[HN Gopher] Making IRC better
___________________________________________________________________
Making IRC better
Author : Tomte
Score : 159 points
Date : 2022-07-06 12:40 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sourcehut.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (sourcehut.org)
| kodah wrote:
| I used to be a big fan of IRC, but I'm not so much anymore. The
| reason IRC tends to suck is channel operators and network
| operators that enable them. No amount of technical advancement
| will solve that problem. Channels on IRC are unique, and much
| like domains, so there's not much community competition to sack
| bad channel operators while network operators are very hands off.
|
| What I'd love to see is an open source version of discord take
| off. Especially if there's a discovery mechanism built in.
| nmz wrote:
| I quite frankly hate discord, the model of "servers" is one of
| communities and although its nice for gaming, not quite so
| technical discussions. Currently I'm in a bunch of servers,
| notifications everywhere, did anyone actually talk to me? no.
| do people talk to each other? barely. From what I can see,
| discord is made for communities, and communities tend to die.
| zulip on the other hand? That's exactly how a project based
| communications platform should be.
| kodah wrote:
| That's a fair point, Discord I feel addresses the issue of
| fiefdoms in IRC, but meaningful engagement _is_ lesser and
| more sporadic. I 'm not sure what's worse, tbh.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Currently I'm in a bunch of servers, notifications
| everywhere
|
| Discord's default of "notify me on every message" is its
| worst anti-feature, IMO.
|
| Other than that, I like Discord.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| That, and not allowing people to leave channels is very an
| annoying.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > What I'd love to see is an open source version of discord
| take off
|
| Isn't this basically the matrix protocol? It already has
| millions of users (mostly in the french and german governments,
| I think) and they're pretty serious about UX and security.
|
| Anyone can run a server, and there's no issue with messaging
| someone who uses a different server than you use. Messages and
| private channels are e2e encrypted, so even the server operator
| can't see them, and it supports modern features like
| editing/deleting messages, file sharing, messaging from more
| than one device, seeing messages that were sent when you were
| offline, and things like that.
|
| To your specific complaint with IRC, matrix also has a pretty
| innovative feature that I like called "spaces", which are
| groupings of channels (with a many-to-many relation between
| spaces and channels). So I can make a "best functional
| programming channels" space that can have many channels with
| different moderation teams, etc.
| welterde wrote:
| That very much depends on the network and the channels how well
| things work or not. And other than having no moderators/channel
| operators at all, I don't see how it can be a problem that can
| even be solved? People can always get drunk on power and go
| completely crazy. What would be your proposal to solve this?
| kodah wrote:
| It can be, but not in a place like IRC. The problem is that
| if a channel operator over a large channel gets to tripping
| your only option is to move networks if you'd like to chat on
| the same topic with less abusive operators, which ignores the
| value that people add to communities.
|
| On Discord, all communities are created equal, and are
| discoverable. When you go to the discovery mechanism you can
| search for many similarly purposed communities.
| welterde wrote:
| Fair point (especially for super generic things like
| "#science" or similar) - that could sometimes be handled
| better. However sometimes there are multiple rooms
| discussing the same thing on the same network, so it's not
| always necessary to jump ship completely.
|
| But not sure I buy that the communities are that different.
| I would rather view them as different networks in IRC
| terms. You'll have a completely different set of people
| from one to the next, so how is it any different to joining
| a different network on IRC?
| kodah wrote:
| > You'll have a completely different set of people from
| one to the next
|
| Yeah, sometimes, other times there's overlap. That is
| kind of my point, they're encouraging chasing people off
| to new places because their channel operators _could be
| worse_.
| newbieuser wrote:
| what exactly is the purpose of this site? what alternative?
| korse wrote:
| IRC is extremely accessible. Sure, you can't send gifs without
| modifying your client... but you can modify your client (or write
| your own)! Confused about how something works? Read the RFC! Quit
| selling pre-packaged experiences; your opsec sucks regardless of
| your use of Matrix/Telegram/Signal and it doesn't hurt to
| shepherd people into an environment where knowing a bit about how
| the underlying technology functions in necessary for
| participation.
| ArrayBoundCheck wrote:
| Also who wants to run IRC on their phone? I rather not have my
| battery zapped by having an active internet connection
| eterps wrote:
| ELI5 what is an irc bouncer?
|
| An irc bouncer is a middleman between you and an irc network. It
| connects to a network like a normal client and instead of
| connecting directly to an irc network you connect to it. Usually
| you would set it up to log for you and show you some or all of
| the messages it received while you were disconnected. In this way
| your nick is always present in your channels and you can see what
| was talked about while you were away.
|
| source:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/irc/comments/35vcth/comment/cr86hcs...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I use a bouncer to hide my home IP address. I've been DDoSed
| after kicking someone from a channel for spamming racial slurs.
| legalcorrection wrote:
| I never understood why IRC servers don't just store history and
| let clients query for it. This seems like a small addition to
| the protocol that would have made it a lot more pleasant to
| use. You could always turn the feature off in your
| channel/server if you want ephemerality.
| bityard wrote:
| Because it's firmly in the category of easier said than done.
|
| For starters, it would mean logging every message in every
| channel. IRC servers are (traditionally) relatively stateless
| and adding a database for logs is a very nontrivial ask.
|
| Server-side logs are a non-starter for many server ops due to
| exposure to the legal system (dealing with warrants,
| subpoenas, DMCA, "right to be forgotten", etc). Way easier to
| say, sorry, we don't have any logs.
|
| It doesn't take a whole lot of active channels to start
| eating up serious disk space. And of course for every user
| connection, you incur a complex db query, the results of
| which need to get sent back to the client, meaning every new
| connection is expensive in all of disk, cpu, sand network at
| a minimum. Most IRC servers are run by volunteers who aren't
| looking to beef up their server specs by an order of
| magnitude for one convenient feature. This is more doable now
| than a decade or two ago but it's still a big ask.
|
| You would need to convince all client authors to support
| server-side logging. Some will, some won't.
|
| Last I knew, most IRC servers didn't support authentication
| directly. If you wanted to "own" your nick, you had to
| register with a bot-like service. This means you can't get
| your logs until after you've authenticated to NameServ or
| whatever.
|
| Channels are ephemeral. Unless registered with services, a
| channel does not exist until a user joins it. Once the last
| user leaves, the channel doesn't exist anymore. Logging would
| mean channels are no longer ephemeral.
