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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

"just running an IRC server" is... a lot. Or can be. Who is running it? Does it scale well? How is login synced with corporate logins? What about mobile devices?

It's not "better" than email, it's different. Real time. It has a million and one service integrations, which IRC doesn't.

Point is, it's really not all that crazy to just pay a third party to manage all this stuff for you. You might imagine the alternative is a perfect IRC server with 100% uptime, but I doubt that would be the reality. If you're saying a service like this is too important to be run by a third party then you're going to have to invest a lot internally to come up with an alternative that's more reliable.

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> Does it scale well?

It's IRC. On modern hardware. It's practically infinite.

> it has a million and one service integrations, which IRC doesn't.

There and were are things way before Slack, eg https://loqi.me/

Obviously you can create IRC integrations for anything. But how many are installable with one click, like Slack integrations are? Having to write custom implementations is yet another extra task and point of failure compared to just paying someone to manage it all for you.

another "but".

First "but it doesn't scale". Now "but integrations".

There will always be another "but", and there will always be a link on the internet showing that it's been done already.

"but shiny web gui" - https://thelounge.chat/

"but mobile app" - https://github.com/MCMrARM/revolution-irc

"but it's complicated" - https://www.mirc.com/ since 1995

IRC does have limits. Some. One is that to make it "modern" it needs a bouncer - that said znc is spectacularly simple to set up with it's web interface.

Integrations were never one of those limits. Just google IRC bots.

How do you make it possible for people to view the IRC channel history when they were disconnected? I know you can have a bot that saves a log, but can it be made seamless?

I think it's really sad how the world has migrated away from an open protocol to a closed one, but I remember IRC having some very real annoyances, well beyond stuff like integrations.

The answer is in at the bottom of my previous entry. It's called an IRC bouncer.

bouncer, or web client that persists chats, like TheLounge or Convos.

> another "but"

That's my entire point. It's death by a thousand cuts. Now I'm responsible for an IRC server, a web frontend, a mobile app and a bouncer.

The OP said "just run an IRC server". There is no "Slack or just an IRC server". There's "Slack or a number of connected, interdependent services you need to maintain". I'm not saying it can't be done, or that it isn't the right answer for some people, but it's also a lot more work (and thus, expense) than just paying for Slack. It absolutely makes sense that people do it.

Why is paying another company better than getting employees and paying them the same or even less money?!

When did this madness start?

In what world is it going to be "the same or even less money" to hire one or two sysadmins on a full-time basis than paying for a Slack subscription?

I don't know how large your company is, but with 10k+ employees, it's suddenly a reasonable option.

With that many employees you're signing up for Slack's enterprise tier, and you can bet they price it so that they come out the right side of this cost/benefit calculation for a lot of companies.

I have seen those numbers. You could easily afford paying sysadmins with those numbers.

But managing an IRC server cluster for 10.000+ users is no simple task.

Paying experts in their field (chat tools in this case) is most of the time the most reliable and cheapest variant. You must also include that Slack has plenty of features that are not available in IRC and mean the productivity is not as good.

Since when is running any service for a number of people something people compare with running google?

30 years ago, efnet was (apparently) 35k users.

Tbh., if you need two full-time sysadmins to run your IRC server + bouncer + log backup + web frontend, you're doing something really wrong. It's more like an after-school job for a bored CS student.

Features is not the only thing, does it have well funded sales team and strong corporate support ? Slack itself did support IRC till recently, the product is not just a sum of its features

> does it have well funded sales team and strong corporate support

Get 2 sysadmins. 2 because of redundancy. Pay them to maintain your service.

"well funded sales team and corporate support". F that. Trust your employees.

2 sysadmins will cost considerably more than a few slack accounts. Unless your company is huge.

> Unless your company is huge.

Yes. Someone above have mentioned ibm using slack though. I think that's huge enough for the argument.

Yes at that scale it may be useful to roll out a custom system. However I'd count into account that large customers probably have different pricing and that maintaining custom systems is always bothersome because you are always the largest customer.

"Well funded sales team" is unfortunately what makes closed products win over open ones.

What happens when your sysadmins say "Maintaining IRC is a waste of time and gets us 1% of the features Slack does, let's just get Slack?" (At my last company, it was the sysadmin team, including myself, who decided to switch to Slack and killed our IRC server.)

Do you stop trusting them then?

Come on, in the 90s and early 00s, volunteers ran and managed IRC networks scaling up to hundreds of thousands of users. This was back when hardware and bandwidth were much weaker and 100x more expensive. It's really not that hard.

Yes, volunteers ran these things. How many? Because you're going to need to have paid employees rather than volunteers running your servers. Is it going to be more reliable and cost effective than just paying a third party to run a service for you?

For something like IRC? Yes. The service is dead simple and one server can handle thousands of users with modest hardware and without breaking a sweat. A completely unfamiliar sysadmin could set it up in an hour or less. Since it's probably internal, there's little need for public services (nick/channel registration, etc).

So what about the mobile device issue? Corporate logins?

If you want to match what Slack offers you aren't just running an IRC server, you're going to have a small fleet of dependent services that, added up, just about match what Slack does.

Is it really that surprising that people just opt to pay for someone to deal with all of this for them?

At which point you're not looking at IRC as a service anymore. There are different niches served - but the question was about the reasonableness of setting up IRC alone, which is still dead easy.

Put TheLounge [1] in front of it for people that want a web interface. Perhaps use ldap for corp users. [2]

[1] - https://thelounge.chat/

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/docs/configuration#ldap-support

Most of how I use Slack, and how everyone I know uses Slack, involves 1. sending messages to people who are “away” to get their attention/loop them into a conversation; and 2. people reading back up in history for context when they come online.

Now, modern IRCds might have features I’ve never experienced on raw IRC... but if they don’t, I don’t suppose you’re suggesting that this server also run thousands of bouncer bots in order to provide this contextual history feature?

(Also, whence push notifications?)

If you're a big enough company (more than 60 people if computer are your means of production, around a thousand if not), you should have your own server and a fallback on a CSP. Just pay some guy in India/South Africa to manage all your internal services and architecture. If they are sensible and you need to trust the guy, just pay him well and hire locally.

I can set you up a resillient architecture and 3 services (communication, documentation, filesharing) in less than two weeks (let's say two weeks and a half because security concerns/limitations and all that stuff). Add one week and you will have mail server, VOIP communication, log conservation and monitoring, backup images on CEPH, vnc service for "easy" maintainance and a small documentation explaining the few action needed to maintain the monster for two years. Initial cost for a company: 15 to 25k$, + 1 hour and ~100$ a month.

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