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Comment by cm3 | Hacker News Reader

I never could use IRC because it's hard to sift through the noise. I have the same issue with group chats as implemented in Slack, but at least Slack can be accessed with an XMPP client, meaning I can get asynchronous delivery of messages without the need to have a client running 24/7. Do all heavy IRC users have a bouncer and a bot or do they rely on a service like irccloud? Either way, without async messaging, it's hard to use in a distributed team.

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> Do all heavy IRC users have a bouncer

As a heavy user of IRC, I would say yes. At least, I wouldn't be able to use it without irssi running inside tmux on some server, and everyone I know does the same.

For a large Free Software project, we use Mattermost (a Slack clone with unlimited history) and it works great. There are a few features missing, but it has been a huge boost for engagement. As someone who has been using IRC for 20 years, I never thought I could get used to using a web-based client, but it's worth it.

Small annoyances, such as having to educate people not to use "@channel" because it will email a notification to 300 people, but it's just a matter of time before it's fixed.

For obvious reasons I don't consider web clients a reliable solution, but it's a practical alternative when away from your desk.

Considering a lot of people use Gmail for email, I would be curious as to why you consider web clients to be unreliable.

(I don't use Gmail, but a ton of tech people do. Something like Mattermost is rather harmless, since less critical than email.)

For what it's worth, Mattermost also package native desktop applications for Linux, Mac, Windows and iOS/Android. The desktop ones are basically a wrapper around a standalone browser. Has better native desktop notifications integration.

I much prefer that I can choose my client, be it pidgin, emacs, mutt, irssi, thunderbird, you name it. Web interfaces are limited in functionality, give me little control how my client works, and I'm at the whim of a server operator. Mutt or Gnus or irssi haven't changed drastically, but a web interface can change without an option for you to restore the previous version. That's a huge problem with the deployment model of web apps, especially for power users.

Like I wrote above, I'm not a real IRC user because it doesn't support async messaging well, and I was curious if there was a viable xmpp-like async mode. I love email and xmpp because they works like git in that I can use it offline as well. Please don't argue that everything is 24/7 connected due to IoT or something like that as an explanation why offline mode has no use today.

Async messaging has other advantages, like drafting a response and pondering about the details over one or more days. That said, realtime chat has its place, but with distributed teams it's most practical to use distributed async messaging for the normal case and fall back to realtime protocols when you need a live conversation. I consider live communication to be the same as calling someone on the phone and disrupting their workflow or failing to reach them due to being unavailable at the moment.

Don't get me wrong, IRC and monitoring chat rooms works for many developers, but that doesn't mean it must work for me as well. We're not all the same after all. When I use live comms, it's on-demand, like a phone call.

I 100% agree. I wasn't sure if you meant reliable as in security, uptime, etc. So reliable as in "stable UI/experience".

I'm also a heavy mutt and irssi user. I think their UI stability is more an issue on how application authors deal with change/improvements, but I agree there's probably a technical factor where libncurses offers less flexibility than HTML/CSS does, so web apps are much more likely to change often.

I don't have a bouncer per se, but my client (WeeChat) is running 24/7 in a tmux. Whenever I want to use IRC, I connect to it with Glowing Bear (browser relay client for WeeChat). This way I have synchronised state (all devices connect to the same WeeChat instance, doesn't matter whether I use my phone, tablet, or laptop) and a nice client.

Thanks for sharing how you use it, seems like there's no real async mode for IRC. So I guess my preference for mailing lists or XMPP isn't just personal taste.

I'd say I'm a heavy IRC user, and I actually tend to either RDP into my Windows setup running hexchat when I'm at another pc/laptop, or just use AndroIRC on my phone with my username plus an underscore or something and skim the chat history when I wasn't connected when I get home if I feel the need to.

That there are no threads to follow per se and you have to come up with filters of your own to create a view of the wall of text is something that failed me anytime I tried to use IRC. With email threads or spontaneous XMPP topic group chats, it works much better for me personally.

I agree it's a personal preference thing for sure. I just really am not compelled by the threaded view of mailing lists. I prefer being able to quickly scan text to "catch up" on things, and I have filters to catch any of the important things I don't want to miss.

Threading is more important today than it was in the past, because there are more and more people who have no idea how to use email or a discussion forum. Gmail and Discourse are partially to blame for when users quote nothing when answering a previous post, assuming everyone has the same view as the author did when writing the reply. So most discourse boards and gmail users' responses on mailing lists have been very hard to fit into the right context. Take even github, where one has to often guess what some comment is referring to. That's why threading with proper message-ids is important. We cope with the bad communication etiquette because we want to be inclusive, but one cannot ignore how much more time is wasted than in the past, due to poor messaging style.

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