
IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival - metabrew
https://irc.com
======
beefhash
As a routine user of IRC: This scares – nay, terrifies – me.

London Trust Media is colossal. They seem to have control over freenode and
Snoonet, two networks basically unchallenged in their niche. Snoonet hasn't
been doing so well since Discord, but that's another story. They also seem to
own Private Internet Access. If a player becomes too big, they'll change the
rules of the game. Just look at the state of Internet advertising: A few
corporations probably know a lot more about most better than you wish they
did.

Re "IRC University": Practically every non-trivial network has its own
software stack of some sort. Trying to teach people every kind of
IRCd/services combination is more or less doomed to fail. Mainly because
people usually just _don 't want to know_.

Re "IRC Ventures": There's no money to be made on IRC, at least in its current
form. Slack, Discord, etc. gained traction because IRC is fundamentally
inaccessible. It does not meet any of the common needs of today: server-side
storage of history, mobile-friendly data usage and session management, built-
in uploading, profiles and profile pictures, first class support for emoji.
Though whether addressing them is correct is another story. However, these
would all need to be addressed to try and make IRC competitive on any kind of
market. The IRCv3 team, which does have a decently broad amount of adoption,
has had issues pushing through much more trivial issues. Hell, we don't even
have everybody on the same page about _TLS_ – QuakeNet and UnderNet are still
plaintext only. QuakeNet undeniably intentionally so[1].

Mark me highly skeptical of this undertaking.

[1] [https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-
transitive...](https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive-
or-why-irc-over-ssl-is-pointless)

 _EDIT_ : Seems I misunderstood some points, see also neatnosleep's response
to this comment.

~~~
bandrami
> first class support for emoji

I'm sorry. Even in 2018 I cannot take seriously any claim that "support for
emoji" is being used to make business case decisions.

~~~
iamdave
I watched as a Lack of emoji support took down a critical production database
for over 100 non-profit organizations in 2015 and made ripples across the
charitable giving sector.

All because someone included a smiley emoji while making a donation to a local
community foundation. Lessons were learned because of poor planning admittedly
but if you don't take emoji support seriously it's probably because you
haven't suffered through a critical outage from poorly supporting character
encodings.

We aren't a chat company. We don't even write email clients. We process
transsctions. And we lost millions because of a single emoji.

~~~
inimino
Sounds more like "Unicode support" or even "input sanitization" was the
missing feature there. As long as you have bytes in = bytes out and you don't
crash on unexpected input, you never need to know that emoji even exist to
avoid these problems.

~~~
hobs
Yep, and this sounds even more fishy because the idea that no unintended
unicode characters wouldnt be copied and pasted into a form field is a joke.

------
ummjackson
London Trust Media recently hired Mt. Gox (yes that Mt. Gox) ex-CEO Mark
Karpeles as CTO. [https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/22/mt-gox-chief-returns-
as-...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/22/mt-gox-chief-returns-as-cto-of-
vpn-giant/)

~~~
yborg
That would seem to immediately nullify the "Trust" part.

~~~
ryanlol
There's no "London" at play here either.

------
sirfz
I can fairly say that it was IRC that introduced me to the coding world (where
I learned to code TCL scripts for Eggdrops) when I was in high school and made
me decide to switch my major to Computer Science after my first semester as a
Graphic Design student (which I only chose because my brother had switched off
Internet access from me for a few months which affected my judgment
apparently)

~~~
HoppyHaus
I'm of a generation after you, likely, but I'm in the same boat. I learned
python by maintaining an IRC bot, which started out rolling d20s. It then
expanded into a 1000+ line monstrosity, which was a mess, but the features
taught me many aspects of programming, and let me apply it. The bot has since
been rewritten into much, much cleaner code, and is one of a few projects I'm
proud of. All thanks to RFC1459.

~~~
sirfz
One of my greatest achievements back then was allprotection.tcl[1] (over 2000+
lines of spaghetti) LOL but I have no doubt that TCL scripting taught me a lot
and gave me a huge advantage during my studies!

