As a routine user of IRC: This scares – nay, terrifies – me.
London Trust Media is colossal. They seem to have control over freenode and Snoonet, two networks basically unchallenged in their niche. Snoonet hasn't been doing so well since Discord, but that's another story. They also seem to own Private Internet Access. If a player becomes too big, they'll change the rules of the game. Just look at the state of Internet advertising: A few corporations probably know a lot more about most better than you wish they did.
Re "IRC University": Practically every non-trivial network has its own software stack of some sort. Trying to teach people every kind of IRCd/services combination is more or less doomed to fail. Mainly because people usually just don't want to know.
Re "IRC Ventures": There's no money to be made on IRC, at least in its current form. Slack, Discord, etc. gained traction because IRC is fundamentally inaccessible. It does not meet any of the common needs of today: server-side storage of history, mobile-friendly data usage and session management, built-in uploading, profiles and profile pictures, first class support for emoji. Though whether addressing them is correct is another story. However, these would all need to be addressed to try and make IRC competitive on any kind of market. The IRCv3 team, which does have a decently broad amount of adoption, has had issues pushing through much more trivial issues. Hell, we don't even have everybody on the same page about TLS – QuakeNet and UnderNet are still plaintext only. QuakeNet undeniably intentionally so[1].
Heyo, I'm the head of snoonet. LTM provides servers for us, with no asks or meddling.
Andrew is passionate about IRC and has been for a very long time. This is just another outflowing of his vision and gratitude, not some kind of cash grab.
Re: University: It's a 'University' ON IRC, not ABOUT IRC. There will be partnered educators and developers teaching classes about many topics, likely a good portion development focused.
Re: Ventures: This isn't ventures FOR IRC, it's an incubator. The communication, application, and interaction will be centered on IRC, but the ventures will be varied.
The team working on irc.com has extensive experience of IRC communities and networks and will be opening the door to collaborations with others within the IRC environments, whether network operators or ircd developers and seeks to work closely with the wider community on these endeavors.
I know most of the people involved personally, feel free to ask questions if you want!
I'm part of LTM and starting to build up irc.com, along with founding kiwiirc.com.
I can say that London Trust Media does not impact freenode in any way - they purely fund it to keep it running so that they can focus on other areas.
As for the issues with IRC - I agree. Major improvements has happened already but it has a long way to go and that's why were putting money into it to boost these efforts. We have open source projects and fund open source projects, each one focussing on what the project communities and developers believe in.
What really is needed IMO is a place that can work on these things full time, prove that IRC can in fact work at scale and solve these problems, then others may hopefully follow. We fully intend on growing the IRC community as a whole - not just ourselves.
he seems to be purchasing influence/control by offering "jobs" to the people in charge of various IRC projects, publicly: freenode[1], kiwiirc[2] (and presumably snoonet) -- I've been told there are others (not public info)
he's also brought on board the disgraced mt. gox CEO as CTO -- what on earth is he up to?
[1] https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn: "Some of you might also find yourselves dealing with me in my new role as Director of Sponsorship and Events at Private Internet Access"
Slack is today's version of a modern accessible IRC client.
It doesn't preclude from the issues of slack being solved by another group.
edit: For the IRC uninitiated who enjoy drive-by downvoting: Slack is IRC-inspired - the concept of channels, usernames, private messaging and bots.... in slack is almost all directly inherited from IRC.
If you look at Twitch, as an example, I say that emoji support is absolutely fine. Though, I guess you somehow excluded that when you said: "[...]in its current form"? Nevertheless, it does show that implementing such a thing is not that much of a problem.
So... you want to rebuild Slack? Why not just use Slack. I don't imagine the vast majority of people still using IRC want or need any of the things you listed as "common needs of today." I've been using IRC almost daily for a couple decades now and can't think of a single instance of someone saying "you know what we need? persistent logging and profile pictures and a graphical picture of poop!" Don't do this. You're making a mistake. IRC isn't a product for a market. It's a standard protocol that is so simple that it can be used via telnet. Don't ruin that.
Yeah and it sounds like he still has to stand trial in Japan and could possibly go back to jail:
“I have no way to be sure that I’ll still be able to work in one year, two years,” Karpelès told Fortune in an interview in Tokyo in March. “So I cannot really get a normal full-time job.” In other words, he acknowledges, he may be sent back to jail. (For the full tale of how the Mt. Gox hack mystery has unfolded, see my feature story “Mt. Gox and the Surprising Redemption of Bitcoin’s Biggest Villain” from the May issue of Fortune.)
