IRC Driven – modern IRC indexing site and search engine

mIRC is one of the best chat programs on the market these days. It uses megabytes of ram at most for hundreds of channels. It's a modern technology miracle and I wish more people used it.

Quassel is basically self hosted irccloud, I use it on 5 computers, Windows, Linux and Android, it's great

I used irssi for many years before switching to Weechat, and I can't imagine ever switching back.

I use Quassel because it's a so-called "split" client, where "quassel core" runs on a VPS, and then I can run actual clients of the quassel core on several different devices, including Quasseldroid on Android. It's a much better experience than sshing into a screen session.

> What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.

Which would, of course, be solved by having those conversations indexed and searchable on the web.

I didn't know twitch uses IRC, though I wouldn't categorize in the same box as traditional channels and networks either. I mean, the protocol might be the same, but it clearly is used in an entirely different context.

https://ircv3.net/

> I've always wondered, why was IRC not developed further?

Personally, part of the charm of the IRC protocol is the simplicity. You can implement a client effortlessly in most languages in just an hour or two.

Because there is nothing wrong with good old IRC. It was developed to a point and left alone. Trying to improve it could actually lead to overengeeniring and spoiling the protocol. If IRC is not what you want, look for alternatives. There are plenty of those.

It was, someone already pointed you to ircV3 which attempted to bring a lot of modern features to irc. But besides the specification process being slow you also had to content with all the different clients and networks. Most of which at that point in time already had stagnated in development.

Moxie Marlinspoke thought hard about that, here’s his conclusion: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

If it supported things like picture messages, then it wouldn't really be IRC any more. I suppose you could create a new protocol that's most similar to IRC, but when creating new protocols, people typically want to make other improvements at the same time, such as the ability for a user to stay in a group while offline.

In my opinion, most of the differences between IRC and Slack/Matrix/Discord/etc stem from trying to keep users in a group chat while they're not actually online, since this requires servers to store message history, and then you're legally required to have a way to moderate the message history, and you might as well send back-history to clients who just joined, and so on. Additionally, since each message is stored authoritatively on the server, it can be updated with things like text edits and emoji reactions.

Some of the differences, like being able to send pictures, do not stem from that.

I read and responded to a similar comment recently here on HN about email security. The gist of the question is "why don't we create something like email but secure?" and the gist of my reply is "if we created a whole new system, we'd add all the things we can now have that we couldn't have when email was invented, like instant notifications, and then it would be a reinvention of a newer protocol (I didn't name Matrix, Fediverse or XMPP), nothing like email.". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42633785

The instant messengers did that.

Then slack did the modern IRC client.

I mean yeah, that is all true as Matrix has slowly been improving over the years and is more user-friendly than it was years ago.

But the reality is also that it has also been a decade since Discord was released. Meaning that for almost a decade people have been able to experience a very low threshold experience of joining entire servers and creating their own.

I don't want to discredit all the work that went into the protocol and clients. All I am saying is that after almost a decade it is quite clear that as far as IRC replacements go most of the internet moved to Discord. Which I also am not a fan of, but I can see why it did happen as Matrix simply didn't have all the features back then. I also do recognize that Matrix at this stage is much more user-friendly and offers many of the features discord also does. Spaces in place of servers and at least one client that is still quite okay. Though I do think some of the things I said a few years ago still apply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30328120#30333252.

And the fact that after a decade there is still only one client having feature parity still stands out to me. I know that discord officially only has one client. But since there are multiple clients advertised for matrix it does add to confusion and therefore detracts from convenience.

Having said that, I firmly believe there is a place for matrix. It is clear there are vibrant communities on the platform, so I am not saying it is a dead platform. Just also not one that I see being more widely adopted in the near future.

I also have seen other applications that I found quite novel and pleasant. Just last year I had to do an online interactive training with a trainer. The platform itself with breakout rooms and trainer interaction was all based on matrix and element as far as I could tell.

I wouldn't expect any other sentiment from the head of Matrix, to put it more bluntly.

Looks like it is broken, I got a HTTP 5XX error.