Everyone going "Just move to IRC!!!" clearly has no understanding of *why* other things have been more popular than IRC for the last ~12 years, and why this won't happen.

Before you reply with "lol IRC is great you don't get it": I say this as a die-hard IRC user who worked for an IRC client company and also ran a large organisation on IRC for the last decade (until we finally gave up and moved to Mattermost this year).

That said, I wish it was true. I want IRC to win.

But without people actually wanting the protocol to move forward, servers changing, and new clients being written to handle it, it ain't gonna happen.

And to be clear, it's not like people haven't tried. They really, really, really have.

But have you ever tried convincing people to modify a protocol that is mostly unchanged since 1993, across a massive set of servers that are largely derived from the same codebase but warped in interesting ways, and run entirely by volunteers who go to war with each other every decade.

@jonty I keep thinking that step 1 of modernising IRC is turning on the chat history extension and step 2 involves your IRC server disconnecting anyone who tries to login with emacs, irssi or basically any IRC client with a featureset stuck in 1993

@jonty @erincandescent

> disconnecting anyone who tries to login with ... irssi

:(

@erincandescent Part of the problem is server-side chat history storage being so controversial within the IRC community.

"Just run a bouncer", they say, like that is actually something most people are ever going to do.

Can't wait for someone to reply to this with "just use Matrix" because I have this whole bottle of rage I've been saving up

@jonty I should invite you to a pint and hear uour rant about matrix

@jonty it’s completely decentralized! Which is another way of saying “we can’t change anything”.

@tom EXACTLY

@erincandescent @jonty don't make me bop you on the head next time we meet for the irssi remark (it actually handles history fine)

though I do plan to migrate off of it at some point

@jonty and then so many channels have public logs anyway! and who knows who’s bouncer is running on a box last upgraded in 2015?

there are reasonable infrastructure reasons why networks don’t have message history as an option but that doesn’t mean the lack of message history is a good thing. even the good reasons are to a large extent accidents of history

@jonty Email chain.

@d The one true federated chat platform. It has history and everything.

@jonty @erincandescent Really depends how it will be implemented but opt in for channels to designate a archive thingy. Plenty of IRC channels have a public or semi public archive. So having a API to just fetch this in your history 🤷

@evey @erincandescent You used the word "just" there

@jonty to paraphrase a post about twitter: "irc sucks, i use it constantly"

@erincandescent @jonty

step 2 involves your IRC server disconnecting anyone who tries to login with emacs, irssi or basically any IRC client with a featureset stuck in 1993

Please do not do this. Also irssi’s featureset is not stuck in 1993, it even supports message-tags!

@jonty i'll bite

if i were to say "just use matrix", what would you say?