But whether it’s what he considers “normal” or not, Karpelès recently did land a new job—and a major one, as a C-level executive at a U.S. corporation. He’s the new chief technology officer of London Trust Media, a Denver-based company that boasts the world’s largest paid virtual private network (VPN) service."[1]
I can fairly say that it was IRC that introduced me to the coding world (where I learned to code TCL scripts for Eggdrops) when I was in high school and made me decide to switch my major to Computer Science after my first semester as a Graphic Design student (which I only chose because my brother had switched off Internet access from me for a few months which affected my judgment apparently)
I'm of a generation after you, likely, but I'm in the same boat. I learned python by maintaining an IRC bot, which started out rolling d20s. It then expanded into a 1000+ line monstrosity, which was a mess, but the features taught me many aspects of programming, and let me apply it. The bot has since been rewritten into much, much cleaner code, and is one of a few projects I'm proud of. All thanks to RFC1459.
IRC is what introduced me to client-server architecture. Like many back then and still today I had this vague idea of "server" meaning some kind of powerful computer with no monitor. I used to love IRC but I was only in dialup Internet and wasn't allowed to use it very often. I sorely wanted to be able to idle on IRC at all times like some people did. But then I discovered I could actually install unrealircd on my own computer! I had my own little network with eggies talking to each other. I experimented with different clients and even connecting manually with telnet. It was great!
I'm interested to see how they manage to convince communities to use their IRC services over competitors like Discord when so many users see Discord as easy, free, trendy, etc. Of course services liks Slack, Telegram, Skype, etc, are also potential competitors in this ecosystem.
>IRC Gaming (We're going to have literally hundreds of thousands in cash prizes!)
I suppose literally paying users money is one way, but it doesn't sound very sustainable.
Some of their other projects like "IRC Ventures (VC/Incubation on IRC!)" are pretty hard to imagine the specifics about, but hopefully we'll see some interesting positive actions sooner or later to show us what they really intend to do.
While it requires having a service worth staying on once you're familiarized to be successful, paying users is a valid strategy when a network effect is important.
PayPal, as an example, is the result of a merger between Confinity (Thiel's) and X (Musk's) competing services. While I believe Confinity had started earlier, X caught up through literally giving people $20 towards eBay purchases if they sign up.
I'm a big fan of the federation of different IRC servers, but also like have rich media embeds and drag+drop image uploading, even if that currently means being tied into the discord servers.
Everything in this post except the personal sentiment could be about any semi-anonymous text based communication medium, be it mailing lists, web forums or any other chat system with group chats / channels.
As somebody who has been on irc for over 20 years now, and shares most of the sentiment, I still wouldn't invest into the tech. As others have written, the protocol simply isn't adequate for today's usage scenarios.
This is a problem that people have been fighting with some success on xmpp, which is far more flexible and is a superset of what irc provides, and there are the obvious web stack based solutions like Slack, Matrix and Mattermost.
Still, people rather use Facebook groups today, and we won't convert them by making irc better.
We do customer support over IRC, on Freenode and OFTC. Particularly with the availability of web clients on Freenode, casual IRC users can reach us with minimal hassle while long-time users idle and voice when they're highlighted or the discussion interests them.
My experience of Freenode is improved since PIA's involvement. Staff lurk in our channel on-hand to help if something comes up. Last month when services went down a developer put their head in to talk about the outage and share the patch developed from the experience.
I don't think there is another chat platform with that kind of robust community. The tooling for IRC makes the experience more like an auditorium than a parlor. I'm optimistic about this announcement--if IRC has a future I believe it will be due to the social scale at which it is capable of operating.
It's good that they want to maintain and nourish the culture that has grown up around IRC, but in the long run, shouldn't the focus be on keeping the culture but moving it toward newer federated systems like Matrix? IRC is late 80's technology with no security.
If I may interject.. Until 4 months ago I didn't know LTMH existed, but I knew I loved Freenode, and IRC in general. Since then I've learned much about LTMH, having been hired by them as a developer and designer. They have treated me very well so far, and I believe in my core that their interests are benevolent. They believe in protecting privacy, freedom of speech, openness of software, and connecting individuals from around the globe. In my experience, LTMH has never sacrificed these principles in the pursuit of financial gain, and I believe this endeavor (the IRC.com project) will, as all their other projects do, serve the community upon which they depend.
In practice this is very easy to achieve with IRC if you just use a BNC or otherwise have a client always running, for example inside of tmux. A lot of IRC users run their client inside of tmux, then they attach to it from any device, desktop, laptop, or phone, anywhere they are. It has all the same connections, history, etc.
