I was an ircop on efnet for like half my childhood until they figured out I wasn't 18 and desynced my server. I just could never go back to IRC. I stopped using it probably 15 years ago or more after using it for 20ish years. Got my first job on it, learned linux and networking through it, definitely propelled my career.
TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree to it in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those 1500 bots in a channel are doing.
NO features. I'm just over the IRC client and protocol and whatever else. It won't preview gifs, you probably still have to do some xdcc crap to send a file. After using discord and twitch and anything remotely modern it just doesn't allow the same type of conversations, socializing, interactions, but a lot of people do love that about it. I don't include weird irc clients like AcidMAX or whatever would be hip nowadays that probably came from a russian warez group that now has your credit card numbers.
No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7. No multi-device support, have to join the server and log in again etc. if it ever restarts or you're somewhere without a shell running it.
Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone.
And being an op the amount of absolutely depraved and creepy stalkery stuff that went on was insane. So many of the few women who identified themselves as women would be harassed and stalked all over irc and sometimes IRL. Lots of glining of creeps.
This was very much an efnet problem with some of the communities it developed. Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.
You hit the nail on the head when it comes to why people don't use IRC anymore. Missing messages because you're not online is simply unacceptable to today's audience, and running a bouncer is too technical for most folks. Using a shared bouncer like IRCCloud isn't feasible since they get abused and the entire provider often gets banned.
I still use IRC (For nearly 30 years now!) and am in a channel that is still highly active with regulars, but I certainly don't fault anybody for not wanting to use it. I run a bouncer not just so I don't lose messages (I leave my computer on 24/7 with mIRC running, so it's not like I'd miss anything), but so I can hide my IP address.
It's actually kind of appalling from a security perspective to expose users' IP addresses. I'm genuinely surprised that the major IRC networks still don't hide them. Sure, it'd break things like DCC, but would prevent DDoS attacks against fellow users.
There’s client addons to log all messages (even highlighting deleted and edited ones) and chat exporters literally anyone can run, mod bots that log every deleted and edited message to special channels, and probably more with Discord too.
(also don’t forget umode +x and vhosts/cloaks exist on most competent networks to hide your IP/hostname)
> Missing messages because you're not online is simply unacceptable to today's audience
It's my favorite feature. I want to chat with friends, not have a second job I need to catch up with.
> It's actually kind of appalling from a security perspective to expose users' IP addresses. I'm genuinely surprised that the major IRC networks still don't hide them. Sure, it'd break things like DCC, but would prevent DDoS attacks against fellow users.
Hostname cloaking is a pretty standard feature these days, you just generally have to ask for it to be turned on which is a bit odd. Doesn't break DCC either because DCC negotiates what your IP is directly with your client afaik. NAT is generally the thing that breaks DCC.
Unreal at least makes it pretty easy to cloak IPs via server config, so there's no window before registering for a vhost where your info is available to normal users: https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Cloaking
Am I the only one who thinks that many of the listed gripes are core features?
> TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites.
Fair enough. This would be a likely problem with any non-private chat system.
> It won't preview gifs
Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party supplied fourth-party content? No thank you.
> No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7
Screen and tmux have been table stakes for decades. If you can not sustain a 400h idle, you're doing it wrong.
> Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone.
Which one do you want? Anonymity or privacy? I don't see how this is in any way different than our current-day antisocial networks.
-- -- -- -- --
But this, now this is a real problem in all modern communications:
> depraved and creepy stalkery stuff that went on was insane
This has always been a problem. In the 90's, IRC was a relatively low-friction method of getting online and talk to people. At least these days the creeps have largely concentrated on their selected forums, but back in the day having just one in any ISC channel was a real menace.
> Fair enough. This would be a likely problem with any non-private chat system.
No, because most non-private chat systems don't oblige anyone who wants to participate seriously to run a log bot. Of course any chat could be being logged, but most people don't bother if you don't give them a reason to.
> Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party supplied fourth-party content?
The whole point of being in a public chat is exposing yourself to arbitrary third-party content. Why would you want to read a message from someone you don't trust enough to load a gif from?
> Screen and tmux have been table stakes for decades. If you can not sustain a 400h idle, you're doing it wrong.
"It was hard for me, so it should be hard for you too." And IRC fans wonder why the younger generation don't want to use it.
> Which one do you want? Anonymity or privacy? I don't see how this is in any way different than our current-day antisocial networks.
People generally want persistent pseudononymity with some kind of reputation/integrity. When you DM someone on Twitter/Instagram/Reddit (or indeed on a phpBB-style forum), you don't have to show them your driving license, but you're reasonably confident they're the same person you were DMing yesterday. For most people that's a better tradeoff than IRC's "they could be anyone who's chosen to call themselves that, lol, good luck". Heck, HN accounts are the same kind of thing (whereas IRC is more akin to 4chan).
