ahtihn 8 hours ago
No it wasn't and it's not even close.
jamwil 7 hours ago
Definitely a regional thing. Where I grew up it was MSN Messenger all the way.
treve 7 hours ago
MSN Messenger was a bit after ICQ's peak
dragontamer 7 hours ago
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.
devin 7 hours ago
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.
com2kid 7 hours ago
ICQ was released only 6 months before AIM, not that big of a difference. :D
chneu 7 hours ago
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.
danaris 6 hours ago
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?
Piraty 2 hours ago
do you mean Trillian, the software that offered a (very themable) frontend to AIM, ICQ, yahoo and (i think) at least 3 more chat services?
the awesomeness of Trillian made it obvious how useless it is for so many different services to coexist while they all offer the same value. still true today
Telemakhos 6 hours ago
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.
dragontamer 5 hours ago
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.
thayne 4 hours ago
> 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.
icedchai 4 hours ago
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!
broken-kebab 5 hours ago
When ICQ was at its peak, users of any chat software were a rather thin layer of population. So "everybody" is more than exaggeration.
pdntspa 4 hours ago
ICQ numbers got into 9, 10 digits. For a late 90s internet population that was practically everybody.
broken-kebab an hour ago
This is type mismatch + incorrect assumptions. In 2001 ICQ went over 100 mln registered UINs. Which is not the same as "active users", it's all registrations from the inception (minus 10000 reserved). Losing UINs was a very common thing. Password recovery required email, which wasn't obligatory during registration, even if entered wasn't verified, back then few people knew what "password manager" is, and finally emails weren't particularly stable identity before gmail. But even if we would, for the sake of argument, assume the number as active users count, regular internet users by that time were numbered at more than half a billion. So even with absolutely unrealistically high estimation, ICQ share would be less than 20% of then internet population. And more realistic is probably 10-15%.
apelapan 3 hours ago
Obviously it was not a global "everyone" like today with WhatsApp. But I would guess that perhaps 20 out of 25 in my high school class was on ICQ back in 1999 or so. Most of us only had dial up, so we wouldn't be allowed to be online and block the phone for more than a 30 minutes or an hour per day.
Anyway, ICQ was not some elite hacker thing. Anyone with enough reading comprehension to tell milk and orange juice apart from reading a label could operate it just fine.
broken-kebab an hour ago
It was very popular, no argument about it, especially among then youngsters. But "everybody" blows it of proportion way too much.
>ICQ was not some elite hacker thing
Sure, exactly IRC was that hacker thing.
bluebarbet 3 hours ago
Oh. Misunderstanding. I thought I was replying to a comment about IRC.
kragen 10 minutes ago
I never had ICQ because I was opposed to replacing open internet protocols with proprietary walled gardens governed by unaccountable private corporations imposing clickwrap contracts of adhesion on helpless users.
jeltz 7 hours ago
Is there any proof that normies would not be on board with it? Discord is information dense and huge among normies.
wredcoll 5 hours ago
For the love of... can we stop saying 'normie', it's just so stupid. And intellectually lazy. And also dumb.
quietsegfault 8 hours ago
“Uh-oh!”
opello 7 hours ago
And the fog horn launch sound that reminded you if your speakers were on or turned up... good times.
mook 4 hours ago
One of the grocery stores near me actually uses that in their POS system, so you can hear it as you check out.
realityloop 3 hours ago
I was a 6 digit’er 421330, and was even able to correspond with the creators via ICQ
speckx 3 hours ago
Mine was 29x,xxx something. I too miss ICQ.
mondainx 7 hours ago
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".
mondainx 7 hours ago
zobzu 5 hours ago
pff more than 6 digits!
Al-Khwarizmi 5 hours ago
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.
oooyay 3 hours ago
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.
eahm 2 hours ago
You forgot to say “Written in Go” /s
I’ve been checking your client for a while and it looks awesome, thanks for the reminder, finally after 30+ years I think I really got tired and left IRC for good but I’ll download and give it a go later today.
d3Xt3r 28 minutes ago
> The interface is built with React and Tailwind CSS
ಠ_ಠ
agumonkey 21 minutes ago
I wonder if the 'unobstrusive, information-dense' will not die with our generation. The new guys grew up with flat and material design, plus UX design classes all about spaced typography and screens.. they will never miss what we do.
basilikum 9 hours ago
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
prologic 11 hours ago
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).
obsoleszenz 10 hours ago
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?
prologic 10 hours ago
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.
WhyNotHugo 9 hours ago
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.
prologic 9 hours ago
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".
itintheory 8 hours ago
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...
prologic 8 hours ago
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.