Of course I mean 'very easy' for someone who is used to the technical side of things. A normal user of GUI webapps likely isn't interested.
https://matrix.org is essentially a modern IRC, but federated and completely FOSS. I suggest people drawn to an IRC-like experience without the proprietary nature of Slack and Discord [give it a shot](https://riot.im).
Riot is the only stable client officially recommended on Matrix's website, and it's in-browser.
So it's not really a viable alternative for a lot of IRC users.
Freenode already has channels like ##math, ##physics etc where lot of actual lecturers and professors lurk. I've gotten all my math help past few years over there as the quality of help is considerably better than the tutors on campus. So what does "IRC University" mean? Have accredited classes? Or just the same idea ?
I don't know about trascended... But it definitely has gone backwards since.
But irc in its heyday had far higher quality and duration of connection than much that followed it. Maybe it was truly the first generation of the internet. I still have many of those teenage irc connections in my life years later.
It's not hard to imagine IRC surviving if it had a natural path to instant messaging when Icq/aim/yahoo arrived.
I mean, IRC is still going pretty strong. I've used IRCCloud [0] for years and swear by it. IRC is still pretty much the universal chat protocol you can expect to find discussion forums for pretty much any subject, and not encumbered by centralized commercial systems like Slack or Discord (as much as I like them).
We should be pleased that someone actually wants to move irc forward and invest in it. I first discovered IRC in 1995 hanging out on #hackerzlair and later various Linux channels on EFnet. Without the countless hours on irssi inside GNU screen (yes, there was something before tmux!) I wouldn’t be where I am today in my career. That said, we need to keep it distributed as much as possible; too few owners could be poisonous.
To my last point, I could easily see a second revival of irc using IPFS as the transport layer. Same feeling of community and privacy in a text terminal, but no central nodes.
IRC should surpass the notion of just a protocol and become a real product. The UX is still not user friendly. There's no standard way of doing threads. Rolling out IRC in an organisation is extremely hard. Cloud-based IRC hosting providers are hardly credible and not endorsed by anyone as enterprise-ready. IRC Clients are offering drastically different level of experience, if even usable out-of-the-box. Authentication is hard (why do we have a hack like NICKSERV if that stuff should be in the protocol?). Offline message retention, history viewing, and seamless offline/online transitions are completely broken (Bouncer usually solves those with terrible UX).
Messaging is not easy. There are teams out there who are working on solving those hard problems full time while having the luxury of having a centralised specification with full control over implementation. IRC won't be ever be able to achieve that without transitioning into a centralised product.
There are reasons why going as centralised product is best. Twitter did the same (it was easy from the technical point of view, hard from community point of view). They managed to up their game in the user experience by doing so.
I'm not sure IRC can even do that at this point, the protocol is in the wild and making additions to it/standardising them, getting clients to adopt the changes would be hard. But it would be the only way for IRC to compete with other solutions.
Most use a websocket library like sockjs or socket.io which uses websockets and falls back to long polling if there's an issue with that.
Some IRC servers are starting to implement native websockets but that introduces several issues, so many networks use a websocket gateway to accept websockets to their network, such as https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway
Then for IRCv3, most clients these days do support their specs in some form of way, and it's growing :)
I don't expect anything good to come out of this for the current IRC users. Hopefully they aren't going to play the embrace-extend-extinguish game in the long run to steal the name for their own proprietary protocol.
London Trust Media have pretty public and open positions on Net Neutrality, user privacy, and open source software.
They are a major donor to various open source projects, and are the primary sponsor of the FSF's LibrePlanet conference (to name one that I happen to be aware of).
A fair few open source projects mentioned there. If they can be keeping things open while truly helping the existing IRC projects then that would be cool.
A friend introduced me to IRC around mid 90s when internet was getting popular in Sweden. DALnet was the network and it was late hours due to the channels main participants where from overseas. My friend went to the channels IRL get together in the US. Met there his love of his life, married and moved to the US. I think it’s a great story about the impact of internet and IRC was and probably is.
Turning to today, I think IRC can be a big player in the area of IoT. Especially because internet is going into a period of decentralisation. It’s starts with the geeks, like you and I, and later the main caucas will trend on.
This is a bit off topic, and I love IRC, but I'd love a modern IRC client.
Features I'd like:
- Inline images and media
- html preview
- people list, friends, but also an automatic highlight system, when I chat with someone I don't know for some time, I'd like to have that person on some list.
- Conversation history (a way to jump to my conversations within the channel history).
- More advanced profiles (image, bio...) Option to publish my public channel list.
- End to end encryption if in private channels
- Notifications
- Status (busy, helping...)
- Activity summary (mostly for private channels but being able to know who was active, and what was discussed).