Also, impersonating a user is against Discord TOS. It's only if the user is actively portraying themselves as that user to others and not just a nickname switch and being goofy, IIRC.
Personally I think you should get nuked for a day minimum for doing it at all but whatever. Someone did it as me last year and was actually having conversationg an entire day or two before I saw them doing it and it confused the HELL out of me until I realized it.
I used to have a 2 or 3 character nick on Efnet + Freenode, prob others. I'm sure thats long taken by someone else now unless the nickserv never expires them.
There is a difference between receiving purely textual content, strictly encoded as text, from third parties and consuming arbitrary binary content from arbitrary third parties. The worst I can receive is bile and propaganda.
To this day, image and video codecs remain full of awful bugs. If you are on the receiving end a piece of data whose mime-type starts with "image/" or "video/", there's no telling what kind of malice you are up against. At best you are up against bile and propaganda.
Incidentally, I find it funny that disappearing messages á la Snapchat or whatever copycat the major tech companies have come up with is considered hip. But IRC with its "you were not online, so you missed it" concept is somehow undesirable.
> TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree to it in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those 1500 bots in a channel are doing.
These sorts of bots are quite rare on Discord, you usually have to make an account to be able to see anything. There have been attempts at standardizing this (like https://www.answeroverflow.com/) but they haven't taken off. Public logs are much more common on IRC than on Discord.
> Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.
It seems all of the drama hit all at once, due to Andrew Lee's cocaine fueled episode in 2021 which caused hundreds of open source projects to leave the network within the span of a few weeks - https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
Honestly as far as drama goes the whole Lee thing went pretty smooth. News of a takeover went through the network, most people went with a "wait-and-see" approach. Lee tried replacing channel ops, people got upset, Libera was already up and running at this point. Most channels switched without much incident. Freenode largely evaporated into thin air as both users and server hosts started leaving.
> Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.
Freenode had all the drama and discovered how to kill off 99% of its use in just three easy steps: (see https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 for the dramatic abruptness of its fall)
1. There was some drama over the new "owner" of freenode which resulted in most of the moderation staff leaving, planning to set up a new network (libera chat).
2. Most of the communities saw this drama and basically said "uh, we're still evaluating what the hell we're doing," with many opting in the interim to do something along the lines of have presence in both freenode and libera. Freenode responding by de-op'ing and kickbanning people from channels that mentioned libera in the topic. This resulted in pretty much every community still on the fence going "thank you for making the decision, we're now on libera, goodbye freenode."
3. A few months later, the network cleared its chanserv and nickserv lists and basically completely rebooted itself from scratch, to avoid the problems of legacy people.
> TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites.
Don't expect privacy in public.
> NO features.
Thank god.
> No syncing
Conversation should be ephemeral. If you want an audit trail use email.
I also use ircs/ircx on plan 9 where the server portion, ircs, runs on my cpu server and I can connect from anywhere and open the ircx chat clients which are just rc scripts in windows.
While some people might use XDCC, it seems more common to post a filehost link, similar to sharing pictures. You can also exchange magic wormhole codes, link a torrent file, give ipfs info, share a server where you can use sftp, etc. I personally don't like XDCC and never touch it. I think it's used more for grabbing files from bots than between real people, and for that sort of thing I much prefer torrents.
>syncing... multi-device support
I run irssi (tui client) inside of tmux on a remote server (in the house of someone I know, within 20 minutes driving distance). I ssh in and attach to the tmux session from my main PC and my phone, getting the same full client and experience from both, allowing me to do powerful things like use irssi aliases, shell commands, and tmux shortcuts even from my phone. Much more powerful than a dedicated mobile client. Plus I can run mail and torrent clients in another tab, quickly look at IRC log files going back years in another pane, etc.
I'm also on XMPP and Matrix, but nothing feels as powerful, controllable, reliable, and as fun as IRC. I've never seen Rizon or Libera go entirely down for a day or even an hour, but it's practically normal for XMPP and Matrix homeservers to go down, lag super hard, have issues sending or receiving media, have issues with encryption (which you can't even turn back off when it breaks on Matrix, but you can on XMPP). Other proprietary chats need not be mentioned of course. Honorable mention to Mumble for voice, but it's not that often I want to voice chat.
I've made a lot of friends on IRC and I still chat on it every single day.
> While some people might use XDCC, it seems more common to post a filehost link, similar to sharing pictures. You can also exchange magic wormhole codes, link a torrent file, give ipfs info, share a server where you can use sftp, etc. I personally don't like XDCC and never touch it.
What you're saying is that IRC file sharing is so bad that people use anything other than IRC file sharing.
> I run irssi (tui client) inside of tmux on a remote server (in the house of someone I know, within 20 minutes driving distance).
