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Comment by hmokiguess | Hacker News Reader

Signal to noise ratio is such a frustrating problem to solve.

I really wish you succeed and I will take whoever claims that space if they manage to do it right, I am burnt out from all messaging apps and utterly dissatisfied with where things are.

I wish we stayed on IRC, that was peak.

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No it wasn't. If you didn't have an irc bouncer there was no scrollback, mod abuse was rampant, netsplits were just a thing we accepted. It didn't work on mobile because they didn't exist back then. I'm not saying what we have today is any better, but let's not look at IRC with rose-tinted glasses and think it didn't have room to improve.

All that you're talking about are UX problems, had we stayed with the Protocol first and "bring your own client" I'm convinced life would have been better.

Everything nowadays is a walled garden behind a PaaS

Yes, but the average worker nowadays doesn't seem tech literate enough to understand decentralized concepts. If you just look at how the (failed) migration from Twitter/X to Mastodon happened, it gave a great insight into the average person's understanding.

That's a fair point, though I think this is a different problem to solve

Whilst it's technically interesting, I'd argue that users don't have to care. Technical, or advanced users can twist whatever dials we nat want to twist. But grandma, my father, my buddy the data scientist they don't care.

Single company control, spofs, none of this means anything to them. Click the button ans itnworls, and quickly does. Returning to simple while maintaining usability, usefulness, speed, turnkey.. that has value to the majority of users.

We just ran our own company server, which got rid of the mod abuse and netsplit problems completely. Every client we used had logs so scrollback wasn't an issue, though a few people used bouncers for the scrollback feature if they didn't like to look at logs - but having a plaintext log was invaluable to simply grep for old conversations, instead of having to use a slow painful UI to search.

I'd go back to IRC in a heartbeat. The one thing I'd miss is inline image viewing but I could survive without that!

There are still lots of projects using IRC by the way. It is light weight and simple. Checkout https://libera.chat/.

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