- Reactions (on busy channels it is quite fun and a fun way to say thanks without pollution).
(kiwiirc.com dev here) You might want to take a look at irccloud.com and kiwiirc.com/nextclient
These 2 clients cover most of your use case while others such as end to end encryption are currently being developed. Hopefully with with irc.com support multiple IRC clients can be reaching all of these features and in a standard open way.
I like IRC but it's 2018 and even the latest drafts of ircv3 lack built in e2e encryption for private and group messages.
Using IRC is like using ftp or email. We've been there and tried that,slapping on a solution to secure it just won't work well. They've been trying to fix email for decades now and the best solutions we have(gpg and s/mime) still don't provide metadata security (I don't think their encryption can be callend end to end either)
In my opinion, a new end to end encrypted protocol that preserves the properties of IRC people like would be ideal.
I am part of a student association of GNU/Linux users in my university.
A long time ago many of the founders met on IRC, and after founding this association, they also founded a dedicated IRC channel.
This was nearly twenty years ago.
Time has passed, many new presidents and members have proposed new communication media (slack, zulip, mattermost among the many) and after some initial enthusiasm they all faded, their problems had become evident and their usage has dropped since.
Needless to say, that IRC channel remained. Despite everything.
Oh man. The description of how IRC has impacted his life really hits me. I've been using IRC since I was in middle school, I've made and lost friends there, I've learned to program, I've helped others, I've grown as a person. It pains me to watch it fade as we move to platforms like reddit or discord.
hmm... To me irc was great as a young teenager in the first half of the 90's because my friends were there. I used a lot of geographical local channels so at some point people started organizing dinners, and I ended up knowing a lot of people. I still love the concept of irc but people are gone and they are never coming back unless someone destroys fb, snapchat or whatever they are using right now.
For me the thing that IRC desperately needs is a set of features that would make it usable on mobile... While constantly switching networks (wifi, 3g etc) it's almost certain I will miss some of the messages. That is a real dealbreaker for me and the reason why we've decided to have an irc->telegram vridge so people can keep up with the conversation on the go.
Back when I used IRC for work I always ran irssi on a server in screen and ssh'd in. I had a window that picked up any highlight that happened and, of course, logged everything.
I liked this solution. After a while people would understand that you are always idling and probably afk but that you would pick up any messages as soon as you can.
Nowadays you could idle using a raspberry pi or something. It would use less power than your phone. I don't want IRC while I'm out. That's not the point of it.
My first experience with the internet was through IRC. I had read about IRC in a book I had gotten at a computer show in 1991. I had no idea what I was looking at but figured out how to join a channel. I chatted with someone from Indonesia! How cool was that. None of my friends could relate.
I continue to use IRC regularly. The Python community is thriving on Freenode and Rust community on Mozilla
However, while IRC is a great collaboration tool, and one I also grew up using, I find that though users are anonymous and no one can see each other, there are still plenty of trolls who have many ways of getting under one's skin.
This utopia of IRC simply doesn't exist. It is still comprised of humans. Anonymous humans. And anonymity tends to bring out the worst in people.
Social Networks with real name policies can be just as anonymous as 4chan. And sometimes, an IRC channel where everyone has a pseudonym can be more intimate than anything else. What makes the difference is:
- Moderation
- Small Groups
- Regulars who get to know each other
You can achieve this anywhere online. But I think IRC lends itself to smaller, closely knit communities.
No utopia exists. But IRC is a hell of a lot more pleasant than you make it sound.
What I'm afraid of are the centralized proprietary chat networks and the perverse incentives that creates for censorship. Censorship is the worst in people. Anonymity just means people aren't constantly playing identity and power social games.
I'm on irc still.. but i've cut down on all the channels I used to hang around in, and now I'm basically only in #motorcycles on EFNet, where IRC is alive and well. Topics range from rebuilding carburetors to the innards of Erlang.
I used to live on IRC, but it's been years since I was a regular user. Are channel takeovers still a thing? That was one of the things that turned me off on it after getting locked out of the channel I called home for most of a decade.
IRC revival? What do people think Slack, Hipchat, Discord, Stride, etc. are? They're IRC derivatives. I spent my formative years online in IRC rooms so for me I feel like the "revival" has been going on for years.
The biggest problem, and biggest fail of IRC. It is too low level and requires people to write scripts when they need anything else beyond simple text message.
I am torn apart here, because I really do like hacking things. The issue is - most people don't. They just want to use it, and they want to use it consistently - no matter the platform, the client, the server they are connecting to. And I totally understand that. More of it, I also understand that if you fail to provide this consistency your service have failed in the design phase and will never get widespread usage.
