Looking at today’s instant messaging solutions, I think IRC is very
underrated. The functionality of clients for IRC made years ago still
surpass what “modern” protocols like Matrix have to offer. I think
re-adoption of IRC is very much possible only by introducing a good UI,
nothing more.
About a year ago I moved my family/friends chat network to IRC. Thanks to modern clients like Goguma and Gamja and the v3 chathistory support and other features of Ergo this gives a nice modern feeling chat experience even without a bouncer. All of my users other than myself are at basic computer literacy level, they can muddle along with mobile and web apps not much more. So it’s definitely possible.
I went this route because I wanted something that I can fully own, understand and debug if needed.
You could bolt-on E2EE, but decentralization is missing—you have to create accounts on that server. Built for the ’10s, XMPP + MUCs can do these things without the storage & resource bloat of Matrix + eventual consistency. That said, for a lot of communites IRC is a serviceable, lightweight, accessible solution that I agree is underrated for text chat (even if client adoption of IRCv3 is still not where one might expect relative to server adoption)—& I would 100% rather see it over some Slack/Telegram/Discord chatroom exclusivity.
I dunno. The collapse of Freenode 3 years ago showed that a lot of the accounts there were either inactive or bots (because the number of accounts on Libera after the migration was significantly lower). I don’t see any newer software projects using IRC (a depressingly large number of them still point to Freenode, which just reinforces my point).
I like IRC and I still use it but it’s not a growth area.
There’s an ongoing effort to modernize IRC with https://ircv3.net. I would agree that most of these evolutions is just IRC catching up with features of modern chat plaforms.
Calling IRCv3 an “ongoing effort” is technically correct, but it’s been ongoing for around 8 to 9 years at this point and barely anything came out of it - and definitely nothing groundbreaking that IRC would need to catch up to the current times (e.g. message history).
The collapse of Freenode 3 years ago showed that a lot of the accounts there were either inactive or bots (because the number of accounts on Libera after the migration was significantly lower).
I don’t know if that’s really the right conclusion. A bunch of communities that were on Freenode never moved to Libera because they migrated to XMPP, Slack, Matrix, Discord, OFTC, and many more alternatives. I went from being on about 20 channels on Freenode to about 5 on Libera right after Freenode’s death, and today that number is closer to 1 (which I’m accessing via a Matrix bridge…).
I guess it just depends what channels you were in; every single one I was using at the time made the jump from Freenode to Libera, tho there were a couple that had already moved off to Slack several years earlier.
It’s “opt-in” in the sense that if you send an OTR message to someone without a plugin, they see garbage, yes. OTR is the predecessor to “signal” and back then (assuming you meant “chats” above), E2EE meant “one-to-one”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging – but it does support end-to-end encrypted messages, and from my memory of using it on AIM in the zeros, it was pretty easy to setup and use. (At one point, we quietly added support to the hiptop, for example.)
Someone could probably write a modern double-ratchet replacement, using the same transport concepts as OTR, but I bet the people interested in working on that are more interested in implementing some form of RFC 9420 these days.
Isn’t the Digital Ocean price you’re quoting more expensive than what IRC Today charges? You’re talking about a price of $5/month, which adds up to $60/year. IRC Today’s Full plan costs 50€/year, equivalent to $54/year.
The page mentions that their clients are open source, and from context it sounds like they have a web client, iOS, and Android. But I’m not able to find the app store links for the latter two, nor source for any of the three.
Looking at today’s instant messaging solutions, I think IRC is very underrated. The functionality of clients for IRC made years ago still surpass what “modern” protocols like Matrix have to offer. I think re-adoption of IRC is very much possible only by introducing a good UI, nothing more.
aka drawing the rest of the owl
More like upscaling an image drawn before the average web developer was born.
no UI will add offline message delivery to IRC
Doesn’t the “IRCToday” service linked in this post solve that? (and other IRC bouncers)
sure but that’s more than just a UI
Specs and implementations on the other hand…
I thínk “Lounge” is a really decent web-based UI.