A unix shell account on a managed server would cost at least $5/month at commercial rates. Most people aren't willing to pay that much just for online chat. You don't like IRC, you like the massive favour this person is doing you.
> I ssh in and attach to the tmux session from my main PC and my phone, getting the same full client and experience from both, allowing me to do powerful things like use irssi aliases, shell commands, and tmux shortcuts even from my phone. Much more powerful than a dedicated mobile client.
It's not though. A native, customizable chat program will let you do everything you could do over ssh, but also do things that take advantage of your device's unique capabilities like touch gestures on phone.
> Plus I can run mail and torrent clients in another tab, quickly look at IRC log files going back years in another pane, etc.
Again this is an example of the best thing about IRC being not IRC.
Super interesting, thank you for posting. Agreed with a lot of it, except for one thing:
"No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7."
That's one of the things I miss most about IRC. There was something very temporal about it -- you were logged in, or you weren't. You were present, or you weren't. More modern tools of communication like Slack or Discord basically don't have this; it's more like a long private "feed" than a "chat" as I think of it, anyway.
I miss that temporality. I miss logging in and asking the chat, "Hey, is so and so online?" "yeah, he was here about half an hour ago, went afk but should be back." It gives me the same warm rosy feeling the thought of having to use a pay phone does.
Obviously, you're right, in the commercial sense, this is unacceptable. But I personally kind of miss the days when chat / email / forum were separate things. Now we have these mutants in Slack and Discord that mish mash both. Maybe I'm old but I find it sort of difficult conceptually.
> you probably still have to do some xdcc crap to send a file
At least you don't have to re-learn how to do it when the UI changes, when the commercial sponsorship changes, when the advertising changes, or when they announce they've been hacked and your data is on the "darkweb" (probably another IRC network).
I guarantee you I don't know a single xdcc command anymore without looking them up and I used them for 15 years, whereas I could probably leave discord for 5-15 years and still try to right click someone and drag a file over to their name.
A new user doesn't know to type xdcc help, etc. They have to google how to send IRC files, blahblah. And everyone will be on a different client so maybe yours has an XDCC context menu button but theirs doesn't, etc.
I was an op when I was under 18, stopped using IRC 15+ years ago, and used it in total for probably 15-20 years. I'm 39 and started at .. Idk, probably 8-9. I think I was an op from 12-16 maybe 17.
A lot of ops were people who synced (peered) their stable and moderated servers on good connections with efnet. Like, OC1-3 connections. My friends and I were pretty much apprentice network engineers to a family member who ran a NOC so we had.. servers..
edit: LOL I just looked up oc1-3 speeds. That used to be so fast.
I didn't grow up in California but Virginia so it was pretty lonely. Everyone online was from CA in the 90s and my friends didn't start having family computers until probably the 2000s.
And my parents really weren't very helpful with me growing it into a career. I was always "playing on the computer."
Yeah I was thinking that when I saw the speed, I remember wanting OC1 at my house but I couldn't even afford shotgun dsl or whatever it was back then, maybe it was shotgun t1s.
Yes look up any $server and #chat_room and you'll probably find one that has an almost elasticsearch quality search feature where you can specifically pick a user and see everything they've said and run sentiment values on it, etc. Sometimes they're not THAT public but someone is usually keeping them, you can even do it in your IRC client with a rolling txt log so its accessible to non-teceh users.
If you want a crazy trip look up irc logs on 9/11, and keep in mind most of the people on irc on 9/11 were middled aged in the 2000s and.. extremely unpleasant. Incredible amounts of anti-muslim, jew stuff, every single channel was ranting about muslims and turning iraq into glass.
These are just examples, you have the full text logs so I'm sure people are running them through AI and everything else now.
That's super identifying of a nickname I used when i was 8-16 that would have IRC logs all over the internet so I won't be passing that on, sorry. God knows what stupid shit I said back then. I still use the domains from back then.
TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree to it in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those 1500 bots in a channel are doing.
NO features. I'm just over the IRC client and protocol and whatever else. It won't preview gifs, you probably still have to do some xdcc crap to send a file. After using discord and twitch and anything remotely modern it just doesn't allow the same type of conversations, socializing, interactions, but a lot of people do love that about it. I don't include weird irc clients like AcidMAX or whatever would be hip nowadays that probably came from a russian warez group that now has your credit card numbers.
No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7. No multi-device support, have to join the server and log in again etc. if it ever restarts or you're somewhere without a shell running it.
Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone.
And being an op the amount of absolutely depraved and creepy stalkery stuff that went on was insane. So many of the few women who identified themselves as women would be harassed and stalked all over irc and sometimes IRL. Lots of glining of creeps.
This was very much an efnet problem with some of the communities it developed. Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.