The sooner we, tech savvy people, understand that, the sooner we'll be able to deliver a successful open services that actually stand a chance with their closed counterpart.
So obviously, give people way to hack, but you must to:
* Design a rich protocol covering needs of the biggest target possible while allowing optionally disable features. Channels history, disappearing messages, embedded media, text formatting, emoji, stickers, web hooks, API for bots, you name it. The protocol must cover most of them, so there is no need to write scripts anymore, unless you need something niche.
* Design a strict spec for the clients, so all of them must keep to the spec, or they fail to be part of the service. And this is critical - do no allow client to behave differently and have a missing features.
* Design clients so they are trivial to use. They must be usable out of box and all (most) of the features must be enabled after installation. Necessary steps to start using it (connection, channels, etc.) should be reduced to minimum and intuitive.
* Keep a community of server and client developers so they can share info and be able to build uniform solution for the users.
* And probably most important - promote the service. And do promote it heavily, unless you want to design something niche, which, I guess, is not what we are talking here.
I've used IRC for years in the past. It was great, I do admit - not anymore. Today I require at least few formatting options (bold, inline code, block code) and no 3rd party tools needed to get anything else work properly. I have no time to hack things I need to use. I would rather spend my time to hack things I like. IRC is just a tool to communicate, I want to use it, not hack it. I loathe to jump here and there to accomplish tasks that should be done within a second with one click.
The biggest problem I observe with many things in the industry is - made by devs for devs. Never for average Joe. Average Joe have no idea about keeping your session attached so you don't loose nick, logs, etc. Neither he cares about that stuff. And honestly - the older I get, the less time I have for this kind of stuff as well. Just make it work or face the failure.
There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great.
IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it.
IRC is open.
The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful
Email, IRC, HTML, FTP
And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different from the newer trendier platforms. Back then people used to engage a lot more before they became curios to put a face on a nickname.
The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX. Looks like average people need apps that are simpler to use than IRC, apps that allow them to promote their profile to the next level, have followers and likes statistic. Which is alright, in the end they are just the average people that wont put effort to learn nonclickable platforms like IRC.
The web really exploded when the smartphone came and apps like facebook came also and made the average people go online and understand what internet was for. There was a time when only the nerds understood what internet really was. Nowadays the internet guy is not a "nerd" anymore. Nerd is not perjorative as it once was.
IRC is still open, IRC is still kicking.
If you are on IRC, dont let the shiny and newer take you out from IRC.
I used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the 1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively-centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator clients that can't even show an image.
I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either.
I guess that makes me "average".
IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s era of protocol design. All are on their way out, some more gradually than others. Good riddance. How sad it would be if the Internet of 2020 looked the same as it did in 1995.
I remember the Ops, Sops, +v and all the medieval hierarchy that ensued.
I remember channel takeovers.
I remember the flooding and the script kiddies with their obnoxious scripts.
In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles.
Weird, I felt physically compelled to upvote this just because I used to use IRC a lot. I regret that I had a lot of great BBS and IRC friends with whom I lost touch over the years.
You so nailed it, man. Thanks for that. I really miss those old days. I'm turning 33, but I'm constantly chasing old nostalgia these days and realizing all the old things that used to make me happy, _still_ make me just as happy. (and you're damn right I still use BitchX)
I'm an average person (with 17 years of professional programming career behind me). I wouldn't give two craps about IRC in 2018. Yes, I really enjoy having a smooth cross-platform experience with inline media, public and private chat rooms, search, file transfers etc. without having to set anything up and without having to deal with half-baked poorly implemented clients who can't even agree on a feature set between each other, and can't produce a single decent mobile client.
Same goes for XMPP.
BTW, it's extremely hard to make a decent product for the "average user". Self-proclaimed über-men should try it sometime.
> The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful
> Email, IRC, HTML, FTP
These protocols are anything but simple. “Be liberal in what you accept” was a huge mistake we’re still paying for. E-mail effectively can’t be made private. There’s lots of room for improvement in open protocols. (Start by not making them text-based, please.)
Do you connect with a 1200 baud acoustic coupler modem or are you average person who uses a fibre connection and off-the-shelf router?
Do you take a horse and cart to work or are you an average person who drives a car or catches the train?
Do you mill your own bread, or are you an average person who eats machine milled and produced bread?
Do you pump and sanitize your own water, or are you an average person who turns on the tap?
Calling people "average" for not using outdated and poorly designed applications that were written by 1 or 2 people in their spare time, versus applications and services designed by tens-to-hundreds of people, with the input of designers, UI and UX engineers, etc is moronic.
