My good friend lolwut made a very astute observation some time ago about IRC being a nearly infallible NORP filter, and thus a very rare safe port from the normiefication storm
To any non-IRC users who are rightfully rolling their eyes at this, let me say that while this awful exclusionary attitude does exist on IRC, it is thankfully in the minority.
I hate reading articles like this that start out with me nodding vigorously a lot of solid critiques and analysis but then slowly slide into “IRC is great because there are fewer stupid newbies on it”; it makes me embarrassed to share a protocol with them.
Fellow retrocomputing enthusiasts: please cut this shit out; you’re making us all look bad, and even worse you’re driving people to Discord.
I spent almost 17 years on Freenode before Andrew Lee fucked it over, and ironically the only time anyone expressed the ideals of the post author was during the fucking over. That said, a lot of creepy-crawlies came out of the woodwork to gloat at the time, and I realized my IRC experience was probably quite sheltered.
I wrote a bit about my recollections of Freenode here (under “IRC culture wars (2020-07-20)”)
There’s nothing inherently wrong with using an obscure, retro, or otherwise non-mass-market-focused communication protocol as a hobbyist community, with the intention of using interest in that protocol as a de-facto gate for your community.
The problem isn’t that that retrocomputing enthusiasts are using IRC in part as a way to make sure their communities are disproportionately full of the sort of people who can use IRC - retro computing is a relatively unimportant hobby. The problem is that people trying to compute in the current day are, in their large, normie, numbers, deciding to use Discord, which creates a negative feedback loop of the non-free program and protocol Discord getting more users and encouraging more groups who want to start chat services to do so on Discord because it is what everyone else uses and is familiar with. A classic. network effect that ultimately affects me, even though I personally have no problem with IRC.
I don’t think that more than very trivial numbers of people are wavering between IRC and Discord, and picking Discord because they saw an IRC enthusiast make an anti-normie comment. I think that far more Discord users never heard of IRC, and if they had would simply treat it as an irrelevant protocol, because it doesn’t support scrollback, voice chat, video chat, good mobile support, or any of the other modern chat features that Discord provides.
So it is not actually true that IRC is the only viable chat. People - normies - by the tens of millions are using Discord anyway, and creating a network effect that pulls in those of us who don’t want to use non-free software. This is the collective action problem that needs to be solved.
I think that far more Discord users never heard of IRC,
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but, when I (an IRC user) briefly tried Discord some years ago, I went into the settings and one of the first settings I saw was whether I wanted messages displayed in a large format or a compact format, with the latter option labelled as “like IRC”.
IRC … doesn’t support scrollback
Although I don’t dispute that these ‘modern’ chat systems work better than IRC for users who are (even) more nontechnical than I, one reason I would not want to switch away from IRC is how much easier (for me) searching my IRC logs is — having the whole corpus of regex-greppable text sitting in front of me vs (from what I recall of Discord, e.g.) dealing with the vagaries of a fuzzy search engine returning small pagefuls of lazily-loaded results at a time.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but, when I (an IRC user) briefly tried Discord some years ago, I went into the settings and one of the first settings I saw was whether I wanted messages displayed in a large format or a compact format, with the latter option labelled as “like IRC”.
All that means is that at least one person who works for Discord (the only people who are allowed to make changes to the one authorized Discord client!) was familiar enough with IRC to include that note. The Discord company does have an interest in getting IRC users to use Discord, but they have even more of an interest in getting the larger number of people who have never used IRC or otherwise don’t care about IRC to use Discord.
Although I don’t dispute that these ‘modern’ chat systems work better than IRC for users who are (even) more nontechnical than I, one reason I would not want to switch away from IRC is how much easier (for me) searching my IRC logs is — having the whole corpus of regex-greppable text sitting in front of me vs (from what I recall of Discord, e.g.) dealing with the vagaries of a fuzzy search engine returning small pagefuls of lazily-loaded results at a time.
Understandable! A person using a real-time chat program should be able to easily archive their chats and do something with that text.
I’ve used tools to download Discord logs into a text format that I could search, which worked well enough for what I wanted to do at the time (namely, archiving chats from a group that was abandoning Discord for Matrix). I believe that using these tools is or was against the Discord terms of service, albeit rarely if ever enforced. Even if unenforced, the fact that grabbing chat logs was against their terms of service should be disqualifying.