I'm sure you enjoyed what you were doing ;)

[1]
[https://github.com/sirfz/allprotection.tcl](https://github.com/sirfz/allprotection.tcl)

~~~
HoppyHaus
Hah, looks better than my original code. When it was starting to be created, I
didn't even know how to write a function, and there were a grand total of I
think two when it was retired. Here [1] is my updated code. Apologies for some
edgy commands, my IRC server has some... interesting people in it.

[1] [https://hoppy.haus/git/Failure/MIPS](https://hoppy.haus/git/Failure/MIPS)

------
ve55
I'm interested to see how they manage to convince communities to use their IRC
services over competitors like Discord when so many users see Discord as easy,
free, trendy, etc. Of course services liks Slack, Telegram, Skype, etc, are
also potential competitors in this ecosystem.

>IRC Gaming (We're going to have literally hundreds of thousands in cash
prizes!) I suppose literally paying users money is one way, but it doesn't
sound very sustainable. Some of their other projects like "IRC Ventures
(VC/Incubation on IRC!)" are pretty hard to imagine the specifics about, but
hopefully we'll see some interesting positive actions sooner or later to show
us what they really intend to do.

~~~
pmoriarty
Are there any open source Discord clients?

So far, I've refused to try it because the only client Gentoo has is a binary
blob.

~~~
adrianmalacoda
There is a libpurple/Pidgin plugin for Discord. As you might expect, however,
it only exposes text chat and not any of the "rich" features such as voice
chat or emote reactions.

I don't know of any free software full reimplementation of the Discord client,
and I suspect such would be against their terms of service.

------
mabynogy
IRC is great and IMHO still the best chat system we have. I'm active in a IRC-
based community of programmers
([http://dailyprog.org/chat/](http://dailyprog.org/chat/)).

I'd like to know more about Andrew Lee (especially if he is reachable on IRC).

------
ge0rg
Everything in this post except the personal sentiment could be about any semi-
anonymous text based communication medium, be it mailing lists, web forums or
any other chat system with group chats / channels.

As somebody who has been on irc for over 20 years now, and shares most of the
sentiment, I still wouldn't invest into the tech. As others have written, the
protocol simply isn't adequate for today's usage scenarios.

This is a problem that people have been fighting with some success on xmpp,
which is far more flexible and is a superset of what irc provides, and there
are the obvious web stack based solutions like Slack, Matrix and Mattermost.

Still, people rather use Facebook groups today, and we won't convert them by
making irc better.

------
alanpost
We do customer support over IRC, on Freenode and OFTC. Particularly with the
availability of web clients on Freenode, casual IRC users can reach us with
minimal hassle while long-time users idle and voice when they're highlighted
or the discussion interests them.

My experience of Freenode is improved since PIA's involvement. Staff lurk in
our channel on-hand to help if something comes up. Last month when services
went down a developer put their head in to talk about the outage and share the
patch developed from the experience.

I don't think there is another chat platform with that kind of robust
community. The tooling for IRC makes the experience more like an auditorium
than a parlor. I'm optimistic about this announcement--if IRC has a future I
believe it will be due to the social scale at which it is capable of
operating.

~~~
nopacience
Support over IRC is historical in open source.

irc.perl.org -- perl language support and development

irc.mozilla.org -- mozila related support and development

irc.freenode.net has many support channels:

#mysql

#postgresql

#vim

#emacs

#nodejs

#css

#javascript

#python

#manjaro -- manjaro linux distro

#archlinux -- arch linux distro

#freebsd

#linux

#vuejs -- horrible support (frontend channel)

#angularjs -- horrible support (frontend channel)

#elasticsearch

#sqlite

#xen

#docker

#git

and the list goes on. many great people there :)

~~~
dikiaap
#vuejs is created by Evan You. As a topic on the channel, he seems abandoned
the channel and suggest people go to Gitter for active support.

------
a_lieb
It's good that they want to maintain and nourish the culture that has grown up
around IRC, but in the long run, shouldn't the focus be on keeping the culture
but moving it toward newer federated systems like Matrix? IRC is late 80's
technology with no security.