IRC, FTP, SMTP, Token Ring, etc are as good as they could have been at the time, but they are awful by modern standards. We should learn from them and design better successors.
It's not that far out of line with the status quo:
"Indeed, to assess WeWork by conventional metrics is to miss the point, according to [Chief Executive Officer Adam] Neumann. WeWork isn’t really a real estate company. It’s a state of consciousness, he argues, a generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs."
I just launched https://superthread.net the other day. It basically replaces IRC with a modern tech stack. Sorry for self promotion, but it’s a bit strange that someone else is having the same idea at the same time.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
beefhash|7 years ago
London Trust Media is colossal. They seem to have control over freenode and Snoonet, two networks basically unchallenged in their niche. Snoonet hasn't been doing so well since Discord, but that's another story. They also seem to own Private Internet Access. If a player becomes too big, they'll change the rules of the game. Just look at the state of Internet advertising: A few corporations probably know a lot more about most better than you wish they did.
Re "IRC University": Practically every non-trivial network has its own software stack of some sort. Trying to teach people every kind of IRCd/services combination is more or less doomed to fail. Mainly because people usually just don't want to know.
Re "IRC Ventures": There's no money to be made on IRC, at least in its current form. Slack, Discord, etc. gained traction because IRC is fundamentally inaccessible. It does not meet any of the common needs of today: server-side storage of history, mobile-friendly data usage and session management, built-in uploading, profiles and profile pictures, first class support for emoji. Though whether addressing them is correct is another story. However, these would all need to be addressed to try and make IRC competitive on any kind of market. The IRCv3 team, which does have a decently broad amount of adoption, has had issues pushing through much more trivial issues. Hell, we don't even have everybody on the same page about TLS – QuakeNet and UnderNet are still plaintext only. QuakeNet undeniably intentionally so[1].
Mark me highly skeptical of this undertaking.
[1] https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive...
EDIT: Seems I misunderstood some points, see also neatnosleep's response to this comment.
noeatnosleep|7 years ago
Andrew is passionate about IRC and has been for a very long time. This is just another outflowing of his vision and gratitude, not some kind of cash grab.
Re: University: It's a 'University' ON IRC, not ABOUT IRC. There will be partnered educators and developers teaching classes about many topics, likely a good portion development focused.
Re: Ventures: This isn't ventures FOR IRC, it's an incubator. The communication, application, and interaction will be centered on IRC, but the ventures will be varied.
The team working on irc.com has extensive experience of IRC communities and networks and will be opening the door to collaborations with others within the IRC environments, whether network operators or ircd developers and seeks to work closely with the wider community on these endeavors.
I know most of the people involved personally, feel free to ask questions if you want!
prawnsalad|7 years ago
I can say that London Trust Media does not impact freenode in any way - they purely fund it to keep it running so that they can focus on other areas.
As for the issues with IRC - I agree. Major improvements has happened already but it has a long way to go and that's why were putting money into it to boost these efforts. We have open source projects and fund open source projects, each one focussing on what the project communities and developers believe in.
What really is needed IMO is a place that can work on these things full time, prove that IRC can in fact work at scale and solve these problems, then others may hopefully follow. We fully intend on growing the IRC community as a whole - not just ourselves.
blibble|7 years ago
he's also brought on board the disgraced mt. gox CEO as CTO -- what on earth is he up to?
[1] https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn: "Some of you might also find yourselves dealing with me in my new role as Director of Sponsorship and Events at Private Internet Access"
[2] https://kiwiirc.com/blog/Kiwi_IRC_gets_sponsored_by_PrivateI...
[3] https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/04/19/disgraced-ceo-of-mt-gox-a...
nbsd4life|7 years ago
it's up for your input method to allow inputting them, and up for your fonts to display them, and up for you to not force a stupid encoding.
j45|7 years ago
It doesn't preclude from the issues of slack being solved by another group.
edit: For the IRC uninitiated who enjoy drive-by downvoting: Slack is IRC-inspired - the concept of channels, usernames, private messaging and bots.... in slack is almost all directly inherited from IRC.
progval|7 years ago
You can do that with a bouncer. Slack and Discord are essentially a chat server with an integrated bouncer.
> mobile-friendly data usage
How is IRC not mobile-friendly? It only transports the raw text, not even "X is writing a message" notifications.
> first class support for emoji
Most clients support UTF-8, isn't it only a matter of fonts?