AtHeartEngineer 8 hours ago
but you could change networks, you could run your own.
jjrh 6 hours ago
Protocol was documented but each server is a silo.
wredcoll 5 hours ago
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.
RunSet 2 hours ago
> the only thing I took from Discord at all (it's UI is generally awful yes, I agree!) is the support for multiple servers.
To be sure, Discord "servers" are not servers in the sense the word is used in virtually every other context. They are more like group chats that share a hosting location. If anything the hard part for Discord is making them seem disparate enough that someone might rent their "own server".
stackskipton 7 hours ago
Discord killer chat features are:
Message History
Channel Discoverability
Attachments
Mobile
Anyone can start a server
esafak 7 hours ago
Every chat product has these things?
jeroenhd 6 hours ago
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.
DeluluDon 5 hours ago
IRCCloud or a $5 VPS if you're willing to pay gets rid of the join/part spam
Aozora7 7 hours ago
Add custom emojis and stickers to that.
Kind of baffles me that people still make chat apps without those.
danaris 6 hours ago
...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.
wredcoll 5 hours ago
Quick, lets restart the argument about "self-hosted"!
shepherdjerred 4 hours ago
You’re missing voice chat and video streaming
jeroenhd 6 hours ago
> 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.
shepherdjerred 4 hours ago
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
Greed an hour ago
Infamous for it's bad UX? This thread is genuinely the first time I've ever heard this, all of my extended circles were overjoyed when Discord came onto the scene and displaced the patchy, hodgepodge UI's of Mumble, Ventrilo, IRC, Skype simultaneously. Both from a feature and a visual perspective it was a breath of fresh air for the programmers, gamers, and casuals alike for everyone I know. Maybe the only thing that still survives alongside it for the folks I know as a preferred communication channel is sporadic Whatsapp among the EU guys and iOS group chats for the Americans locked into the Apple ecosystem.
What about it makes it terrible UX for you? Feature set seems to get better every year as far as I'm concerned, inclusion of ads aside.
lexicality 32 minutes ago
my latest annoyance is the way they keep making the gift nitro button bigger and more likely to be where you tap when trying to send a message. I don't know what their PMs are smoking to think that gifting nitro is something people do so often that there needs to be a permanent flashing button on screen to do it.
SaberUK 9 hours ago
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.
mort96 6 hours ago
What would "new IRCv3 leadership" do to get all the different independent IRC client and server software developers to support IRCv3?
tagyro 36 minutes ago
Just today I installed an irc server, well three, and will try to convince my small group of friends to switch our comms to that. Nice to see the protocol evolving.
xyzsparetimexyz 34 minutes ago
I hope they enjoy communicating in plaintext, not having any chat history and being unable to send images.
kristopolous 12 hours ago
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...
dist-epoch 11 hours ago
COBOL is still used 50 years later.
pelagicAustral 11 hours ago
COBOL is definitely a hallmark of this type of argument.
kristopolous 11 hours ago
reminds me that fortran has a modern website: https://fortran-lang.org/
glimshe 11 hours ago
Logo too!
unclet 11 hours ago
what about SMTP?
kristopolous 11 hours ago
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 [email protected] 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.
zoky 11 hours ago
FTP is still used quite a bit. For what it’s useful for, nothing has come close to replacing it.
kristopolous 11 hours ago
like in enterprise? the browsers stopped shipping with ftp support I think 5 years ago.
terminalbraid 11 hours ago
You might be surprised to learn there are dedicated ftp clients.
kristopolous 11 hours ago
sarcasm?
TeMPOraL 11 hours ago
Don't know of a client with that name, but there are plenty of others.
zoky 10 hours 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).
Dylan16807 7 hours ago
> 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.
charcircuit 11 hours ago
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.
mathgeek 11 hours ago
Only if you ignore the banking industry.
thiht 10 hours ago
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
cowlevel 11 hours ago
SFTP? Don't confuse it with FTP or FTPS - SFTP is a different protocol which runs on top of SSH.
Bender 10 hours ago
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.
networked 10 hours ago
What do you mean, "for what it’s useful for"? For me, WebDAV has replaced FTP where SFTP hasn't.
kristopolous 28 minutes ago
Has that caught on? I last used it 15 years ago and it was great but I haven't seen it anywhere
frumiousirc 11 hours ago
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.
fragmede 10 hours ago
TCP
Geezus_42 8 hours ago
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
goalieca 6 hours ago
Telnet still very popular with embedded. SSH is not a spring chicken either.
terminalbraid 11 hours ago
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.
kristopolous 11 hours ago
Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.
hollowonepl 10 hours ago
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
cowlevel 10 hours ago
Still is, but a bit empty. https://eternal-september.org/
jeroenhd 6 hours ago
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.
pmoriarty 3 hours ago
> 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.
pmoriarty 3 hours ago
> 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.
movsx 11 hours ago
What about the registration you find so painful? It takes a single command to register a nick, if that's what you mean.
dijit 11 hours ago
In his defence, its a single command, if you know the command
terminalbraid 11 hours ago
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.
itintheory 8 hours ago
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.