~~~
erikb
Just because a protocol is old, doesn't mean you need to replace it. And newer
stuff often is just a reiteration of the old stuff anyways.

------
cantelope
If I may interject.. Until 4 months ago I didn't know LTMH existed, but I knew
I loved Freenode, and IRC in general. Since then I've learned much about LTMH,
having been hired by them as a developer and designer. They have treated me
very well so far, and I believe in my core that their interests are
benevolent. They believe in protecting privacy, freedom of speech, openness of
software, and connecting individuals from around the globe. In my experience,
LTMH has never sacrificed these principles in the pursuit of financial gain,
and I believe this endeavor (the IRC.com project) will, as all their other
projects do, serve the community upon which they depend.

------
crooked-v
IRC will never get popular again. Server-based history and connections shared
across devices are just too useful.

~~~
dev_dull
Not only that, but passionate IRC people still hold onto the belief that
things like TLS are "useless"[1]

1\. [https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-
transitive...](https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive-
or-why-irc-over-ssl-is-pointless)

~~~
Something1234
Your link went dead. I would greatly appreciate actually being able to read
this article.

~~~
schoen
You can find a working version at

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170629073046/https://www.quake...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170629073046/https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-
is-not-transitive-or-why-irc-over-ssl-is-pointless)

The argument is that there's no way to move the whole IRC ecosystem to use TLS
(including with enforcement of certificate checks on the client side) and so
the security benefits will be radically degraded by patchwork adoption,
because if even one channel participant accepts a MITM attack, all channel
participants' communications will be exposed.

This seems correct to me, but I still don't find it to be an argument against
TLS on IRC, just an argument that security indications perhaps shouldn't be
presented to users to confirm that their communications are secure since they
do depend on behaviors of remote clients that the local user's client can't
confirm easily. After all, suppose you're in a channel with only 3 or 4 people
and all of them are enforcing certificate checks. Then you _have_ gotten lucky
and received a tangible security improvement. Likewise for direct messages
with one other user. But indeed, in the common case of a large heterogeneous
IRC channel, probably there will most often be no security gain in practice
against a powerful network adversary.

(And it's also a benefit for a user who's individually concerned about a
nearby network adversary more than about pervasive monitoring.)

~~~
beefhash
> in the common case of a large heterogeneous IRC channel

Which does not map all cases. Queries are still far from dead. And you don't
want to set up a small IRCd for shady things because that might tick off law
enforcement a lot more than sticking to some established network whose
security you trust.

~~~
schoen
Yes, I tried to acknowledge this by writing "Likewise for direct messages with
one other user". I think the author of the original anti-TLS piece was too
focused on "the common case of a large heterogeneous IRC channel" to the
exclusion of other cases, which I agree are very real!

------
xf86alsa
[https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org) is essentially a modern IRC, but
federated and completely FOSS. I suggest people drawn to an IRC-like
experience without the proprietary nature of Slack and Discord [give it a
shot]([https://riot.im](https://riot.im)).

~~~
warmwaffles
You know that IRC is FOSS as well right?

~~~
schoen
Maybe the intended contrast isn't between IRC and Matrix, but between Matrix
and Slack (which a lot of people like to call "modern IRC" and which isn't
FOSS).

------
itchyjunk
Freenode already has channels like ##math, ##physics etc where lot of actual
lecturers and professors lurk. I've gotten all my math help past few years
over there as the quality of help is considerably better than the tutors on
campus. So what does "IRC University" mean? Have accredited classes? Or just
the same idea ?

------
j45
I don't know about trascended... But it definitely has gone backwards since.

But irc in its heyday had far higher quality and duration of connection than
much that followed it. Maybe it was truly the first generation of the
internet. I still have many of those teenage irc connections in my life years
later.

It's not hard to imagine IRC surviving if it had a natural path to instant
messaging when Icq/aim/yahoo arrived.

I welcome a return of a modern IRC.

