I've been an IRC user since 1996 and still going strong. There have been many chat networks that have come and gone, but IRC, by virtue of being a protocol rather than a commercial venture, lives on.<p>These days, I use Textual on OS X which has a very clean interface and things like in-line images and videos combined with ZNC for logging messages while I'm away. I log in and they all come up, if I want older ones I use the backlog module with /bl #chan <num lines to go back>. Granted it's not as elegant as scrolling up in Slack but I don't tend to need it often. I'm even connected to my friend group's Slack via IRC so I never have to open Slack itself!<p>I find the idea of piping in various things into IRC intriguing and something I've been meaning to implement. It's trivial to get a Python/Perl/etc script to connect to an IRC server and spit out some information.<p>Long live IRC!
+1 for IRC, the interface is clunky and the protocol hasn't aged particularly well (especially for mobile devices who may not be able to hold a connection forever). But the social aspect of easily accessible chatrooms and the plethora of clients/tools surrounding IRC is really second to none.<p>You can put a pretty skin on it (slack,discord) but at the end of the day it's going to take years to bring up the level of tooling and at the end you wind up in a closed loop on someone elses platform.<p>FWIW; I dream of electric sheep so I'm completely biased. I run an IRC network if anyone is interested in joining.<p>host: irc.darkscience.net/6697 (SSL required)<p>chan: #darkscience
I agree with the author on many points, but he's wrong about mobile support. WeeChat has a relay plugin (built-in) that allows mobile clients to connect to your existing WeeChat session. There are even some options to choose from: WeeChat-Android has recently gotten some love again (I hear it works nicely), and Glowing Bear works on every device that has a modern browser and has a nice responsive UI, along with some neat features like embeds and direct imgur upload.<p>Both connect to your WeeChat instance directly, so there's no cloud provider you have to trust, as the relay works as a socket and websocket. This allows Glowing Bear to work in the browser (Disclosure: I'm one of the devs)<p><a href="https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear</a><p><a href="https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android</a><p>Oh and the point about long URLs being unclickable has been addressed by bare mode, which is bound to meta-L by default. This is not a concern for the mobile clients obviously, as they don't run in a terminal.
I'm a long-time IRC user (back to 2004---wait, it might not qualify as "long-time") as well, but I feel that the current reputation of IRC is simply built around communities that <i>still</i> conglomerate on IRC. IRC is a horrible protocol in the modern standard, lacking every bit of the modernism you define. I still don't like a recent trend of using something like the Slack instance for public discussion, but that trend clearly shows that the continued "success" of IRC is simply an illusion or at best depending on an external factor.
I am not an IRC user, but I wonder whether Python Paradox[1] applies to IRC users.<p>To soak wisdom from top-tier hackers in the field, you want to go where they hang out. IRC might just be the hacker playground.<p>That alone makes a convincing case for using IRC.<p>[1]: <a href="http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html</a>
I know of others who forward almost everything to email, including custom scrapers/converters (and then of course there's RMS). If your info feed contains more long form resources, that seems like a better end point. But for twitter feeds and notifications, IRC seems mostly sufficient.<p>Now I do wonder what would be the equivalent for someone heavily into image-based communiciation/updates. Unifying your reddit, snapchat, facebook, imgur etc.
Forward everything to pinterest (or a similar homebrew interface)? Maybe even rendering some text updates to images...
I use IRC over XMPP almost daily, with a transport that connects me to a channel and represents it as multi-user chat, like #maemo%irc.freenode.net@irc.netlab.cz.<p>The primary reason is that XMPP behaves really nice if the connection is spotty: When I am using IRC in a moving train, I almost never timeout even if the network is not reachable for minutes – and as soon as the client reconnects, I get all the messages from the chatroom.
This was very informative and this "hub" is something that I want to setup for myself. When I started writing down concepts I immediately picked slack because of all the integrations but isn't it a bit 'overkill' to use a community system for me alone to get all my feeds aggregated together?<p>Are there solutions out there that offer something similar but without the community aspect?
FWIW there's a really good Slack plugin for Weechat called wee-slack [0]. It uses the Slack API (as opposed to their IRC gateway) and so is surprisingly full featured.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/rawdigits/wee-slack" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rawdigits/wee-slack</a>
IRC user since 1995 and still going strong. Too bad IRCNet is declining, it has been my source of entertainment since the beginning, having these Finnish chat rooms and close circle of friends. I never really got into the english tech-related irc channels, they move too fast and are hard to follow...
My main issue with IRC is channel rot. Every channels I was once a part of died. Most channels that are still "active" are in fact filled with quiet lurkers.<p>Otherwise IRC is still my favourite. I simply don't visit anymore...
I lived in IRC from 2001 to 2006.<p>Back in the days it was my go to social software. People were always online there and I even started programming with mIRC. Funny thing, back in the days I built chat-bots for fun and now they are big business, haha. Well, most people there were nerds and this was okay. We also had our own small bulletin board communities.<p>Later I wanted to meet girls and they just didn't show up often on IRC or BBoards.<p>So I started using LiveJournal, MSN Messenger and MySpace. Later I switched to Facebook and WhatsApp.
I never could use IRC because it's hard to sift through the noise. I have the same issue with group chats as implemented in Slack, but at least Slack can be accessed with an XMPP client, meaning I can get asynchronous delivery of messages without the need to have a client running 24/7. Do all heavy IRC users have a bouncer and a bot or do they rely on a service like irccloud? Either way, without async messaging, it's hard to use in a distributed team.
I started learning programming since 2012. I don't like IRC. IRC is not friendly to people like us. Hard to connect, hard to find a free and neat client, hard to talk to the people, hard to start a new thread(also hard since it's in English, but this is somehow good for others). That's why I like talking with people on Twitter and WeChat.
Regarding the long URL issue, since IRC can be easily customised, wouldn't it be possible to create a filter that, for each message, would send the URLs to a URL shortener service and display the result? It could even be a self-hosted service to make sure the URLs remain private.
irc since -95. Though I use it just for work these days. I don't think irc will ever go away. It would be nice to have it working in a persistent, distributed way without servers, maybe in the future.