But you can’t use IRC to chat with people who don’t use IRC and who do use Discord and who don’t care about being able to grep through chatlogs.
Quality discourse happens in relatively high signal to noise environments. For a community to form, and worthwhile communication to take place, you need some form of boundary against garbage. Here, and on private discord servers, and the like, that boundary is in the form of an existing member vouching for you to get in. That’s dramatically more exclusionary, but much easier to maintain, than finding a barrier that is intrinsically tied to the activity at hand: Imagine a rock climber’s clubhouse that’s halfway up a rock face, or in the example of IRC, a certain level of technological literacy that allows someone to figure out a relatively arcane technology.
When a solution like that can be found, it should be celebrated! It’s by far the most inclusive way to let into your community only those who are a good fit for your community.
Somewhat weird to blame Discord alone with IRC’s multi-decade long slide in popularity. At the very least, AIM (& clones), Campfire (& clones), and Slack deserve more credit, even if we don’t like them any more than we like Discord.
The casual slur a quarter of the way in was unnecessary and off-putting. I’d drop it.
Zulip and Discourse are better than IRC and Discord. They are much friendlier to folks who are in a different timezone (or who in general find the experience of real time chat mentally taxing), while still allowing for near real-time interaction (Zulip more so).
My experience has been that these hybrid synchronous/asynchronous applications create pressure for people to read transcripts of synchronous chats, which often amount to a waste of time, either because the synchronous chat didn’t include anything important or because the important stuff is buried and lacks the editing and forethought that is typical of asynchronous communications.
From this perspective, chat protocols without built-in scrollback are actually nicer to people who are absent because there can be no expectation that they catch up on chats that are not as fun or as useful to read after they occur. If something important is said which people absent should know about, someone in the chat can write a summary in an asynchronous medium. This also creates a much better record of the important things, even for the people present in the chat to refer to later.
I find discourse to be generally awful, it’s a worse version of phpbb-style forums with noisy notifications, way too sparse a layout, and a complete inability to decently handle long threads. The widespread use of discourse is by far the worst part of the rust ecosystem.
The “noisy notifications” are a real problem. It boggles my mind that so many free software communities accept these gamification features, as if engagement is an end in itself.
I think my only issue with Zulip is the UI is difficult to engage with and Discourse federation feels like a mess (such as setting up new settings for every community I want to join). Otherwise I agree with this sentiment. IM systems in general just.. aren’t very productive?
I’m more of a Matrix fan myself. Works well, interop with all matrix servers, and is fediverse.
IRC’s kind of long in the tooth. I would have enjoyed actually extending the protocol for things like federation, conversation logs, and other features that we now expect.
I don’t believe Matrix & the Fediverse are related other than being federated. Matrix’s chat resilience copying the entire chat history (+ attachments, edits, etc.) of all rooms and DMs from all of its users is often seen as a negative. Not only does the data duplication use a lot data on servers, but holding onto the entire history will lead some to treat the chat as something asynchronous & not ephemeral which leads us to important details be locked into chat logs instead of forums/mailing lists.
If you need more features, XMPP MUCs more than cover the gap while also consuming considerably less resources. Most MUCs are configured just to give you just the last 20 messages & that’s about perfect for getting the topic & being able to jump in without needing to hold onto the entire history or assume everyone should/needs to see it.
IRC supports a distributed system so long as all nodes trust each other. Federation was invented to solve that need for trust, but IRC never adopted the concept, choosing to shard into various silo’d “networks” instead
Right, the main issue with IRC is lack of namespacing. The usernames and channels names need to be globally unique and so the nodes need to trust each other to respect that etc
That trust requirement exists in ActivityPub as well. I don’t think there’s any mechanism to prevent a node from misrepresenting names or content from other nodes, even if the names have an @ in them.
An AP node can’t post content from anyone but itself/its own users usually. If you allow extensions to this then you lose the benefits of federation for sure
That is a meaningless statement. They have to trust each other to do what? And what can a malicious IRC server do that is so different from what a malicious AP server can do?
AP servers still have to trust each other to faithfully relay content between their users and other servers. A malicious server can misrepresent what I posted on my server to its users, or misrepresent posts from its users in what it sends to other servers. It can do the same for usernames of course. I don’t see why you think this is substantially different from IRC.