~~~
criddell
I'm waiting on an NNTP revival.

~~~
j45
Rss too

~~~
gsich
RSS was and is not dead.

~~~
j45
Didn't mean to imply rss is dead. It's definitely not at the top of the pile
where it should be either.

------
amatecha
I mean, IRC is still going pretty strong. I've used IRCCloud [0] for years and
swear by it. IRC is still pretty much the universal chat protocol you can
expect to find discussion forums for pretty much any subject, and not
encumbered by centralized commercial systems like Slack or Discord (as much as
I like them).

[0] [https://www.irccloud.com/](https://www.irccloud.com/)

------
hestefisk
We should be pleased that someone actually wants to move irc forward and
invest in it. I first discovered IRC in 1995 hanging out on #hackerzlair and
later various Linux channels on EFnet. Without the countless hours on irssi
inside GNU screen (yes, there was something before tmux!) I wouldn’t be where
I am today in my career. That said, we need to keep it distributed as much as
possible; too few owners could be poisonous.

To my last point, I could easily see a second revival of irc using IPFS as the
transport layer. Same feeling of community and privacy in a text terminal, but
no central nodes.

~~~
moises_silva
Wait, there is something after screen?

------
noway421
IRC should surpass the notion of just a protocol and become a real product.
The UX is still not user friendly. There's no standard way of doing threads.
Rolling out IRC in an organisation is extremely hard. Cloud-based IRC hosting
providers are hardly credible and not endorsed by anyone as enterprise-ready.
IRC Clients are offering drastically different level of experience, if even
usable out-of-the-box. Authentication is hard (why do we have a hack like
NICKSERV if that stuff should be in the protocol?). Offline message retention,
history viewing, and seamless offline/online transitions are completely broken
(Bouncer usually solves those with terrible UX).

Messaging is not easy. There are teams out there who are working on solving
those hard problems full time while having the luxury of having a centralised
specification with full control over implementation. IRC won't be ever be able
to achieve that without transitioning into a centralised product.

There are reasons why going as centralised product is best. Twitter did the
same (it was easy from the technical point of view, hard from community point
of view). They managed to up their game in the user experience by doing so.

I'm not sure IRC can even do that at this point, the protocol is in the wild
and making additions to it/standardising them, getting clients to adopt the
changes would be hard. But it would be the only way for IRC to compete with
other solutions.

------
giancarlostoro
I'd love to see IRCv3 take off more:

[https://ircv3.net/irc/](https://ircv3.net/irc/)

I also want to understand web clients more, do they use WebSockets? Can we
spec that out to be part of every IRC server out there?

~~~
prawnsalad
Most use a websocket library like sockjs or socket.io which uses websockets
and falls back to long polling if there's an issue with that.

Some IRC servers are starting to implement native websockets but that
introduces several issues, so many networks use a websocket gateway to accept
websockets to their network, such as
[https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway](https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway)

Then for IRCv3, most clients these days do support their specs in some form of
way, and it's growing :)

------
madprops
I love IRC. Use it every day. I'm developing my own chat stack though, which
supports images, video, and audio changes as core features of it.

This is how an empty room looks like:
[https://i.imgur.com/ir3qyUp.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ir3qyUp.jpg)

Code can be found in
[https://github.com/madprops/Hue](https://github.com/madprops/Hue)

Been working on it since 2016

------
mepian
I don't expect anything good to come out of this for the current IRC users.
Hopefully they aren't going to play the embrace-extend-extinguish game in the
long run to steal the name for their own proprietary protocol.