|
| Traditionally, the IRC networks and server authors have
| responded to these kind of feature requests by saying they
| should be done by the client, not the server. And I think I
| have to agree. There's nothing that Slack does (for instance)
| that can't be done with a sufficiently advanced IRC client.
|
| Keep the server as a relatively dumb message broker and put
| all the smarts in the client. If the features are useful
| enough, other clients will implement them too.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| IRCv3 has an extension that does just that. I've played with
| it using ergo.
|
| https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory
|
| https://github.com/ergochat/ergo
| progval wrote:
| UnrealIRCd also supports this chathistory extension. And
| both UnrealIRCd and InspIRCd support replaying the last
| handful of messages to clients which don't support the
| extension. https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history
| https://docs.inspircd.org/3/modules/chanhistory/
| dizhn wrote:
| In addition to the above. Both matrix and discord can provide
| IRC bridges which provide the same "always-on with history"
| functionality. I have been using the matrix.org bridge to
| libera.chat for a few weeks. One can join any libera.chat
| channel this way. Other matrix server might configure a more
| limited room-to-channel setup where not all channels are
| bridged.
| snarfy wrote:
| I always found the ephemeral nature of IRC chat to be a
| feature, not a bug.
| eterps wrote:
| It doesn't work very well for low traffic channels.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Email does. Right tool for right job.
| eterps wrote:
| Not sure what you mean, how does email help me follow low
| traffic IRC channels?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| You shouldn't use IRC for low-traffic communications, or
| more precisely it shouldn't be used in the scenario where
| you want people to be able to receive messages while not
| connected to the channel. Email is the appropriate tool
| for these cases.
| mro_name wrote:
| are there irc2email bots?
| eterps wrote:
| I don't control the message frequency or member
| timezone/presence of existing channels that I didn't
| create in the first place. Also switching back and forth
| between email and IRC depending on frequency sounds
| cumbersome to me. Some niche channels can have busy weeks
| while being silent on others. I like how bouncers improve
| the UX for that situation.
| [deleted]
| nly wrote:
| It certainly gets around some of the privacy concerns you get
| once your platform has message persistence.
|
| On the other hand, the mobile/cellular world has been largely
| responsible for killing off IRC.
| WJW wrote:
| I don't think IRC ever had much of an expectation of
| privacy. Just because you didn't keep logs yourself does
| not mean the IRC server didn't. Using a bouncer does
| nothing for that.
| nly wrote:
| Most IRC networks are relatively small and/or are/were
| run by techies with no real incentive to log everything.
| Also, almost everything culturally about IRC relies on
| trusting the IRC operators to keep things running
| smoothly and moderate appropriately.
|
| UnrealIRCd (a popular IRC server implementation) have
| actively refused to add features in to the code-base that
| allow IRC operators to snoop on private messages or
| covertly on channels, for example.
|
| Slack, Facebook, Reddit, and whoever else we all use
| these days, keep every private message ever sent logged
| for all time and this is just accepted.
| corobo wrote:
| > UnrealIRCd (a popular IRC server implementation) have
| actively refused to add features in to the code-base that
| allow IRC operators to snoop on private messages or
| covertly on channels, for example.
|
| Someone should have told Angrywolf. This module was on
| every "we used to be on BigNet but we split off because
| reasons" UnrealIRCd network for a while, haha
|
| https://pastebin.com/EVkudZVb
|
| (disclaimer: don't use it for moral reasons, but also
| because I've not vetted the code in any way beyond
| checking it looks a bit like code)
| astrobe_ wrote:
| > UnrealIRCd (a popular IRC server implementation) have
| actively refused
|
| That's really moot because operators can certainly and
| easily snoop the traffic on the wire. Therefore I agree
| with the statement above that one should take IRC for
| what it is: lightweight, convenient, but don't assume any
| privacy - and it can be perfectly fine.
| usrn wrote:
| Exactly. You don't want to know everything that's ever
| happened in the history of the channel, there's _way_ too
| much. Even on Discord the client can 't handle it so you
| won't know anyway.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Same here. Works quite nicely to have tempers cool down as
| people dis/reconnect and lose history.
| Grumbledour wrote:
| I always saw it as a bug tbh, but reading drew's footnote on
| that right now, I am starting to think you and he are right!
|
| But I think it is more complicated, because it also makes
| clear that IRC is not an ideal medium for many forms of
| messaging. It works great for free for all chat, where the
| discussion happens right now. But it is not great for group
| chats with friends or when information needs to be
| disseminated across a community, but I have both of these
| seen used often.
|
| It just not asynchronous, while at the same time, because of
| the constant open connection, also not great to use on the
| go.
|
| It's somehow nice to have a medium for "right here and now",
| but it sucks to not be able to answer a question or miss
| important conversation because you didn't look for 10
| minutes.
|
| Of course, multi-tier conversation options have helped
| traditionally, but I think that's also why i never bothered
| with IRC much, because it was always 3 dozen people idling
| who always seemed to burst in conversation once you got
| disconnected.
| ddevault wrote:
| To add to this: I think IRC strikes an interesting balance
| between async and sync conversations -- Schrodinger's
| synchronization, in a sense. In public conversations,
| there's no expectation that anyone will be present for
| anything and no expectation that they should read the
| things they missed, which is good. However, among mutual
| bouncer users there's a culture of sending messages you
| expect to be read later, in their own time. We essentially
| get the best of both worlds.
|
| I wrote a little bit about this facet of IRC culture in
| this article:
|
| https://drewdevault.com/2021/11/24/A-philosophy-for-
| instant-...
