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- Hacker News
- 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?by neals
- 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.
by kstrauser - 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...
by kristopolous - 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.
by Retr0id - 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).by prologic
- 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
by basilikum - 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.
by theshrike79 - 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).
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.
by rkagerer