~~~
wencha
Remove “proprietary” and that’s what IRCv3 did.

~~~
strkek
It's like the devs of Clang and GCC suddenly joined to define what "C20" means
but bypassing ANSI and ISO processes.

------
passedby
A fair few open source projects mentioned there. If they can be keeping things
open while truly helping the existing IRC projects then that would be cool.

------
babbit999
A friend introduced me to IRC around mid 90s when internet was getting popular
in Sweden. DALnet was the network and it was late hours due to the channels
main participants where from overseas. My friend went to the channels IRL get
together in the US. Met there his love of his life, married and moved to the
US. I think it’s a great story about the impact of internet and IRC was and
probably is.

Turning to today, I think IRC can be a big player in the area of IoT.
Especially because internet is going into a period of decentralisation. It’s
starts with the geeks, like you and I, and later the main caucas will trend
on.

Long Live IRC!

------
kuon
This is a bit off topic, and I love IRC, but I'd love a modern IRC client.

Features I'd like:

\- Inline images and media

\- html preview

\- people list, friends, but also an automatic highlight system, when I chat
with someone I don't know for some time, I'd like to have that person on some
list.

\- Conversation history (a way to jump to my conversations within the channel
history).

\- More advanced profiles (image, bio...) Option to publish my public channel
list.

\- End to end encryption if in private channels

\- Notifications

\- Status (busy, helping...)

\- Activity summary (mostly for private channels but being able to know who
was active, and what was discussed).

\- Reactions (on busy channels it is quite fun and a fun way to say thanks
without pollution).

\- Threads.

~~~
prawnsalad
(kiwiirc.com dev here) You might want to take a look at irccloud.com and
kiwiirc.com/nextclient

These 2 clients cover most of your use case while others such as end to end
encryption are currently being developed. Hopefully with with irc.com support
multiple IRC clients can be reaching all of these features and in a standard
open way.

------
badrabbit
I like IRC but it's 2018 and even the latest drafts of ircv3 lack built in e2e
encryption for private and group messages.

Using IRC is like using ftp or email. We've been there and tried that,slapping
on a solution to secure it just won't work well. They've been trying to fix
email for decades now and the best solutions we have(gpg and s/mime) still
don't provide metadata security (I don't think their encryption can be callend
end to end either)

In my opinion, a new _end to end encrypted_ protocol that preserves the
properties of IRC people like would be ideal.

~~~
CapacitorSet
Isn't IRC compatible with e2e? I could see it working at a "transport" layer,
with additional commands to import, export and view keys.

~~~
badrabbit
If you break backwards compatibility? Maybe to an extent. How do you handle
clients that don't support it? How do you secure channels and allow some of
the current server op/admin (what freenoders call staffer) functionality? By
the time you consider that and more you might as well make a new protocol.

Let's say someone with an older irc client or who doesn't want e2e messages
you,what then? Now your irc conversations become opportunistically secure.
That means only arbitrary conversations are secure. Email does this and it
sucks.

Another problem,clients that don't have e2e almost always also store logs in
plain text. Yet another problem - no protocol level e2e plans as of yet.

So why try to fix it? This approach does not work. The least we can do is
learn from history. Unlike email or ftp, there aren't a whole lot of people
that depend on irc being the current irc protocol. What people want is a
distributed server architecture with a user interface that is similar to the
current irc. What protocol engineers seem to get wrong is that they use the
opportunity to also add other fancy features which simply ends up working
against adoption.

~~~
strkek
I can perfectly see this implemented without breaking backwards compatibility,
similar to how we have usermodes for "connected via SSL" and channel modes for
"requires SSL".

It doesn't require breaking backwards compatibility because, as far as
outdated clients are concerned, they just "can't enter a channel because they
lack a required usermode" or "can't send a message to some user because they
lack a required usermode".

We only need the spec to define "some way" to do it so clients can announce
their support and servers know what to do with the supporting clients.

Then it's up to IRC daemons to provide some modes for it.

~~~
badrabbit
Most of my comment was assuming it was implemented with or without backwards
compatibility. You are assuming people will slowly move to the e2e version.

People are still writing clients without tls support. Why would you think e2e
support will have better adaptability? People will move away from it when they
get enough number of messages that require turning it off because the other
party does not support it. Nobody wants to join your channel because you need
them to have one of a few clients in a very short list in order to join.

We already have OTR (for quite some time now) and matrix has libolm - things
aren't and won't change because the best you can practically implement it is
using opportunistic negotiation and that is bad security. Best case
scenario(imo),20 years from now 95%+ of irc users will use e2e. That is
unacceptable when we already have fully e2e chat today. Let's break
compatibility and have a separate network for the new secure protocol. At
least that way people that move over don't have to look back. When foss
projects move to the new network everything else (again,pure opinion) will
follow.

