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

It's a great product fit for 1998 but it is not 1998

"Just set up a bounce server" If I'm going to the bother how about I set up a fucking Conduwuit instance

@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

@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

@mcc honestly I think 1998 could have done better

@mcc I mean...I've recently gone back to IRC, lol

@mcc until they shut off the bridge, matrix.org was the best IRC bouncer I'd ever used

@mcc is this not more a funding/organization problem than a technical one?

I use IRCCloud and it has a pretty nice interface and always online, but it’s not free. There are self hosted options, but somebody somewhere has to operate and pay for it, so I guess the question is like all online services, who is operating and who is paying?

@mcc point: fediverse idle rpg

counterpoint: the need for an idle rpg

@mcc Geeze, you really want the world, don't you?

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

@mcc @vampiress who the heck had a laptop in 1998? 🤔

(I know they technically existed long before but I’m pretty sure they were only for rich ̶w̶a̶n̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶ business people back then)

@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...

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

@mcc @glyph yup

@aeva @mcc Yep. I spent many happy hours on IRC, but the main reason I stayed on Undernet (iirc) was because netsplits weren't as bad. Plus you needed a decent client. File transfer was awful. Definitely wasn't completely user friendly even with a good client.

@itgrrl @mcc My girlfriend had one in like 1997. The screen was absolutely TERRIBLE. Like, barely legible. The rest of it wasn't great either. It was so bad it took me like 12 years before I risked getting a laptop myself, my memory of her terrible one was so strong.

@mcc so mean... 😭

@mcc oh why

@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.

@vampiress @itgrrl that's why it was a good product fti for 1998.

However in 1999…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook

@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

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

@mcc

@freya @mcc
No push and no reacts? You mean I don't have to unlock my phone to see that somebody sent the 19th eggplant emoji in response to a question that wasn't about groceries? I'll take two please!

@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.

@itgrrl @mcc @vampiress it me, since 95 as a personal primary machine, but even before that there was one in the house going back to the 80s

@EndlessMason @mcc I'll take precisely zero lol. I like push, it's great when you're blind, so you know you've got messages when you're in another window

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

@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...)

@freya @mcc
Does it just read you the push right away, or do you get a tone?

@EndlessMason @mcc I get a ding, and it reads it inj a 'polite' mode, where it finishes reading the sentence it's reading, goes "new notification from discord, #general,tetraspace, <name>, <message>"

@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 gosh I wish it was ... Can't we you know pretend it's 1998 for a while? Who wants 2026 anyways?

@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"

@klara
"Ivy asking sun-starved ground-cover to just climb a tree already."

This is excellent.
@mcc

@thatsten @mcc that bridge was horrible, it was frequently getting messages delayed and out-of-order (and if you weren’t careful about it, long messages and edits could be really annoying for IRC users)

also it had several security vulnerabilities discovered at various points and IIRC it didn’t handle quiets

… so whatever other IRC bouncers you’ve used must’ve been really terrible

@freya @mcc
Polite mode! Computers need way more of that!

@EndlessMason @mcc screenreaders are nice about it

@mcc yeah IRC is great if what you want is "a room you can join and leave"

99% of chat platforms are not like that

it's like a MUCK minus the world (and those are basically text VRChat). Sooo it's text-based voice chat.

@mcc it was terrible in early 00s for sure

@mcc This. Also every time I see a reply to this thread in my timeline it's lowkey threatening 😅

@mcc please we have to *make* users suffer the absolutely attrocious clients that seemingly can't even implement the already lacking and outdated with decades features of IRC...

Push notifications? F that. History to catch up with when you've been offline? No baby, let's party like it's the stone age.

IRC being touted as not only an alternative to Discord, but a privacy-preserving one at that? LMAO what is encryption?... Also anyone can impersonate you btw...

@mcc lmao just connect to some rando's bounce server connected to another rando's IRC server... 10/10 more private compared to Discord fr...

@mcc it seems they renamed the project tuwunel