0x457 4 hours ago
Also funny watching peopel mistype the command in the wrong window and expose their "password for everything" to everyone in the chat.
RyJones 11 hours ago
I'm here looking for other telenet (not telnet) oldheads, finding nobody.
countWSS 11 hours ago
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.
Ekaros 10 hours ago
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...
pmoriarty 3 hours ago
> 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.
nmlt 11 hours ago
But as IRC has a social network component, it's more of a social thing than anything inherent to IRC.
jstummbillig 11 hours ago
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...
techjamie 9 hours ago
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.
mondainx 7 hours ago
I wonder if the LOC Gopher is still around; I used to use it as a "jumping off" point.
Retr0id 10 hours ago
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.
progval 10 hours ago
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.
mort96 6 hours ago
> 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?
badsectoracula 10 hours ago
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
IshKebab 9 hours ago
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:
philsnow 3 hours ago
This is one of the things that killed xmpp (too many XEPs, experience was severely fragmented).
kstrauser 6 hours ago
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.
stackghost 6 hours ago
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.
kstrauser 6 hours ago
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.
stackghost 3 hours ago
Discord was originally for gamers so most communities I was part of had their own voip servers.
In the 90s it was in game chat, forums, VoIP, possibly an IRC channel. That was a lot of infra to juggle and usually it wasn’t all hosted by the same person. So if xXxDarkNinja69xXx got his feelings hurt he might take down the teamspeak and then your community is up shit creek without a paddle until you can find someone else to host it.
Discord does a merely-okay job of all of that, and possibly Reddit has supplanted the forum bits that discord can’t, but it’s less overhead for the administrators of each community.
I don’t really do any gaming these days so I too don’t use the VoIP, but that was a big part of the allure when discord launched.
clumsysmurf 6 hours ago
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.
kstrauser 6 hours ago
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.
clumsysmurf 5 hours ago
Thanks for the heads-up on Textual!
theshrike79 5 hours ago
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.
tyjen 8 hours ago
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/
embedding-shape 6 hours ago
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.
neals 12 hours ago
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?
rylando 12 hours ago
I mean, it seemed mobile enough for that tv presenter to get caught on a plane being a pedo on IRC
yieldcrv 12 hours ago
why wouldn’t mobile access work? Its just a protocol
hengheng 11 hours ago
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.
dewey 11 hours ago
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.
progval 11 hours ago
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)
dmacedo 9 hours ago
Oh thanks for the note about ergo.chat, need to have a play with this!
dewey 6 hours ago
Ergo looks really cool, will have to take a look at that. Thanks for sharing.
cowlevel 10 hours ago
Mobile devices are different devices with different constraints. The main blockers are intermittent connectivity and the need to save battery life.
javier2 12 hours ago
really need the simple voice chat for me to use it.
pkal 11 hours ago
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).
cowlevel 10 hours ago
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.
javier2 9 hours ago
ok, that is funny at least!
trickypr 11 hours ago
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).
mgaunard 11 hours ago
in general discord has a very bad app and usability, irc regardless of client is a clear upgrade
jeltz 11 hours ago
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.
OccamsMirror 10 hours ago
imo Telegram is the least bad chat app that I've used. Discord has a lot of UX and performance issues.
javier2 9 hours ago
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.
punarinta 6 hours ago
Try alternative, native, Slack clients like msga.app or similar. They tend to use Slack's API pretty efficiently.
pkal 11 hours ago
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.
cowlevel 11 hours ago
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.
phavelsk 9 hours ago
It’s a matter of having a good client. Mango will give you everything you mentioned … https://mangoirc.chat
DarkUranium 9 hours ago
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).
WhyNotHugo 9 hours ago
Goguma is an IRC client which runs on Linux Mobile, iOS and Android.
downsplat 2 hours ago
Does anyone know which IRC group this descends from, if any? Back when IRC was the thing it was split into rival networks, there was EFnet and IRCNet - I still remember when they split from each other, rather acrimoniously, over questions of governance and network protocol. And then there were the alternative networks, Undernet and DALnet and possibly a few more.
I was involved in server-to-server protocol design for a while, and each network had very specific ideas of how they wanted it. IIRC Undernet pioneered the use of timestamps to keep track of channel membership priority, EFnet came up with a v2 twist on the same idea, while IRCNet rejected the approach in favor of some kind of limited server-side persistence. Heady times!
badsectoracula 10 hours ago
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).
jareklupinski 10 hours ago
> 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?