------
znpy
I am part of a student association of GNU/Linux users in my university.

A long time ago many of the founders met on IRC, and after founding this
association, they also founded a dedicated IRC channel.

This was nearly twenty years ago.

Time has passed, many new presidents and members have proposed new
communication media (slack, zulip, mattermost among the many) and after some
initial enthusiasm they all faded, their problems had become evident and their
usage has dropped since.

Needless to say, that IRC channel remained. Despite everything.

------
bonyt
Oh man. The description of how IRC has impacted his life really hits me. I've
been using IRC since I was in middle school, I've made and lost friends there,
I've learned to program, I've helped others, I've grown as a person. It pains
me to watch it fade as we move to platforms like reddit or discord.

[https://xkcd.com/1782/](https://xkcd.com/1782/)

------
fimdomeio
hmm... To me irc was great as a young teenager in the first half of the 90's
because my friends were there. I used a lot of geographical local channels so
at some point people started organizing dinners, and I ended up knowing a lot
of people. I still love the concept of irc but people are gone and they are
never coming back unless someone destroys fb, snapchat or whatever they are
using right now.

------
kuba-orlik
For me the thing that IRC desperately needs is a set of features that would
make it usable on mobile... While constantly switching networks (wifi, 3g etc)
it's almost certain I will miss some of the messages. That is a real
dealbreaker for me and the reason why we've decided to have an irc->telegram
vridge so people can keep up with the conversation on the go.

Spoiler alert: now everybody just uses Telegram

~~~
cup-of-tea
Back when I used IRC for work I always ran irssi on a server in screen and
ssh'd in. I had a window that picked up any highlight that happened and, of
course, logged everything.

I liked this solution. After a while people would understand that you are
always idling and probably afk but that you _would_ pick up any messages as
soon as you can.

Nowadays you could idle using a raspberry pi or something. It would use less
power than your phone. I don't want IRC while I'm out. That's not the point of
it.

~~~
jan-jakub
Of course _I_ can do that - and I did, with znc on my vps. But it's not a
solution for beginners or less-technical people.

Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members
to read into the conversation history... Adding it to the spec would make it
1000x easier to onboard new users

~~~
cup-of-tea
> But it's not a solution for beginners or less-technical people.

I don't see a problem. You don't give beginners enough credit. We were
beginners once and we managed it just fine. If anything beginners today are
cleverer than us :)

> Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new
> members to read into the conversation history

Is this actually something people do? For one of my channels I had stats
generated from the logs and ability to search the entire log. I'm sure that
could be trivially setup nowadays with Elasticsearch or something. If you
control the server you can guarantee you'll catch every message too and won't
lose any in a netsplit.

------
Dowwie
My first experience with the internet was through IRC. I had read about IRC in
a book I had gotten at a computer show in 1991. I had no idea what I was
looking at but figured out how to join a channel. I chatted with someone from
Indonesia! How cool was that. None of my friends could relate.

I continue to use IRC regularly. The Python community is thriving on Freenode
and Rust community on Mozilla

------
ulkesh
I love the optimism. Really.

However, while IRC is a great collaboration tool, and one I also grew up
using, I find that though users are anonymous and no one can see each other,
there are still plenty of trolls who have many ways of getting under one's
skin.

This utopia of IRC simply doesn't exist. It is still comprised of humans.
Anonymous humans. And anonymity tends to bring out the worst in people.

~~~
pmoriarty
My experience with the FreeNode IRC network has been pretty troll-free.

They could do even better by requiring everyone to register.

In my experience, trolling on IRC is mostly a thing of the past.

~~~
mattl
> They could do even better by requiring everyone to register.

Many channels have this. For example, a lot of the GNU and FSF channels do
this so we can keep them relatively spam and troll free.

------
agumonkey
irc is lively enough, steady and just right. Thanks but no thanks

~~~
sgt
I'm on irc still.. but i've cut down on all the channels I used to hang around
in, and now I'm basically only in #motorcycles on EFNet, where IRC is alive
and well. Topics range from rebuilding carburetors to the innards of Erlang.

~~~
noeatnosleep
Huh, I'll have to drop in. I didn't realize efnet had an active #motorcycles
channel. I'm in one on freenode and one on snoonet, though.

------
orliesaurus
Read the article, a bit skeptical, but we'll see.

P.S. I been registered on rizon since 2002 - who else is a an oldschool IRC
user in here?