Any IRC server in the network can send a message claiming it is from any possible user in the network and everyone on every other server has no way to verify if this true or not. So if you allowed me to stand up my own IRC server as part of the network, I could impersonate every single other user. This is why no network allows me to do this
I see, thanks for clarifying. That explains why some people say IRC has “closed federation” while ActivityPub has “open federation.” But in practice, AP relays still do some vetting before allowing an instance, and the varied use of relays means the AP ecosystem still consists of disjoint shards/silos, like IRC.
AP servers must trust each other not to flood users’ feeds with spam, and if they do this it is easily detected and the offending server blocked. For IRC, user impersonations by a malicious server are also detectable by the user being impersonated, or by admins who can also identify the offending server.
Malicious IRC servers have more ways to undermine the service than malicious AP servers, but it’s a matter of degree, and AP/Matrix don’t get to claim the word “federation” for their particular approach to it.
Oh for sure, AP relays aren’t part of the federated system in the same way really, they’re some other thing using some parts of the same protocol and muh more system to the IRC distributed-but-sharded nature.
But relays are the main way AP nodes form a large scale federation, so without them the ecosystem is even more sharded/siloed/atomized. Besides, if two nodes want to federate directly, the vetting still happens, so my point still applies.
Normal AP federation uses a following/follower model and you get the content you follow. No siloing, global federation. Relays exist, as far as I understand, to power features which break this model and show content from people you don’t follow.
There’s a bit of a contradiction here. The author’s purpose in this page is
to inspire some people to change their ways and consider migrating from the proprietary spyware platform of Discord to free and de-centralised prairies such as IRC and Mumble,
Yet the author’s criticisms of Discord are derived from this linked article, where their vision of the Web explicitly has a higher entry barrier of technical skill. Surely many of the people using Discord are the very same people that IRC’s barrier to entry would have filtered out?
The organizations that I get the angriest at for using Discord for their official chat are open-source software development communities. They, of all people, ought to value building important pillars of their intra-community communication on free software, and have the technical chops to find another solution, both of which should immediately rule out Discord as a viable chat platform.
They, of all people, ought to value building important pillars of their intra-community communication on free software, and have the technical chops to find another solution, both of which should immediately rule out Discord as a viable chat platform.
Or, hear me out: they, of all people, need to be careful of the amount of time they spend on things like deciding which code hosting site to use and which communication venues to use, because they are already deeply constrained for time. And so they will prioritize things like “free of charge to the project” and “easy to set up” and “already have a lot of people onboarded” far more highly than things like theoretical purity.
Which, these days, basically means GitHub and Discord. If you want to change that, being angry at open-source communities will not accomplish your goal. Providing something that ranks highly on the factors I mentioned will be far more effective.
Has anyone ever tried making an “overlay protocol” on top of IRC that adds additional features for rich clients, like images and custom emoticons, while still allowing interaction from a normal IRC client?
I’m sure something like this has existed, given IRC’s long history, but I don’t know where I’d find it if it does.
I’m imagining something like this:
A format for including a base URL in the channel topic (must have the same origin as the IRC server)
When this URL is present, the client expects certain well-known HTTPS endpoints to exist under this URL:
JSON description of capabilities
JSON list of custom emoticons
Set user avatar
Get user avatar
Upload media (images, videos)
View media
Voice/video chat channels, if present
Specialized clients will use these endpoints to give the IRC channel features that look like Discord/Matrix
But normal IRC clients will still see a normal channel. In particular, image posts are just URLs that match the “View media” subpath of the base URL, so normal clients will still see a post with a URL and can follow it.
Various IRC clients over the years have done custom things like this - extensions that show up to other users of the same client. It’s generally been frowned on by “everyone else in the channel,” because they’re a lot of clutter.
I think you’ll find that most users of IRC very actively don’t want any of these features, and so haven’t put any effort into building or supporting things they don’t want in the first place. There’s no shortage of rich clients and chat services (Matrix being a modern self hosted one), but IRC is enjoyable mostly because it remains purely plaintext - and low bandwidth.
Seems like what @ar-nelson suggests would have very little clutter - only a URL in the topic. Maybe the standard could be that you only use the last URL in the topic for the API entry point.
And while Matrix’s bridging is head and shoulders above every other bridge that I’ve ever seen, it’s still not super graceful when it comes to message edits.
Recently they made it so shorter edits get converted into s/foo/bar style invocations, which is a big improvement, but I’d still prefer to be able to disable message edits for Matrix/IRC channels tho; sed style edits should be implemented client-side; it’s pretty easy to do this.