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| If is a feature in many ways, however there are usecases
| where it isn't applicable. If I got such a usecases the
| question is whether I pick a completely different chat system
| or use some form of bouncer as workaround.
| remram wrote:
| Like shipping channels in the ocean. You can't see them until
| a boat cuts through the water leaving a wake. There's no
| evidence left behind.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ&t=18s (gibberish
| warning)
| baby wrote:
| I don't like the framing on feature vs bug. I think it's a
| characteristic of IRC that made it nice in some ways, and
| impractical in other ways. The fact that you knew that people
| were "on" when they were in the channel, and see exactly how
| many people where "on" at some point in time was really
| interesting. Right now all your chat apps are persistent
| chats so you don't really have that feeling of really being
| in a "chat room" anymore.
|
| If someone is looking for an ephemeral side-project to work
| on, it'd be interesting to have something like twitter that
| works in a similar way: you only see tweets posted when
| you're online on the page.
| ddevault wrote:
| You're only online on IRC while you're connected to it. When
| you disconnect your client, your username disappears from the
| list and you cannot receive private messages or see
| conversations in IRC channels. One user == one open TCP
| connection.
|
| A bouncer holds that TCP connection for you and you connect to
| it instead of directly to the server. It will store messages
| received while you were away, automatically log conversations
| to disk, and allow you to connect to the same user with
| multiple devices, among other features.
| baby wrote:
| I remember getting an offer for a bouncer for $1 for life. I
| presume the company shut down and my bouncer doesn't exist
| anymore, but at the time I was like "WHAT A FUCKING DEAL".
|
| (Yeah people would usually buy a bouncer, or perhaps several
| ones)
| Syonyk wrote:
| An IRC bouncer will fit nicely in the "Free tier" EC2 or GCE
| instances, with gobs of room to spare (even the 1GB bandwidth
| tier is plenty for a month of IRC bouncer use). I ran one in
| there for a long while until I moved back to my own server.
| dewey wrote:
| Even when I'm not a heavy IRC user any more I'm excited that they
| are pushing IRCv3. It's a smaller spec where a two people team
| can already make a dent.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I can understand not wanting to use a proprietary platform for
| communications about a FOSS project, but why does it have to be
| IRC? The world is moving on. I like being able to paste code into
| chat and have it syntax highlighted. I like being able to ping
| people so that they get a notification on their phone, and
| likewise, I like people to be able to ping me. Occasionally, I
| like to send a GIF.
|
| I imagine IRC people will just call all of these distractions.
| They are in a shrinking minority of people.
| usrn wrote:
| If only I had a fraction of a Bitcoin for every time someone
| said "Why IRC and not Google talk? The world is moving on."
|
| The world is not moving on, IRC is very much here to stay. It
| works way too well for this sort of thing and people like being
| able to have their client set up exactly right. It's just heavy
| iPhone users that left and once Apple allows web push iPhone
| users will be back on IRC again.
| EmilyHughes wrote:
| I can guarantee you that the amount of people using an iPhone
| that are desperate to get on IRC are almost 0%
| usrn wrote:
| Yeah when I had an iPhone I was really annoyed I couldn't
| leave an IRC client in the background. I'm certain I wasn't
| alone.
| [deleted]
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| > The world is not moving on, IRC is very much here to stay
|
| I don't doubt that IRC is here to stay, but I've noticed more
| and more people moving from IRC to Matrix. Nix, the wgpu-rs
| guys, I believe the blender devs, and I believe the GHC devs
| are all on Matrix now.
|
| (No affiliation, I just like the service)
| Arnavion wrote:
| Nix, Blender and GHC all have IRC channels on Libera, with
| a few hundred members each. I didn't join them but I assume
| they're bridged to Matrix via EMS.
| dijit wrote:
| I think a large issue might be the fact that nobody runs
| their own bouncers, and the idea of paying a subscription for
| such a thing is not something people are comfortable with.
|
| I run ZNC+Palaver and get push notifications on my iPhone;
| but I also run ZNC on my own machine somewhere, which is a
| cost and a setup most people don't usually have to bother
| with.
|
| One solution for casuals is probably IRCCloud; since IRCCloud
| will give you the same experience as mine for free, but will
| disconnect you if you're inactive (unless you're paying).
|
| Irccloud also precludes all of the nice features you might
| get if you're running your own clients... so, YMMV.
| TingPing wrote:
| IRCCloud now acts as a regular bouncer for any client.
| Stampo00 wrote:
| I think we need to separate IRC the client from IRC the
| protocol. Everything you just described is possible with a
| sufficiently advanced client without any changes to the
| protocol. In fact, some clients already do what you describe.
| eropple wrote:
| "A client could do that" is true. It's also unhelpful. They
| don't _all_ , or even _most_ , do that. Consistency is
| valuable, and trying to coach people to switch IRC clients
| (assuming one exists that ticks the right boxes on their
| platform) is, to me, a pretty poor use of my limited time on
| this planet.
|
| I don't love Discord or Slack and there are a lot of things I
| miss about IRC, but the amount of sandpaper around getting
| people who are less than extremely forgiving of Computer
| Stuff to use it adroitly is one. Two chat platforms is
| already one too many for me, and IRC doesn't really make the
| cut for a third anymore because I too am becoming less
| forgiving of Computer Stuff as I get older, too.
| welterde wrote:
| Part of the problem is though that there people (like
| myself) that simply don't want any of those features. If
| everyone agreed that these features are worth having then
| there would be no problem, since then every client would
| get them eventually.
|
| People have different needs and expectations, so why
| shouldn't different clients for different people exist?
| eropple wrote:
| TBH? Because the expectation for a communications
| platform is that you want people to communicate with you,
| and imposing the need to keep a set of caps in _my_ head
| for _your_ client is grating and annoying. "I only
| accept text-based email" would be the closest equivalent
| I can think of, and I don't think I'd go out of my way to
| write a text-based email to you because you _choose not
| to_ parse ` <ul>`.
|
| I'm not saying somebody who only accepts text-based email
| is wrong, mind--do as thou wilt and all. I am saying that
| the more barriers you present to being communicated with,
| the less reasonable it is to expect people to communicate
| with you. IRC makes it too difficult to communicate in
| modes I've come to expect as normal, so I'm just not
| gonna do that these days.
| welterde wrote:
| What do you mean with keeping caps in your head for my
| client? Capabilities? Why would you need to keep those in
| mind?
|
| One doesn't need to keep anything in mind if one just has
| two different clients for the two user groups. And there
| are IRC clients, such as thelounge or irccloud (ok.. more
| than just a client), that offer things like inline
| images/audio, link preview, etc. (and wouldn't be hard to
| add missing things there). On the protocol level they
| just send urls in the irc messages, which falls back
| nicely for the other user group. I send images, pastes,
| etc. all the time on IRC it's just I don't want my client
| to render any of them inline - I want to decide if I look
| at something or not, while you want a client that does
| render everything inline for the most part.
|
| PS: My spam filter judges html emails rather harshly :P
| eropple wrote:
| _> What do you mean with keeping caps in your head for my
| client? Capabilities? Why would you need to keep those in
| mind?_
|
| Because the point of a conversation is to communicate.