~~~
trumped
EFnet was my first favorite network... haven't used that network in years
though... #warez950 I think was one of the channels...

------
csixty4
I used to _live_ on IRC, but it's been years since I was a regular user. Are
channel takeovers still a thing? That was one of the things that turned me off
on it after getting locked out of the channel I called home for most of a
decade.

~~~
progval
No, channel admins register their channel to a bot (ChanServ) with special
privileges over the network, so the bot can never be taken over.

I've been using IRC for about a decade, and almost all networks I have seen
have such a bot.

------
noddingham
IRC revival? What do people think Slack, Hipchat, Discord, Stride, etc. are?
They're IRC derivatives. I spent my formative years online in IRC rooms so for
me I feel like the "revival" has been going on for years.

------
jaequery
Long time user of IRC and I never ever heard of irc.com till now. What is it
for and what does it do???

I have been saddened to see the state of IRC declining year after year. I love
the fact someone is trying to do something about it!

------
whywhywhywhy
IRC proves that having a barrier to entry can be a beautiful thing in some
cases.

I hang about in an IRC channel with less than 10 active users, still more
valuable than any Slack channel I lurk in with hundreds.

------
st3fan
Who cares about the domain. Don’t need a fancy .com for a revival.

------
lerie82
not sure it need a revival. i have been using irc since 99

------
badrabbit
Isn't london trust media the owner of freenode and privateinternetaccess?

~~~
prawnsalad
Yup! [https://londontrustmedia.com/](https://londontrustmedia.com/)

------
ekianjo
Revival? I did not know IRC was dead. I am still using it every day.

------
Jigsy
How can you revive something that never died? :>

------
valeg
Fediverse has a better shot than this.

------
wst_
The biggest problem, and biggest fail of IRC. It is too low level and requires
people to write scripts when they need anything else beyond simple text
message.

I am torn apart here, because I really do like hacking things. The issue is -
most people don't. They just want to use it, and they want to use it
consistently - no matter the platform, the client, the server they are
connecting to. And I totally understand that. More of it, I also understand
that if you fail to provide this consistency your service have failed in the
design phase and will never get widespread usage.

The sooner we, tech savvy people, understand that, the sooner we'll be able to
deliver a successful open services that actually stand a chance with their
closed counterpart.

So obviously, give people way to hack, but you must to:

* Design a rich protocol covering needs of the biggest target possible while allowing optionally disable features. Channels history, disappearing messages, embedded media, text formatting, emoji, stickers, web hooks, API for bots, you name it. The protocol must cover most of them, so there is no need to write scripts anymore, unless you need something niche.

* Design a strict spec for the clients, so all of them must keep to the spec, or they fail to be part of the service. And this is critical - do no allow client to behave differently and have a missing features.

* Design clients so they are trivial to use. They must be usable out of box and all (most) of the features must be enabled after installation. Necessary steps to start using it (connection, channels, etc.) should be reduced to minimum and intuitive.

* Keep a community of server and client developers so they can share info and be able to build uniform solution for the users.

* And probably most important - promote the service. And do promote it heavily, unless you want to design something niche, which, I guess, is not what we are talking here.

I've used IRC for years in the past. It was great, I do admit - not anymore.
Today I require at least few formatting options (bold, inline code, block
code) and no 3rd party tools needed to get anything else work properly. I have
no time to hack things I need to use. I would rather spend my time to hack
things I like. IRC is just a tool to communicate, I want to use it, not hack
it. I loathe to jump here and there to accomplish tasks that should be done
within a second with one click.

The biggest problem I observe with many things in the industry is - made by
devs for devs. Never for average Joe. Average Joe have no idea about keeping
your session attached so you don't loose nick, logs, etc. Neither he cares
about that stuff. And honestly - the older I get, the less time I have for
this kind of stuff as well. Just make it work or face the failure.