Not to the same extent as what you’re describing, but for a time Slack let you connect with an IRC client. You didn’t get the history or things like that, but for managing day-to-day team communication it was fabulous. And then they killed it.
To any non-IRC users who are rightfully rolling their eyes at this, let me say that while this awful exclusionary attitude does exist on IRC, it is thankfully in the minority.
I hate reading articles like this that start out with me nodding vigorously a lot of solid critiques and analysis but then slowly slide into “IRC is great because there are fewer stupid newbies on it”; it makes me embarrassed to share a protocol with them.
Fellow retrocomputing enthusiasts: please cut this shit out; you’re making us all look bad, and even worse you’re driving people to Discord.
I spent almost 17 years on Freenode before Andrew Lee fucked it over, and ironically the only time anyone expressed the ideals of the post author was during the fucking over. That said, a lot of creepy-crawlies came out of the woodwork to gloat at the time, and I realized my IRC experience was probably quite sheltered.
I wrote a bit about my recollections of Freenode here (under “IRC culture wars (2020-07-20)”)
https://gerikson.com/blog/comm/Libera-one-year.html
There’s nothing inherently wrong with using an obscure, retro, or otherwise non-mass-market-focused communication protocol as a hobbyist community, with the intention of using interest in that protocol as a de-facto gate for your community.
The problem isn’t that that retrocomputing enthusiasts are using IRC in part as a way to make sure their communities are disproportionately full of the sort of people who can use IRC - retro computing is a relatively unimportant hobby. The problem is that people trying to compute in the current day are, in their large, normie, numbers, deciding to use Discord, which creates a negative feedback loop of the non-free program and protocol Discord getting more users and encouraging more groups who want to start chat services to do so on Discord because it is what everyone else uses and is familiar with. A classic. network effect that ultimately affects me, even though I personally have no problem with IRC.
I don’t think that more than very trivial numbers of people are wavering between IRC and Discord, and picking Discord because they saw an IRC enthusiast make an anti-normie comment. I think that far more Discord users never heard of IRC, and if they had would simply treat it as an irrelevant protocol, because it doesn’t support scrollback, voice chat, video chat, good mobile support, or any of the other modern chat features that Discord provides.
So it is not actually true that IRC is the only viable chat. People - normies - by the tens of millions are using Discord anyway, and creating a network effect that pulls in those of us who don’t want to use non-free software. This is the collective action problem that needs to be solved.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but, when I (an IRC user) briefly tried Discord some years ago, I went into the settings and one of the first settings I saw was whether I wanted messages displayed in a large format or a compact format, with the latter option labelled as “like IRC”.
Although I don’t dispute that these ‘modern’ chat systems work better than IRC for users who are (even) more nontechnical than I, one reason I would not want to switch away from IRC is how much easier (for me) searching my IRC logs is — having the whole corpus of regex-greppable text sitting in front of me vs (from what I recall of Discord, e.g.) dealing with the vagaries of a fuzzy search engine returning small pagefuls of lazily-loaded results at a time.
All that means is that at least one person who works for Discord (the only people who are allowed to make changes to the one authorized Discord client!) was familiar enough with IRC to include that note. The Discord company does have an interest in getting IRC users to use Discord, but they have even more of an interest in getting the larger number of people who have never used IRC or otherwise don’t care about IRC to use Discord.
Understandable! A person using a real-time chat program should be able to easily archive their chats and do something with that text.
I’ve used tools to download Discord logs into a text format that I could search, which worked well enough for what I wanted to do at the time (namely, archiving chats from a group that was abandoning Discord for Matrix). I believe that using these tools is or was against the Discord terms of service, albeit rarely if ever enforced. Even if unenforced, the fact that grabbing chat logs was against their terms of service should be disqualifying.
But you can’t use IRC to chat with people who don’t use IRC and who do use Discord and who don’t care about being able to grep through chatlogs.
You say, on an invite-only forum.
Quality discourse happens in relatively high signal to noise environments. For a community to form, and worthwhile communication to take place, you need some form of boundary against garbage. Here, and on private discord servers, and the like, that boundary is in the form of an existing member vouching for you to get in. That’s dramatically more exclusionary, but much easier to maintain, than finding a barrier that is intrinsically tied to the activity at hand: Imagine a rock climber’s clubhouse that’s halfway up a rock face, or in the example of IRC, a certain level of technological literacy that allows someone to figure out a relatively arcane technology.