Merem|7 years ago
If you look at Twitch, as an example, I say that emoji support is absolutely fine. Though, I guess you somehow excluded that when you said: "[...]in its current form"? Nevertheless, it does show that implementing such a thing is not that much of a problem.
bandrami|7 years ago
I'm sorry. Even in 2018 I cannot take seriously any claim that "support for emoji" is being used to make business case decisions.
igetspam|7 years ago
ummjackson|7 years ago
yborg|7 years ago
MaxLeiter|7 years ago
https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/04/19/disgraced-ceo-of-mt-gox-a...
bogomipz|7 years ago
“I have no way to be sure that I’ll still be able to work in one year, two years,” Karpelès told Fortune in an interview in Tokyo in March. “So I cannot really get a normal full-time job.” In other words, he acknowledges, he may be sent back to jail. (For the full tale of how the Mt. Gox hack mystery has unfolded, see my feature story “Mt. Gox and the Surprising Redemption of Bitcoin’s Biggest Villain” from the May issue of Fortune.)
But whether it’s what he considers “normal” or not, Karpelès recently did land a new job—and a major one, as a C-level executive at a U.S. corporation. He’s the new chief technology officer of London Trust Media, a Denver-based company that boasts the world’s largest paid virtual private network (VPN) service."[1]
Sounds like a great choice.
[1] http://fortune.com/2018/04/19/bitcoin-mark-karpeles-mt-gox-c...
jacquesm|7 years ago
sirfz|7 years ago
HoppyHaus|7 years ago
cup-of-tea|7 years ago
ve55|7 years ago
>IRC Gaming (We're going to have literally hundreds of thousands in cash prizes!) I suppose literally paying users money is one way, but it doesn't sound very sustainable. Some of their other projects like "IRC Ventures (VC/Incubation on IRC!)" are pretty hard to imagine the specifics about, but hopefully we'll see some interesting positive actions sooner or later to show us what they really intend to do.
alehul|7 years ago
PayPal, as an example, is the result of a merger between Confinity (Thiel's) and X (Musk's) competing services. While I believe Confinity had started earlier, X caught up through literally giving people $20 towards eBay purchases if they sign up.
RpFLCL|7 years ago
I'm a big fan of the federation of different IRC servers, but also like have rich media embeds and drag+drop image uploading, even if that currently means being tied into the discord servers.
pmoriarty|7 years ago
So far, I've refused to try it because the only client Gentoo has is a binary blob.
gsich|7 years ago
mabynogy|7 years ago
I'd like to know more about Andrew Lee (especially if he is reachable on IRC).
ge0rg|7 years ago
As somebody who has been on irc for over 20 years now, and shares most of the sentiment, I still wouldn't invest into the tech. As others have written, the protocol simply isn't adequate for today's usage scenarios.
This is a problem that people have been fighting with some success on xmpp, which is far more flexible and is a superset of what irc provides, and there are the obvious web stack based solutions like Slack, Matrix and Mattermost.
Still, people rather use Facebook groups today, and we won't convert them by making irc better.
alanpost|7 years ago
My experience of Freenode is improved since PIA's involvement. Staff lurk in our channel on-hand to help if something comes up. Last month when services went down a developer put their head in to talk about the outage and share the patch developed from the experience.
I don't think there is another chat platform with that kind of robust community. The tooling for IRC makes the experience more like an auditorium than a parlor. I'm optimistic about this announcement--if IRC has a future I believe it will be due to the social scale at which it is capable of operating.
nopacience|7 years ago
irc.perl.org -- perl language support and development
irc.mozilla.org -- mozila related support and development
irc.freenode.net has many support channels:
#mysql
#postgresql
#vim
#emacs
#nodejs
#css
#javascript
#python
#manjaro -- manjaro linux distro
#archlinux -- arch linux distro
#freebsd
#linux
#vuejs -- horrible support (frontend channel)
#angularjs -- horrible support (frontend channel)
#elasticsearch
#sqlite
#xen
#docker
#git
and the list goes on. many great people there :)
a_lieb|7 years ago
erikb|7 years ago
LinuxBender|7 years ago
fiatjaf|7 years ago
cantelope|7 years ago
crooked-v|7 years ago
dev_dull|7 years ago
1. https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive...
noeatnosleep|7 years ago
ve55|7 years ago
Of course I mean 'very easy' for someone who is used to the technical side of things. A normal user of GUI webapps likely isn't interested.
MaxLeiter|7 years ago
albertgoeswoof|7 years ago
That way you could have full history of the channel provided someone remains in the channel or keeps it pinned.
Maybe it's an entirely new protocol but it seems that we don't need a centralized server to fulfill your requirements now.