About a year ago I moved my family/friends chat network to IRC. Thanks to modern clients like Goguma and Gamja and the v3 chathistory support and other features of Ergo this gives a nice modern feeling chat experience even without a bouncer. All of my users other than myself are at basic computer literacy level, they can muddle along with mobile and web apps not much more. So it’s definitely possible.
I went this route because I wanted something that I can fully own, understand and debug if needed.
You could bolt-on E2EE, but decentralization is missing—you have to create accounts on that server. Built for the ’10s, XMPP + MUCs can do these things without the storage & resource bloat of Matrix + eventual consistency. That said, for a lot of communites IRC is a serviceable, lightweight, accessible solution that I agree is underrated for text chat (even if client adoption of IRCv3 is still not where one might expect relative to server adoption)—& I would 100% rather see it over some Slack/Telegram/Discord chatroom exclusivity.
I dunno. The collapse of Freenode 3 years ago showed that a lot of the accounts there were either inactive or bots (because the number of accounts on Libera after the migration was significantly lower). I don’t see any newer software projects using IRC (a depressingly large number of them still point to Freenode, which just reinforces my point).
I like IRC and I still use it but it’s not a growth area.
There’s an ongoing effort to modernize IRC with https://ircv3.net. I would agree that most of these evolutions is just IRC catching up with features of modern chat plaforms.
The IRC software landscape is also evolving with https://lobste.rs/s/wy2jgl/goguma_irc_client_for_mobile_devices and https://lobste.rs/s/0dnybw/soju_user_friendly_irc_bouncer.
Calling IRCv3 an “ongoing effort” is technically correct, but it’s been ongoing for around 8 to 9 years at this point and barely anything came out of it - and definitely nothing groundbreaking that IRC would need to catch up to the current times (e.g. message history).
Message history is provided by this thing (IRC Today), and it does it through means of IRC v3 support.
I don’t know if that’s really the right conclusion. A bunch of communities that were on Freenode never moved to Libera because they migrated to XMPP, Slack, Matrix, Discord, OFTC, and many more alternatives. I went from being on about 20 channels on Freenode to about 5 on Libera right after Freenode’s death, and today that number is closer to 1 (which I’m accessing via a Matrix bridge…).
I guess it just depends what channels you were in; every single one I was using at the time made the jump from Freenode to Libera, tho there were a couple that had already moved off to Slack several years earlier.
IRC really needs end-to-end encrypted messages.
Isn’t that what OTR does?
Not really. It’s opt-in and it only works for 1:1 charts, doesn’t it?
It’s “opt-in” in the sense that if you send an OTR message to someone without a plugin, they see garbage, yes. OTR is the predecessor to “signal” and back then (assuming you meant “chats” above), E2EE meant “one-to-one”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging – but it does support end-to-end encrypted messages, and from my memory of using it on AIM in the zeros, it was pretty easy to setup and use. (At one point, we quietly added support to the hiptop, for example.)
Someone could probably write a modern double-ratchet replacement, using the same transport concepts as OTR, but I bet the people interested in working on that are more interested in implementing some form of RFC 9420 these days.
Hm, why it is so expensive. You can do the same on a 5 dollars digital ocean vps for the whole family unlimited everything.
I partly thought it was worth posting as it’s significantly cheaper than comparable services like Irccloud.
Of course you can admin the same thing yourself, this is what you pay to not have to do it.
Isn’t the Digital Ocean price you’re quoting more expensive than what IRC Today charges? You’re talking about a price of $5/month, which adds up to $60/year. IRC Today’s Full plan costs 50€/year, equivalent to $54/year.
Isn’t irc today price per user?
The page mentions that their clients are open source, and from context it sounds like they have a web client, iOS, and Android. But I’m not able to find the app store links for the latter two, nor source for any of the three.
given they use soju on the server side, I assume the recommended client for mobile is goguma
Web client looks like https://codeberg.org/emersion/gamja
By someone else!
No thanks, I’ll keep running my own bouncer.