AnonymousPlanet 10 hours ago
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.
sdcfgy 10 hours ago
This is actually a really good point and perspective. Couldn’t agree more.
badsectoracula 9 hours ago
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.
AnonymousPlanet 7 hours ago
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.
cykros 10 hours ago
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.
ido 10 hours ago
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.
badsectoracula 9 hours ago
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.
Bender 9 hours ago
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
user3939382 9 hours ago
> There is no video (or any other file) host on IRC servers.
Ircv3, the thread title, supports file sharing
badsectoracula 9 hours ago
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.
user3939382 5 hours ago
It is in draft https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/562
Good v3 clients like The Lounge also offer it
WhyNotHugo 9 hours ago
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.
badsectoracula 9 hours ago
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).
qudat 6 hours ago
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.
kstrauser 6 hours ago
Ergo has that built in now. It Just Worked when I installed that server and connected with Halloy.
SaberUK 8 hours ago
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.
dewey 11 hours ago
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.
rie_t 11 hours ago
An IRC client with an extension for image/video embeds and a voice chat (with video/screenshare support) would go far.
pkal 11 hours ago
I know it is a different protocol, but doesn't Mumble provide this to some degree?
gsich 11 hours ago
only voice and subpar text chat.
dewey 11 hours ago
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.
rie_t 11 hours ago
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.
dewey 11 hours ago
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.
movsx 11 hours ago
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.
smokeyfish 11 hours ago
I agree. Part of the beauty is the limitations, the simplicity and transient nature of it.
cowlevel 10 hours ago
Give Matrix a try.
jamesponddotco 10 hours ago
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.
phavelsk 9 hours ago
Seems you never found Mango IRC on iOS
jamesponddotco 9 hours ago
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.
dmacedo 9 hours ago
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.
jamesponddotco 9 hours ago
Nice! Got any screenshots?
dewey 6 hours ago
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.
cosmic_crumpet 6 hours ago
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.
t1234s 4 hours ago
Any companies running an internal IRC server instead of wasting money on slack?
mxmilkiib 11 hours ago
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;
cowlevel 10 hours ago
Note: Twitch chat isn't real IRC, but exposes an IRC-compatible interface.
mxmilkiib 10 hours ago
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
mxmilkiib 10 hours ago
meethkr 12 hours ago
Maybe with all the age verification spyware around its time I finally went back to IRC chat.
9dev 11 hours ago
That’s just nostalgia. You wouldn’t miss bouncers, worrying about presence, multiple devices, file sharing, and more.
mgaunard 11 hours ago
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.
jeltz 11 hours ago
Which is never if the person you messaged did not have a bouncer or their bouncer crashed.
esafak 7 hours ago
Presence is the defining feature of chat. Without it, you're using a forum.
dewey 11 hours ago
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.
9dev 3 hours ago
If you make IRC centralised like this, you’re taking everything away that makes it IRC. You could build the same thing with XMPP, Matrix, or Signal.
dewey 3 hours ago
It's as centralized as everyone running their znc on Hetzner. It's mostly just a bouncer with a nice web interface (Like The Lounge) and a rudimentary app for people who want to pay someone to run this setup. You'd still connect to Libera and other networks and there's zero lock in.
gsich 11 hours ago
The Lounge https://thelounge.chat/
Balinares 11 hours ago
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.
smokeyfish 11 hours ago
That's exactly what my tech teams did during outages of other channels. Spin up an ircd and carry on.
1potato 4 hours ago
What is the use case for IRC these days? Honest question.
pmoriarty 3 hours ago
Same use case as for Discord and Slack, only it's not centralized or owned by any corporation.
7bit 11 hours ago
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.
terminalbraid 11 hours ago
> 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.
broodbucket 10 hours ago
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.
jpeeler 9 hours ago
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.
jeroenhd 6 hours ago
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.
knorker 11 hours ago
On this topic: https://robustirc.net/
It's a server side change, robustifying the server-to-server links and its effects on connected clients.
stevefan1999 10 hours ago
I really hope IRC supports WebSocket transport
phavelsk 9 hours ago
Mango IRC does! So does Halloy I think
stevefan1999 9 hours ago
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.
SaberUK 8 hours ago
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.
koolala 4 hours ago
All the IRC server hosts I've talked to said they would never enable WebSocket support from fear of bot spam :(
olalonde 10 hours ago
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.
pjmlp 11 hours ago
No mIRC on the list, oh well.
smokeyfish 11 hours ago
It's still active.
pjmlp 10 hours ago
Great! There is a whole generation raised on ICQ, Y! Mensager, MSN and naturally mIRC.