| Your client is changing the meaning of what I am sending
| _to_ you, and I have to know that to effectively
| communicate _with_ you. I value clarity, and IRC _doesn
| 't offer me this_ without knowing what the other client
| is doing. I do not trust a normal, representative user to
| click on every relevant link and internalize it from
| there, because my experience is that _people don 't_. On
| the other hand, being able to post a snippet makes it
| _part_ of the conversation and not a reference, and in my
| experience means people are more likely to actually read
| the thing. The assumption that I should just throw URLs
| at you and you will parse them, either through a computer
| or mentally, and do the right thing with them increases
| the lossiness of communication, and adds to my mental
| stack. My mental stack is tall enough already for me.
|
| In my experience from platform to platform it's a
| difference of kind, and frankly? It's also not one I
| really want to be dealing with myself on the sending end
| more generally. I don't like the bouncer paradigm and I'm
| not paying irccloud to host one for me when I can do so
| myself _but_ doing so myself is annoying and work that
| other platforms do not demand of me. And I 'm not going
| to a pastebin _website_ when I can literally drag a code
| file in and click "post as snippet". It's slower and
| it's unpleasant. A sufficiently smart client could solve
| these things, sure--but Slack and Discord already do
| them, and the 99% case are there and not on IRC.
|
| I am not, to be totally clear, saying you're wrong to
| like what you like. I've run IRC servers many times and I
| used them steadily for about fifteen years. But I have
| learned, personally and for me, that the things users
| seem to value on IRC makes those folks harder for me to
| communicate with as we've normed (for lack of a better
| term) rich experiences in group conversations. And if
| you're cool with that, that's totally fine. It's a
| tradeoff, not a moral thing. It does also means that (not
| that you're doing it, but some IRC defenders in this
| thread have definitely logged on) incredulity that Nobody
| Wants To Use IRC just isn't reasonable. It's not a
| friendly platform unless your values are _its values_.
| Mine aren 't anymore, so I don't use it.
| welterde wrote:
| I don't think the argument that the mere existence of
| clients that work differently ruin the modern features
| somehow is really that fair (see below). The bouncer
| argument is kinda fair, but if you also don't like to
| live in a walled gardens (slack or discord), it limits
| the options a lot (although there are IRC servers that
| have integrated bouncers! Matrix is kinda like running
| your own bouncer again, unless you are ok with a third-
| party running it for you). I can also accept that there
| are many more non-modern IRC clients than modern ones
| that work the way you would expect, so the overall
| expectation would be biased. And that probably it was too
| little too late.
|
| But I think you are overthinking it by a lot. If you were
| to use IRC, you should just use a modern "magical" IRC
| clients and not worry about what happens in the
| background (and btw it's not just "could" but "does"..
| there are clients that do all that already - where you
| can just drag and drop stuff in and it will magically do
| the right thing). And I am willing to bet that in other
| instances you already do operate that way. Unless your
| mail client is very broken it will send a plain text
| version of your email along with the html email. Do you
| worry there too that I am actually just looking at the
| plain text version of your email and not with the
| intended html formatting? Or do you worry that the person
| you are talking to on slack might just be connected via
| matterircd via IRC (or directly via IRC back before slack
| did the bait 'n switch) and not see any of your snippets,
| images, etc.? Which btw. I am totally doing despite how
| much it butchers everything - I just cannot stand that UI
| (and neither can my rather old laptop).
| jjav wrote:
| > "A client could do that" is true. It's also unhelpful.
|
| That's a fundamental disagreement. I know some people like
| tightly walled gardens where there can only be one client
| and you're stuck with its limitations. Personally, I
| despise those systems and will do everything to avoid them.
|
| > Consistency is valuable
|
| Consistency is not valuable in this context, it is a
| straightjacket. I want a client which works exactly the way
| I want, which is likely different from what you want. So we
| need probably different clients, or at least an extremely
| configurable one.
|
| This is why email is so wonderful and I use it above all
| else. I can have my client which I love and others can have
| their clients which they love and I find unusable but we
| can all be happy.
| eropple wrote:
| I completely agree--it absolutely is a fundamental
| disagreement! It's also why "but why won't people use
| IRC?" is misguided. I won't use IRC because I don't value
| what it does anymore. I valued it a lot more when almost
| everyone I talked to was as much of a computer nerd as I
| am--that's no longer the case and the computer-nerdy
| parts of my life are complementary pieces rather than
| core ones now, so I want different things.
|
| The idea that IRC might be better was why I clicked on
| this thread in the first place, before I really parsed
| the srht part of it, 'cause my values absolutely do not
| overlap with theirs. (Which is fine. Like what you like!)
| nsv wrote:
| What is the replacement for IRC that the world is moving on to?
| Matrix? XMPP?
|
| Personally all the people I want to talk to still use IRC, so
| I'll use it to.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Element and Rocket Chat are decent.
| Macha wrote:
| The people/projects that care about an open ecosystem but
| want more than IRC are moving to Matrix, and those that don't
| are moving to Discord. In particularly basically every gaming
| community that used to be on IRC seems to be a discord now.
| carapace wrote:
| > They are in a shrinking minority of people.
|
| Another way to say that is IRC helps filter out the worst of
| Eternal Eternal September. (Meaning nothing against you
| personally! No disrespect intended.)
|
| (FWIW, it's a slowly _growing_ minority.)
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Never thought I'd see an Eternal September post these days.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| "Growing". I doubt it. New developers are not jumping on IRC
| channels and mailing lists, they're going to Discord servers
| and Reddit, sorry to break it to you. Nobody below the age of
| thirty is using these old tools unless they're specifically
| working in spaces where they're used such as kernel dev or
| they want to be a hipster. I imagine the count of developers
| on Discord already outnumbers IRC 100:1.
|
| Say what you want about these services being privacy
| infringing and proprietary (trust me, I don't like them
| either) but let's not be deluded. Their predecessors will
| die.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > "Growing". I doubt it. New developers are not jumping on
| IRC channels and mailing lists,
|
| I am :) . I've found that the discussions I've had on IRC
| or read on mailing lists are typically higher quality, and
| more interesting than anywhere else.
| Alekhine wrote:
| u801e wrote:
| > I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax
| highlighted.
|
| > Occasionally, I like to send a GIF.
|
| Some people don't like large blocks of text or images pushing
| other messages completely off screen.