------
caiocaiocaio
Meh. I'm still waiting for the triumphant return of the pets.com puppet.

------
xor1
Please no ircoin.

------
nopacience
Long live IRC

There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever.
IRC was and still is great.

IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be
done above it.

IRC is open.

The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful

Email, IRC, HTML, FTP

And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to
ask for a picture. Different from the newer trendier platforms. Back then
people used to engage a lot more before they became curios to put a face on a
nickname.

The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately
are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX. Looks like average
people need apps that are simpler to use than IRC, apps that allow them to
promote their profile to the next level, have followers and likes statistic.
Which is alright, in the end they are just the average people that wont put
effort to learn nonclickable platforms like IRC.

The web really exploded when the smartphone came and apps like facebook came
also and made the average people go online and understand what internet was
for. There was a time when only the nerds understood what internet really was.
Nowadays the internet guy is not a "nerd" anymore. Nerd is not perjorative as
it once was.

IRC is still open, IRC is still kicking.

If you are on IRC, dont let the shiny and newer take you out from IRC.

Long live IRC

~~~
tptacek
I used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the
1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively-
centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator
clients that can't even show an image.

I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either.

I guess that makes me "average".

IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s era of protocol
design. All are on their way out, some more gradually than others. Good
riddance. How sad it would be if the Internet of 2020 looked the same as it
did in 1995.

~~~
csomar
I don't think people want IRC for the lack of functionality. I think they miss
IRC because they see in Slack a real threat to decentralization, privacy and
openness.

I don't use IRC. But I'd never use Slack either in a project I maintain/lead.
We need a better alternative.

~~~
rasengan
Also, slack is like a dumbed down version of IRC. As an example, on IRC you
could run an auction or a 10000 person university lecture because there is a
+m channel mode (moderation).

+m quiets all users in the channel and only allows you to speak if you receive
the channel-user mode +v (voice) or have +o (operator status). Some ircds also
have a +h etc.

You can setup bots like “RaiseYourHand” for people who want to ask questions
and need temporary voice (+v).

Try that on slack, telegram, signal, etc. Its impossible.

IRC was ACTUALLY built for collaboration and communication. Slack was built to
make money.

The difference in goals causes a different outcome.

~~~
detuur
Actually, Discord does this pretty well. I honestly consider it a 21st century
successor to IRC. The unfortunate fact is that Discord is still a closed
system, with not even the ability to run your own instance, instead with the
owners insisting on a cloud-run infrastructure.

Just imagine how much better Discord, Slack, et al. could be if you could host
your own instances with your own rules and with your own extensions.

~~~
krageon
If it is closed (and nominally 'free' for the average user), you have to
assume _everything_ you say and do is being mined and sold to the highest
bidder. How can something like that be the successor to anything?

------
slater
"IRC is a transcended level of humanity"

Just how high are these folks on their own supply?

~~~
toomuchtodo
It's not that far out of line with the status quo:

"Indeed, to assess WeWork by conventional metrics is to miss the point,
according to [Chief Executive Officer Adam] Neumann. WeWork isn’t really a
real estate company. It’s a state of consciousness, he argues, a generation of
interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs."

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-27/wework-
ac...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-27/wework-accounts-for-
consciousness)

~~~
nathanaldensr
We are always told by marketing types that what we perceive isn't real;
instead, it's always something at least one level above that. Purely designed
to manipulate an emotional response from the reader/viewer.

I can say for me it certainly does cause an emotional response, but not the
one WeWork or London Trust Media are hoping for.

------
Fukkaudeku
Let IRC die. Shit protocol, horrible usability.

------
lcnmrn
I just launched [https://superthread.net](https://superthread.net) the other
day. It basically replaces IRC with a modern tech stack. Sorry for self
promotion, but it’s a bit strange that someone else is having the same idea at
the same time.

~~~
orliesaurus
[https://spectrum.chat](https://spectrum.chat) is also very similar! I love
the minimalist approach tho!