When a solution like that can be found, it should be celebrated! It’s by far the most inclusive way to let into your community only those who are a good fit for your community.
Sure but at least I have the decency to be embarrassed about it.
Somewhat weird to blame Discord alone with IRC’s multi-decade long slide in popularity. At the very least, AIM (& clones), Campfire (& clones), and Slack deserve more credit, even if we don’t like them any more than we like Discord.
The casual slur a quarter of the way in was unnecessary and off-putting. I’d drop it.
Oh, I see below they are a literal nazi. Never mind, slur was probably an intentional dog whistle.
I don’t think you can easily compare mostly-channel based and mostly-1:1 messenger based apps/protocols.
Zulip and Discourse are better than IRC and Discord. They are much friendlier to folks who are in a different timezone (or who in general find the experience of real time chat mentally taxing), while still allowing for near real-time interaction (Zulip more so).
My experience has been that these hybrid synchronous/asynchronous applications create pressure for people to read transcripts of synchronous chats, which often amount to a waste of time, either because the synchronous chat didn’t include anything important or because the important stuff is buried and lacks the editing and forethought that is typical of asynchronous communications.
From this perspective, chat protocols without built-in scrollback are actually nicer to people who are absent because there can be no expectation that they catch up on chats that are not as fun or as useful to read after they occur. If something important is said which people absent should know about, someone in the chat can write a summary in an asynchronous medium. This also creates a much better record of the important things, even for the people present in the chat to refer to later.
I find discourse to be generally awful, it’s a worse version of phpbb-style forums with noisy notifications, way too sparse a layout, and a complete inability to decently handle long threads. The widespread use of discourse is by far the worst part of the rust ecosystem.
The “noisy notifications” are a real problem. It boggles my mind that so many free software communities accept these gamification features, as if engagement is an end in itself.
I think my only issue with Zulip is the UI is difficult to engage with and Discourse federation feels like a mess (such as setting up new settings for every community I want to join). Otherwise I agree with this sentiment. IM systems in general just.. aren’t very productive?
I’m more of a Matrix fan myself. Works well, interop with all matrix servers, and is fediverse.
IRC’s kind of long in the tooth. I would have enjoyed actually extending the protocol for things like federation, conversation logs, and other features that we now expect.
I don’t believe Matrix & the Fediverse are related other than being federated. Matrix’s chat resilience copying the entire chat history (+ attachments, edits, etc.) of all rooms and DMs from all of its users is often seen as a negative. Not only does the data duplication use a lot data on servers, but holding onto the entire history will lead some to treat the chat as something asynchronous & not ephemeral which leads us to important details be locked into chat logs instead of forums/mailing lists.
If you need more features, XMPP MUCs more than cover the gap while also consuming considerably less resources. Most MUCs are configured just to give you just the last 20 messages & that’s about perfect for getting the topic & being able to jump in without needing to hold onto the entire history or assume everyone should/needs to see it.
IRC has always supported federation.
s/always/never ftfy
IRC supports a distributed system so long as all nodes trust each other. Federation was invented to solve that need for trust, but IRC never adopted the concept, choosing to shard into various silo’d “networks” instead
There is no such binary distinction. When would you say email “adopted the concept” of federation?
When email addresses stopped containing routing info and became just user@server
That is quite orthogonal to the question of trust between nodes. IRC usernames don’t contain routing info either?
Right, the main issue with IRC is lack of namespacing. The usernames and channels names need to be globally unique and so the nodes need to trust each other to respect that etc
That trust requirement exists in ActivityPub as well. I don’t think there’s any mechanism to prevent a node from misrepresenting names or content from other nodes, even if the names have an @ in them.
An AP node can’t post content from anyone but itself/its own users usually. If you allow extensions to this then you lose the benefits of federation for sure
What do you mean “post”? Most AP users log into a node and expect to see content from other nodes in their feed, served by the node they log into.
Oh, you mean you have to trust your own server to not lie to you? Sure.
So how is that any different from IRC?
IRC the servers have to trust each other
That is a meaningless statement. They have to trust each other to do what? And what can a malicious IRC server do that is so different from what a malicious AP server can do?
AP servers still have to trust each other to faithfully relay content between their users and other servers. A malicious server can misrepresent what I posted on my server to its users, or misrepresent posts from its users in what it sends to other servers. It can do the same for usernames of course. I don’t see why you think this is substantially different from IRC.