| fouric wrote:
| I can think of many situations where I'd rather have an image
| that explains something much more clearly than a wall of text
| on my screen, and other situations where it's perfectly
| possible to send large blocks of useless _non-syntax-
| highlighted_ text over IRC.
|
| Don't try to solve social problems by removing useful
| technical features from tools.
| welterde wrote:
| IRC does support sending URLs just fine. The key point here
| is though, do I want those images to be displayed inline
| among the text or not. And there are IRC clients (such as
| thelounge) that will just display those images inline
| (which is what you would want) and some where you can just
| drag some image/file and will upload it to some file/image
| host and then just send the url in the chat.
|
| So options for people that have different usage patterns do
| exist.
| rascul wrote:
| > and some where you can just drag some image/file and
| will upload it to some file/image host and then just send
| the url in the chat.
|
| The Lounge can do that also.
|
| https://thelounge.chat/docs/configuration#fileupload
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Come on, it's sourcehut. This is what they do.
|
| They think PRs and pull requests are a distraction and all
| should happen in mailing list.
|
| If you host on sourcehut, you want these things
| tsujp wrote:
| > I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax
| highlighted.
|
| Use a pastebin, there are plenty out there. See:
| https://paste.sr.ht/ or http://ix.io/ or https://paste.rs/ or
| https://bpa.st/ or https://gist.github.com/ or
| https://paste.ubuntu.com/ and many, many more.
|
| Regardless of there being a better tool for syntax highlighting
| and holding small linkable snippets of code (so that logic
| doesn't need to be more to download when opening your chat) it
| also keeps it _out_ of the chat so it's not polluted. People
| not being able to instantly insert 20 lines of text is a _good_
| thing. So, link to the resource don't embed it.
| > I like being able to ping people so that they get a
| notification on their phone, and likewise, I like people to be
| able to ping me
|
| In the article you're responding to Drew directly mentions
| their suggestions for Push Notifications. I don't mean to sound
| facetious but, did you read this (article) in it's entirety?
| > Occasionally, I like to send a GIF
|
| See above: link to the resource, don't embed it.
| Macha wrote:
| > People not being able to instantly insert 20 lines of text
| is a _good_ thing.
|
| Element (Matrix) and Slack will render something like this as
| 3-5 lines with the expansion option to see all of it. I'm
| sure discord will eventually do the same too.
|
| This is clearly preferable to using a different application
| entirely to view the snippet.
|
| It's only IRC where some naive clients expand this out into
| 20 something messages where this is a problem. And since it's
| not part of the protocol, you're at the whims of the sender's
| client for how it's handled, so it's not like you can install
| a sufficiently smart client to render it how you like in all
| cases.
|
| I'd also suggest your perspective of how much a problem even
| that 20 lines of text is is distorted by being in fast moving
| public chatrooms, like your typical Linux distro channel. In
| my small team or friends chat, it's perfectly fine
|
| The same also applies to the gif. If this one bothers you,
| most clients even have the options to disable inline images,
| so the sender gets to choose. Also it means you just get the
| image file, and not whatever cruft the popular image host of
| this 5 year period is doing to monetise.
|
| Image hosts and pastebins also seem more fragile than chat
| services. I've occasionally gone through old messages that
| link to pastie or similar and the context is gone.
| welterde wrote:
| For me it's not really about fast moving rooms or not, but
| that I want to see a bit of context to what was said. In
| IRC it's easy to see more than 60 lines back without having
| to scroll, but all modern alternatives don't have that as a
| concern at all. Have a few people paste code, liberal use
| of quoting for messages that are less than 10 lines up (so
| you are seeing the same message 3 times repeated on the
| screen), people posting images and you'll be lucky to even
| have a tiny fraction visible compared to the IRC view.
|
| I can of course see the appeal of all those features, but
| at least for me it translates into a much worse UX in the
| end.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > Image hosts and pastebins also seem more fragile than
| chat services.
|
| Sadly true. While I don't use IRC much, looking at older
| posts from fora without on-forum file storage and I just
| see photos roughly like this Imgur example
| (https://imgur.com/NOnf.jpg). Heck, even older HN posts
| suffer from the same problem.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I think your expectations can easily be alleviated with the
| right IRC client. Most pastebins and image hosts use some
| form of markup so that if your IRC client was set to
| preview those links then it could, or even potentially
| cache those resources as well.
| Macha wrote:
| So what is this magical sufficiently smart client that
| can embed images from all major image hosts, code
| snippets from all major pastebins and also configures a
| bouncer for me and also lets me see messages on my phone
| without missing some as the phone OS killed it's network
| socket as it put the app to sleep?
|
| I'm no stranger to the IRC protocol (in fact one of my
| first submissions to this site 12 years ago in 2010 was
| an introduction to the protocol written as part of
| building an Android client that was my side project at
| the time), but I have no interest in putting in the time
| to make an IRC client with the experience I'd like in
| 2022, which is clearly a much lower bar on matrix when
| Element, nheko, Cinny, FluffyChat and Fractal have all
| managed it.
| dpifke wrote:
| https://www.irccloud.com/
|
| (Not affiliated, just a happy user.)
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| To be fair IRCCloud is not free nor open source. I
| believe there are other clients that offer similar
| functionality but it would be good to have something easy
| that does this readily available within open source
| bchar wrote:
| IRCCloud does much of this.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Been using Sourcehut as my main repo host for like a year
| now, and didn't even know https://paste.sr.ht existed. Very
| handy. Thanks.
| Tomte wrote:
| "All sourcehut services" on the web site doesn't show all
| services, alas.
|
| I wonder what else is missing besides paste and chat there.
|
| Edit: but the manual does: https://man.sr.ht/
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| is it not weird that you're responding to people who
| obviously know how to use irc and say "this is why i don't
| use it anymore" by trying to teach them how to do what
| everyone already knows how to do?
|
| did you feel that you were offering solutions or something?
| proto_lambda wrote:
| > Use a pastebin
|
| That's not a solution, that's a bad and inconvenient
| workaround. Having to use an external service just to share a
| couple lines of code is horrible for usability. Funnily
| enough, its also exactly the thing that IRC users complain
| about when the matrix bridge converts multi-line messages to
| links.
| Arnavion wrote:
| >Funnily enough, its also exactly the thing that IRC users
| complain about when the matrix bridge converts multi-line
| messages to links.
