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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I love going on Freenode, simply because the people that lurk on any given project's room have always been incredibly helpful to me, and really nice too. I am in the #clojure room semi-often (asking silly questions), and occasionally the Haskell room if I'm up for learning a bit more about theory.

I like how simple IRC is, but I get why so many people have an aversion towards it. In the age of Slack, telling people to install Weechat and connect to a server manually is kind of scary. I largely embrace the transition to something new, but I do have an issue with the open-source world moving to a proprietary platform.

I wish XMPP were more popular, since I think a federated chat system with an open protocol is pretty neat, but sadly I fear that the Slack hype-train might be a bit too far-gone.

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I like it for the same reason. It's super nice when your doing some oss development, and have to ask something.

If you head into the xorg channel, you will find yourself talking to all the people who were also attending conferences about xorg 5-10 years ago. Those are exactly the people I want to talk to, when I have questions about xorg.

> I love going on Freenode

Funny this is the worst possible IRC network to use - so many channels are overly restrictive which leads to a crappy user experience. The usual claim is to "combat spam" but most other networks (OFTC) don't implement these policies and have little to no trouble with spam.

What restrictive policies ruins your experience on freenode? I use freenode all the time and have not noticed anything unusual.

For example, to join #django you have to be a registered user (+r), so you have to learn about NickServ and how it works before even being able to ask a question on a channel.

When there is a connection hiccup (once every couple months) and you get tossed to your backup nick then, in many channels, you can't send. What's worse, you can't re-nick while still in the channel. So you have to /part all such channels, re-nick, then /join them again. Often I just don't bother rejoining. It's extremely frictional.

I literally just re-nicked this week without having to rejoin any channels.

Indeed, i can confirm i have renick-ed without problems.

Maybe you have to kill the ghost of your previous connection if it hasn’t times out yet?

There are so many of us "I wish XMPP were more popular" folks.

> I think a federated chat system with an open protocol is pretty neat

Have you looked into Matrix? It still has a few kinks to work out, but it seems to fit the bill, and the idea of bridging to other protocols (namely IRC and Slack) is an interesting idea for reducing friction.

I use XMPP with bridging to IRC (to access freenode). There would have been no need to reinvent that particular wheel. Sadly the hype-train comment upthread also applies to Matrix.

Well, yes - the hype train is the whole point, as they were looking for something more popular than XMPP.

Though I would disagree with there being no need for reinvention - historically (and AFAIK unchanged) there are several real issues with XMPP [0]. The idea of XMPP appeals to me, but its complexity and UX are costly, whereas Matrix just works well and is easy to use, which hopefully will allow it to spread beyond tech circles.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040848

Wasn't matrix (riot.im) hacked recently?

edit: found this https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bca2k2/matrix_riot...

yes, the matrix.org homeserver was compromised. see https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediati... for the details and what we did about it to prevent a repeat performance.

The protocol itself, the implementations, and the rest of the Matrix network was unaffected.

If not Slack, then Discord

I probably should have been clear, I meant that the slack hype train has been joined by discord, even though it is essentially the same, it has just been marketed differently.

We want modern and good features. That's why we use slack. We say this every time one of these IRC threads shows up.

What modern/good features do you like the most? (i.e. what are the things that draw you to Slack)

Going through the list of nuances would take a while, but i think it's fairly easy to see just how different IRC is to Slack from the get go. For one, setup is stupid easy compared to IRC. Making a server? Click of a button. It comes with a bot. I can add people directly.

I get the feeling you or someone is going to use this to argue how all of this can be achieved on IRC in some way, but it's just too much work. If you're someone who is trying to make open source chatting cool again, please respect opinions like mine regardless of how stupid you think they are. If IRC isnt at least as easy to use as Slack, i'm not using it for the same things.

Yeah, we get it, you're lazy, can't be arsed, you want someone else to do the work. We like configurability, decentralization, freedom of choice. We are different people. We will never agree. I suspect your kind outnumbers my kind by about 99 to 1.

Yup. This was the exact reaction I expected to see on HN. Somehow, you're never welcome if you ever take an easy approach. I'm sorry i don't force feed myself nails for breakfast to get an extra dose of iron like you do, but forgive me for thinking there must be some sort of way where you can have both open source AND modern features! Wow, what a new concept for you hackers who just can't help but do everything the hard way even if it's totally unnecessary.

For what it's worth, I do some things the hard way. I like digging into the nitty gritty. I'm not a different species. The fact that you think I am is the reason you'd never get any middle ground accomplished. Being "outnumbered 99 to 1" not only reveals how you think of yourself as some kind of victim, but also implies that you exist in some strange reality where being in the minority is the 'right' side to be on. Funny, usually it's the opposite.

I just don't get it. Why, why can't we have both? Why is decentralised, open source, configurable, modern and easy impossible to achieve all at once?

It isn't impossible. It just isn't Slack. Slack is a service offered by a private company. You want to have it easy by consuming a service; I want to slog through the mess of setting up things. One of these things is on the path to "decentralised, open source, configurable, modern and easy". The other is not. I leave it to you to ponder which is which.

> I just don't get it. Why, why can't we have both? Why is decentralised, open source, configurable, modern and easy impossible to achieve all at once?

Because you don't do it. If anyone who wants a different user experience than IRC chooses to use a proprietary system, then how do you expect that user experience to come about as Free Software?

How do you expect to be able to set up a server with a click of a button, without paying for it, without hosting it yourself, to work without SaaS? What you want is a predatorily priced VC funded SaaS that only offers this cheap service to get you into their ecosystem. It's not possible to do this in a self-sustaining way.

Ofc you can use IRCCloud Teams, create servers with one click, but also pay for that.

And what other modern features ate you looking for? This is IRC today: https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png and emoji reactions, typing notifiers as well as threads are already supported in some clients and being standardized.

I can’t quite tell from that screenshot: is there an IRC client that supports newlines and where you have some indication of whether the other clients support newlines?

The inability to structure text visually is my biggest reason for avoiding IRC.

Many newer clients group messages that follow right after another as if they were one message with line breaks, this is one of them :)

https://zulipchat.com/

Is open source and has lots of modern features like support for threading.

> we get it, you’re lazy

If another user asks a question, and you are apathetic or bored of the answers to that question, thats fine. You’re allowed to have different preferences and not obligated to care about others’ preferences.

But I implore you not to respond with an insult to an answerer as if they’d barged in with an unsolicited opinion.

You're not "making a server" when you set up a Slack or Discord workspace, no matter what they want you to believe.

Chat history, ability to message people who are offline at the moment, sharing images/videos, no NickServ weird identification, no weird permission systems, no splits

A bouncer resolves many of these issues or you could use Matrix. It feels like dropping IRC entirely is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

> A bouncer resolves many of these issues

Then you have to pay for a server and you have to admin that.

> or you could use Matrix

Sure. I wish Matrix well, and I hope they one day reach the point where they can beat Slack or Discord on the polish front.

> It feels like dropping IRC entirely is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

What baby are you throwing out? I appreciate that these services are proprietary but there's so little lockin in practice that I struggle to care. My gang already switched from Axon to Skype to Mumble to Discord, if and when Discord becomes onerous then we'll move again. Perhaps even to IRC. But for the time being, UX matters and IRC's remains extremely poor.

For chat history you might want to look at services like irccloud or host something like “thelounge” (which is awesome).

The biggest feature for me of Slack is newlines. The ability to break up a piece of text visually so that I can structure a complex question or explanation for more readability is incredibly valuable.

Slack = Electron = over 1 GB of RAM.

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