Any IRC server in the network can send a message claiming it is from any possible user in the network and everyone on every other server has no way to verify if this true or not. So if you allowed me to stand up my own IRC server as part of the network, I could impersonate every single other user. This is why no network allows me to do this
I see, thanks for clarifying. That explains why some people say IRC has “closed federation” while ActivityPub has “open federation.” But in practice, AP relays still do some vetting before allowing an instance, and the varied use of relays means the AP ecosystem still consists of disjoint shards/silos, like IRC.
AP servers must trust each other not to flood users’ feeds with spam, and if they do this it is easily detected and the offending server blocked. For IRC, user impersonations by a malicious server are also detectable by the user being impersonated, or by admins who can also identify the offending server.
Malicious IRC servers have more ways to undermine the service than malicious AP servers, but it’s a matter of degree, and AP/Matrix don’t get to claim the word “federation” for their particular approach to it.
Oh for sure, AP relays aren’t part of the federated system in the same way really, they’re some other thing using some parts of the same protocol and muh more system to the IRC distributed-but-sharded nature.
But relays are the main way AP nodes form a large scale federation, so without them the ecosystem is even more sharded/siloed/atomized. Besides, if two nodes want to federate directly, the vetting still happens, so my point still applies.
Normal AP federation uses a following/follower model and you get the content you follow. No siloing, global federation. Relays exist, as far as I understand, to power features which break this model and show content from people you don’t follow.
That makes sense, I totally overlooked that. I wonder how it works with Matrix.
There’s a bit of a contradiction here. The author’s purpose in this page is
Yet the author’s criticisms of Discord are derived from this linked article, where their vision of the Web explicitly has a higher entry barrier of technical skill. Surely many of the people using Discord are the very same people that IRC’s barrier to entry would have filtered out?
Gab, as in the Nazi site? Am I misunderstanding?
Looks like it. There is a direct link to the site in the same article and they also advertise for gab as a Twitter alternative on their links page.
Search “SJW” in the article and you’ll know xD
Presumably a few of the Chosen have strayed from the Path, and the Preacher is leading them back to it.
The organizations that I get the angriest at for using Discord for their official chat are open-source software development communities. They, of all people, ought to value building important pillars of their intra-community communication on free software, and have the technical chops to find another solution, both of which should immediately rule out Discord as a viable chat platform.
Or, hear me out: they, of all people, need to be careful of the amount of time they spend on things like deciding which code hosting site to use and which communication venues to use, because they are already deeply constrained for time. And so they will prioritize things like “free of charge to the project” and “easy to set up” and “already have a lot of people onboarded” far more highly than things like theoretical purity.
Which, these days, basically means GitHub and Discord. If you want to change that, being angry at open-source communities will not accomplish your goal. Providing something that ranks highly on the factors I mentioned will be far more effective.
Has anyone ever tried making an “overlay protocol” on top of IRC that adds additional features for rich clients, like images and custom emoticons, while still allowing interaction from a normal IRC client?
I’m sure something like this has existed, given IRC’s long history, but I don’t know where I’d find it if it does.
I’m imagining something like this:
IRCv3 is in active, if fitful development: https://ircv3.net/irc/
Various IRC clients over the years have done custom things like this - extensions that show up to other users of the same client. It’s generally been frowned on by “everyone else in the channel,” because they’re a lot of clutter.
I think you’ll find that most users of IRC very actively don’t want any of these features, and so haven’t put any effort into building or supporting things they don’t want in the first place. There’s no shortage of rich clients and chat services (Matrix being a modern self hosted one), but IRC is enjoyable mostly because it remains purely plaintext - and low bandwidth.
Seems like what @ar-nelson suggests would have very little clutter - only a URL in the topic. Maybe the standard could be that you only use the last URL in the topic for the API entry point.
And while Matrix’s bridging is head and shoulders above every other bridge that I’ve ever seen, it’s still not super graceful when it comes to message edits.
Recently they made it so shorter edits get converted into
s/foo/barstyle invocations, which is a big improvement, but I’d still prefer to be able to disable message edits for Matrix/IRC channels tho; sed style edits should be implemented client-side; it’s pretty easy to do this.Not to the same extent as what you’re describing, but for a time Slack let you connect with an IRC client. You didn’t get the history or things like that, but for managing day-to-day team communication it was fabulous. And then they killed it.