|
| I assume you're trying to say this is hypocritical, but it
| isn't.
|
| The problem with multi-line messages becoming links is that
| the message is the context of the question. You have to
| reach for a browser just to read what the other person
| wanted to say.
|
| Things like images and pastebins are ancillary to the
| message. You read the text part, decide whether you want to
| engage with it further, and then if you do you reach for a
| browser to see the image or pastebin.
|
| Compare: <h> hey guys im trying to
| install blub on ubuntu but it keeps complaining that my
| splines aren't reticulated. full error here:
| https://paste.rs/id123
|
| with: <h[m]> hey guys... (full message at
| https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/id1
| 23)
|
| That last one is an actual example from an OFTC channel
| that's bridged to Matrix. It truncated at just two words
| because the original message had a newline after "guys".
| proto_lambda wrote:
| Oh yeah, that's indeed not great. For messages with up to
| ~5 lines, the bridge actually just sends several
| messages, but as soon as the message has more lines than
| that, it only shows the first line as a preview. I
| could've sworn it actually sends the first couple lines,
| then a "(full message at ...)" message, but apparently
| not (anymore) - would probably be worth opening an issue
| for :)
| Arnavion wrote:
| The full message was longer than five lines.
|
| There's nothing to file a bug about. The bridge does not
| (and can not without some AI or heuristics which are both
| fallible) know where the relevant part of the message
| ends and the log spew begins, so a message with a one-
| line description and fifty lines of logs is treated the
| same as a message with fifty-one lines.
| kodah wrote:
| An IRC bouncer does what you're wanting in terms of offline
| notification, they're just hard to configure. The problem with
| IRC is largely it's structure. Huge networks don't really merge
| anymore, channel owners stay in their seats for very long
| periods of time, and the network operators largely run on a
| very libertarian ideology of non-interference. Discord solves
| that, and many people moved because of that before Discord had
| all the novel features it has. The people that stick around on
| IRC usually have gripes about the networks they're on, but the
| gripes are tolerable enough.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > but why does it have to be IRC?
|
| Because IRC works. It's open, battle tested and has huge
| support by an endless amount of tools and documentation. There
| is not much reason to not use if all you wanna do is chat.
|
| > I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax
| highlighted
|
| > I like being able to ping people so that they get a
| notification on their phone
|
| > Occasionally, I like to send a GIF.
|
| That's the job of your client, not the communication-protocol.
| IshKebab wrote:
| IRC works... if all you want to do is send basic text
| messages back and forth like it's still 1995.
|
| That's not what I want. I want modern features like text
| formatting, links, images, file sharing (don't mention DCC),
| threads, linking to messages, persistent history, and even
| emoji reactions.
|
| And when I say "modern" I mean "modern relative 1995 which is
| where IRC proponents are still stuck".
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| > Because IRC works. It's open, battle tested and has huge
| support by an endless amount of tools and documentation.
| There is not much reason to not use if all you wanna do is
| chat.
|
| How about encryption?
| dijit wrote:
| TLS is accepted, since you implicitly trust the server when
| using chatrooms in most cases.
|
| for everything else there are plugins in your client for
| OMEMO (what signal is based on) and OTR (which is purely
| session based).
|
| Handling this as a third-party implementation for E2EE is
| probably the only true way to gain trust anyway. If your
| provider provides the infrastructure _and the client_ then
| how can you really trust it?
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| I'm not a security expert, but my humble view is that if
| you need plugins for really basic functionality, that's a
| red flag.
| [deleted]
| dijit wrote:
| "E2EE" is not really basic functionality.
|
| I believe it is hard to get right, and only worthwhile on
| 1:1 communication, it doesn't work well at all on large
| chat rooms, which is what IRC is.
|
| Regardless, if you don't want E2EE to be handled by a
| plugin- it is possible to make a client with it baked in.
|
| There is no company that will stop you creating a third-
| party client unlike slack/discord which are extremely
| hostile to those endeavors by comparison.
|
| EDIT: If you downvote without replying I'm just going to
| assume you're ideologically opposed to open standards,
| because I'm not sure what else I can take from it.
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| I didn't downvote, and I'm very pro open standards. I
| just think we can do better than IRC, that's all.
| dijit wrote:
| Ah, I wasn't accusing _you_ of downvoting, just the
| community.
|
| You can't downvote direct replies.
|
| ---
|
| Speaking about standards; have you looked at IRCv3? Is
| there anything specific that you feel is not being
| addressed?
|
| Encryption (to my mind) _is_ better handled outside of
| the spec itself, just like HTTP vs TLS wrapped HTTP
| (HTTPS) where the "TLS" has no bearing at all on how
| HTTP is implemented.
|
| IRCv3 is attempting to address the persistence issues,
| though many people like the lack of persistence in
| general.
|
| I don't want to guess at what your concerns are, but more
| generally; have you looked at the spec?
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's not really a green flag when values offered by major
| commercial alternatives seems like then-experimental
| client features of existing thing(cf. Twitter, Slack,
| Discord)
| rdpintqogeogsaa wrote:
| Yet there are also large networks like QuakeNet or
| UnderNet with no TLS anywhere.
| dijit wrote:
| And you can choose not to be there.
|
| My network forces TLS: https://darkscience.net
|
| Forcing people to "do what _you_ want " is against the
| spirit of open standards.
| [deleted]
| ddevault wrote:
| If IRC were designed today, it would probably be with E2EE.
| But it's not the end of the world that it wasn't, it just
| limits what use-cases it's appropriate for. Asking about
| kernel config options in #linux does not really demand
| particularly high privacy, and TLS between you and the
| server is generally sufficient. E2EE is also pretty
| difficult to get right and dramatically increases the
| complexity of the system -- Matrix's third-party client
| ecosystem is hamstrung by this requirement and very poor
| compared to IRC as a result. E2EE is nice to have and
| essential for some use-cases, but I don't think that IRC is
| invalid because it lacks it.
| 300bps wrote:
| I haven't heard of a widely-used IRC client that doesn't
| have built-in SSL connectivity for quite some time. For
| example:
|
| https://www.mirc.com/ssl.html
| usrn wrote:
| Encryption makes more sense for small or one on one chats
| with people you know, the sorts of things people use XMPP
| for (which has OMEMO: signal style encryption.) In large
| public chat rooms being able to use a pseudonym is much
| more important than encryption.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| When a platform does not guarantees secrecy you just avoid
| holding private conversations on it. In my opinion, that's
| the spirit of IRC, a public place to discuss, because often
| channels are logged and the logs are accessible for anyone
| from the web. If not, just about anyone on a channel can do
| it without your consent. That's also true I think with
| other "secure" chat platforms because that's the nature of
| any-to-any chat protocols.
|
| Then you use private messages as a way to talk to someone
| without disturbing, or away from the noise, of the channel
| - still not for really private conversations ; for this you
| don't need encryption, you need _end-to-end_ encryption,
| but at this point you 'd rather use a messaging platform
| rather than a chat platform.
| stonogo wrote:
| The world has been "moving on" from IRC for approximately
| thirty years, just like it's been "moving on" from email and
| phone calls and so on. Somehow, all these tools remain.
| ddevault wrote:
| You might like pinging people so they get a notification on
| their phone, but _they_ might not like being on the other end
| of your ping :)
|
| IRC has been around a lot longer than most of the projects
| which have sprung up in the same space, and IRC views their
| features with skepticism rather than being the eternal trend-
| follower. If IRC had followed every trendy chat feature for the
| past 34 years then it would be a hulking monstrosity by now.
|
| There is wisdom in moderation. A communication method can be
| effective without facilitating every style of communication --
| often moreso. I'll note that you're unable to embed a GIF or
| highlight code or send an emoji reaction on your Hacker News
| comments, but we seem to be having this conversation in
| relative ease despite that.
|
| Different people value different things. Matrix is there if you
| want a more "modern" option.
| corobo wrote:
| If IRC had followed every trendy chat feature it might not be
| 10x smaller than it was when I last used it too, in fairness
|
| Not even using comical exaggeration either, I'd say the user
| counts are pretty dead on 10x less now, give or take a few
| thou. Back then EFNet, Undernet, DALNet had like 100k users
| each. Barely getting over the 10k hump these days.
|
| > You might like pinging people so they get a notification on
| their phone, but they might not like being on the other end
| of your ping :)
|
| Notification settings aren't stuck in 1988 too, if you don't
| want to be pinged in 2022 that's on you :P
| carapace wrote:
| It's not humanly possible to talk to 100k or 10k people
| anyway, so what does it matter? It's not Twitter. If the
| hundred or ten people you want to talk to are there, that's
| enough, eh?
| corobo wrote:
| I'm not saying they were all in one channel lmao
|
| What does it matter? If you go on IRC now every channel
| is idle, no chat, just joins quits and parts, boring,
| dead.
|
| > If the hundred or ten people you want to talk to are
| there,
|
| They're not, and haven't been in 10 years. I'd love to
| get back into IRC but there's no IRC to go back to.
| welterde wrote:
| Libera is still quite active, just hop on and onto your
| favorite programming language channels there (or science
| or news or ..) and chances are you'll see plenty of chat
| activity instead of only joins and quits.
| rascul wrote:
| > If you go on IRC now every channel is idle, no chat,
| just joins quits and parts, boring, dead.
|
| Not my experience at all. The channels I'm in have had a
| fairly stable number of users for at least the last
| decade. These are channels with hundreds or even
| thousands of users. There is lots of discussion in these
| channels every day. Sometimes so much I can't keep up
| with it if I'm there participating. I'm in mostly tech
| related channels, though.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > You might like pinging people so they get a notification on
| their phone, but they might not like being on the other end
| of your ping :)
|
| This is a false dichotomy between "you have to receive
| annoying pings" and "there's no notification system in your
| chat system".
|
| What actually happens in real life is that chat systems, even
| proprietary ones, give you control over _what_ notifications
| you receive (and when you receive them). Discord, in
| particular, gives you _significantly_ more fine-grained
| control than any FLOSS tool that I 've ever seen.
| [deleted]
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| i love IRC, without bncs
|
| you close it, and you are not there :) its amazing you connect
| and the history is empty, like every day is fresh
|
| slack/discord/whatsapp/etc are just invasive, everybody somehow
| expects immediate answer to their request.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| in reality, everyone use some kind of irssi or whatever, to
| replicate slack etc, so everyone is there and "active" but
| nobody really is. Hugely annoying.
| nequo wrote:
| > to replicate slack
|
| IRC replicating slack. The irony. _old-person grumble_
| tsujp wrote:
| I think Drew and Simon represent a good case for IRC
| modernisation _without_ it devolving into Slack or Discord.
| Notification fatigue, endless automated bots, and the expectation
| to read channel history _sucks_ and IRC keeps the opt-in liveness
| and culture that fosters jump-in and jump-out chats which is kind
| of how it works face-to-face in the real world anyway.
|
| There are absolutely others doing good work here too but Simon
| and Drew are the most visible (to me).
|
| With (good) forums non-existent now I spend almost all of my
| tech/programming/misc talking on IRC and have since 2011. I'm 27,
| this isn't technology for "boomers" or "die hard oldies" which is
| the general tone against "just use Discord or Slack" I see in
| response to any kind of IRC discussion online.
| way2freedom wrote:
| OT but wanted to share (quoting some of the people here ^^):
|
| 'In public conversations, there's no expectation that everyone
| will be present and no expectation that those "not there"
| should view the things they missed.' -Not even with the same
| eye. P-:
|
| Freedom!?
|
| It certainly gets around some of the privacy concerns. (-:
|
| regards,
| [deleted]
| hericium wrote:
| Wanting to have a "session" on IRC 24/7 in order to stop missing
| messages and conversations, introduced me to UNIX-like systems.
|
| In the late 90s I've purchased a "shell account" from a guy who
| was working for a local uni. Had some trouble understanding how
| the hell `screen` makes programs like ircII stay alive when I'm
| logging out.
|
| Good times.
| ArrayBoundCheck wrote:
| The 80's called, they want their technology back
| zaik wrote:
| What are you doing on this TCP/IP based website?
| ArrayBoundCheck wrote:
| Waiting for QUIC
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Wasn't this what Slack was all about?
| AndyKelley wrote:
| No, Slack was about making a return on VC investments, same as
| what every startup is all about.
| dopa42365 wrote:
| Just use Matrix. Can run an IRC bridge if you need it.
| EmilyHughes wrote:
| Reminds me of the short time when everyone used trillian or
| miranda to have ICQ, MSN and whatever else at once. Guess what,
| these protocols are all gone know, along with these multi-
| clients. Why keep stuff alive that's on the way out? Just move
| on.
| overlisted wrote:
| Last time I checked, Synapse was the only usable homeserver
| implementation. Has this changed yet? It's not that big of an
| issue, but it doesn't seem much of an open protocol if everyone
| is just running the same implementation.
| miloignis wrote:
| Yes, depending on your needs Dendrite (Go impl, written by
| Element team (mostly Neil?)) works well (I've heard) and some
| people are even running Conduit (Rust impl, independent) as
| their main.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I run Conduit as my main. It's still behind on features but
| is active and very usable. No complaints.
| zaik wrote:
| The real standards are IRC and XMPP. Matrix is more a product
| / custom protocol.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| Matrix isn't more or less real than IRC or XMPP, see
| https://spec.matrix.org/latest/
| lobocinza wrote:
| I'm glad that Sourcehut exists but still a long way from Github
| or Gitlab.
| bitwize wrote:
| Just use Slack or Discord, you barbarians. Federation is bad:
| https://www.greaterthancode.com/federation-is-bad
| xibo9 wrote:
| I genuinely cannot tell if you're being sarcastic or not, and
| I'd rather not listen to a long rambling podcast to find out.
| Could you elaborate or summarize?
| bitwize wrote:
| One of the points that Aurynn Shaw makes is that federation
| hampers the addition of protocol features because new
| features have to be agreed upon by all participants in the
| federated network. This adds friction to the evolution of
| protocols, and results in the phenomenon wherein Slack runs
| halfway around the world while IRC is still putting on its
| shoes.
|
| She also makes some excellent points about the social
| characteristics of federated networks. In a federated
| environment, each node sets their own policy, which meant
| there was no single point of responsibility for onboarding
| new users, setting standards of behavior, or filtering out
| trolling and harassment. Often, as on USENET and IRC, it is
| the user's own responsibility to filter out content and users
| they don't want to see -- and there was no authoritative
| source for new users to determine who/what should be
| filtered. Some USENET groups were moderated, and on IRC,
| channel ops can monitor and ban users for in-channel
| behavior, but if someone is harassing you in PRIVMSG there's
| often nothing you can do -- and channel bans can be
| circumvented and enforcement bots subverted fairly easily.
| And no one takes responsibility to communicate _which_
| instance of a federated network to join if they don 't want
| to see particular kinds of content.
|
| So federated networks quickly become cesspools of the worst
| forms of communication because they're optimized to promote
| all forms of communication -- "freedom of speech at all
| costs" as Aurynn says (and, as she points out, is actually a
| US-chauvinistic perspective on speech and runs contrary to
| the laws on speech even in most democratic countries -- hate
| speech being an offense is the norm). This tends to make them
| grognard-friendly, but hostile to new users and to users of
| marginalized communities, as well as potentially illegal to
| participate in in countries not called the USA. And that was
| accepted in the 90s internet because that's how the 90s
| internet was. But standards have changed and this is no
| longer acceptable. "Me too" has gone from the mark of a
| clueless n00b to a rallying cry against harassment. And
| people like Aurynn Shaw and Coraline Ada Ehmke have been
| leading the way in terms of calling out and removing the
| negativity, exclusion, and sometimes outright hate, from open
| source development communities with things like Coraline's
| code of conduct and Aurynn's efforts to highlight contempt
| culture -- the "PHP sucks" and "Micro$oft sucks" culture that
| prevailed in technical circles in the 90s and early 00s whose
| toxicity is something we still deal with today.
|
| Times have changed since federation came out and was promoted
| as a wonderful thing. Back in the 90s, we thought that
| building the technology itself was sufficient to change the
| world for the better. Today we understand better the social
| costs that mentality has unleashed. We optimize for creating
| safe, welcoming communities and promoting voices that are
| usually silenced, rather than allowing everyone to
| communicate anything at any time. Unfortunately, federated
| technologies as we understand them today still come from that
| 90s mentality, and without broader conversations about the
| social impacts -- as well as establishing some sort of
| standards for mitigating those impacts -- it's simply better
| to not federate. Slack and Discord are easier to get started
| with, offer more features, and promote a safer and more
| welcoming environment than does IRC.
| caslon wrote:
| I agree that federation is bad, but "Just use [two awful
| proprietary services, one owned partially by the unethical
| Chinese conglomerate Tencent and the other owned by a
| terrible American company]" isn't a good alternative.
| progval wrote:
| > but if someone is harassing you in PRIVMSG there's often
| nothing you can do
|
| The large majority of IRC networks are centrally managed
| these days, so you can talk to the network operators so
| they ban the person from the network.
|
| > channel bans can be circumvented and enforcement bots
| subverted fairly easily
|
| Disallow unregistered users on your channel, and it becomes
| as hard to circumvent as registering on any other platform;
| assuming the network uses standard blocklists like DroneBL
| dpedu wrote:
| Am I the only person that doesn't want IRCv3? I don't find the
| new features important or compelling (telling others when I am
| typing is creepy!) and I see v3's rise as only leading to some
| sort of schism.
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| One beauty of IRC is you can easily opt out or in to the typing
| spec
| ddevault wrote:
| There are some good ideas and some bad ones. Part of our work
| is to argue against the bad ones. I don't think that the
| contentious ones are likely to get much traction, but some of
| the more obvious ones, like account-registration, are making
| their way into the ecosystem.
| mjevans wrote:
| My _opinion_ is that whatever really replaces / evolves
| existing commonly used communications protocols already has an
| uphill battle. Further, as Gchat / XMPP based chats showed
| (opinion observations): federation without a sufficiently rich
| baseline to ensure a basic user experience leads to
| fragmentation, silo-ing, and eventual death.
|
| It has to fulfill the need of a common space for public
| discourse.
|
| The specification must be open and free for all to use. There
| should be no artificial restrictions on who is able to develop
| tools including servers, clients, intermediary or subsystems,
| or provide a service to host any of them. Federation also
| introduces a higher risk of spam and bad actors; it's part of
| the price of freedom so the protocol should have an intended
| use pattern that addresses that type of issue; ideally without
| forcing the association of a 'real identity' to all use of the
| system. That won't solve all of the problems, and it adds a
| bunch of other problems. However a system of the commons may
| see users such as government organizations or heavily regulated
| industries where endpoints agree to use such an identity in
| some way.
| [deleted]
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