GyYZTfWBfQw|7 years ago
[deleted]
xf86alsa|7 years ago
warmwaffles|7 years ago
progval|7 years ago
itchyjunk|7 years ago
j45|7 years ago
But irc in its heyday had far higher quality and duration of connection than much that followed it. Maybe it was truly the first generation of the internet. I still have many of those teenage irc connections in my life years later.
It's not hard to imagine IRC surviving if it had a natural path to instant messaging when Icq/aim/yahoo arrived.
I welcome a return of a modern IRC.
criddell|7 years ago
amatecha|7 years ago
[0] https://www.irccloud.com/
hestefisk|7 years ago
To my last point, I could easily see a second revival of irc using IPFS as the transport layer. Same feeling of community and privacy in a text terminal, but no central nodes.
moises_silva|7 years ago
noway421|7 years ago
Messaging is not easy. There are teams out there who are working on solving those hard problems full time while having the luxury of having a centralised specification with full control over implementation. IRC won't be ever be able to achieve that without transitioning into a centralised product.
There are reasons why going as centralised product is best. Twitter did the same (it was easy from the technical point of view, hard from community point of view). They managed to up their game in the user experience by doing so.
I'm not sure IRC can even do that at this point, the protocol is in the wild and making additions to it/standardising them, getting clients to adopt the changes would be hard. But it would be the only way for IRC to compete with other solutions.
giancarlostoro|7 years ago
https://ircv3.net/irc/
I also want to understand web clients more, do they use WebSockets? Can we spec that out to be part of every IRC server out there?
prawnsalad|7 years ago
Some IRC servers are starting to implement native websockets but that introduces several issues, so many networks use a websocket gateway to accept websockets to their network, such as https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway
Then for IRCv3, most clients these days do support their specs in some form of way, and it's growing :)
madprops|7 years ago
This is how an empty room looks like: https://i.imgur.com/ir3qyUp.jpg
Code can be found in https://github.com/madprops/Hue
Been working on it since 2016
mepian|7 years ago
confounded|7 years ago
London Trust Media have pretty public and open positions on Net Neutrality, user privacy, and open source software.
They are a major donor to various open source projects, and are the primary sponsor of the FSF's LibrePlanet conference (to name one that I happen to be aware of).
wencha|7 years ago
passedby|7 years ago
babbit999|7 years ago
Turning to today, I think IRC can be a big player in the area of IoT. Especially because internet is going into a period of decentralisation. It’s starts with the geeks, like you and I, and later the main caucas will trend on.
Long Live IRC!
kuon|7 years ago
Features I'd like:
- Inline images and media
- html preview
- people list, friends, but also an automatic highlight system, when I chat with someone I don't know for some time, I'd like to have that person on some list.
- Conversation history (a way to jump to my conversations within the channel history).
- More advanced profiles (image, bio...) Option to publish my public channel list.
- End to end encryption if in private channels
- Notifications
- Status (busy, helping...)
- Activity summary (mostly for private channels but being able to know who was active, and what was discussed).
- Reactions (on busy channels it is quite fun and a fun way to say thanks without pollution).
- Threads.
prawnsalad|7 years ago
These 2 clients cover most of your use case while others such as end to end encryption are currently being developed. Hopefully with with irc.com support multiple IRC clients can be reaching all of these features and in a standard open way.
badrabbit|7 years ago
Using IRC is like using ftp or email. We've been there and tried that,slapping on a solution to secure it just won't work well. They've been trying to fix email for decades now and the best solutions we have(gpg and s/mime) still don't provide metadata security (I don't think their encryption can be callend end to end either)
In my opinion, a new end to end encrypted protocol that preserves the properties of IRC people like would be ideal.
CapacitorSet|7 years ago
LinuxBender|7 years ago
znpy|7 years ago
A long time ago many of the founders met on IRC, and after founding this association, they also founded a dedicated IRC channel.
This was nearly twenty years ago.
Time has passed, many new presidents and members have proposed new communication media (slack, zulip, mattermost among the many) and after some initial enthusiasm they all faded, their problems had become evident and their usage has dropped since.
Needless to say, that IRC channel remained. Despite everything.
bonyt|7 years ago
https://xkcd.com/1782/
fimdomeio|7 years ago
kuba-orlik|7 years ago
Spoiler alert: now everybody just uses Telegram
cup-of-tea|7 years ago
I liked this solution. After a while people would understand that you are always idling and probably afk but that you would pick up any messages as soon as you can.
Nowadays you could idle using a raspberry pi or something. It would use less power than your phone. I don't want IRC while I'm out. That's not the point of it.
Dowwie|7 years ago
I continue to use IRC regularly. The Python community is thriving on Freenode and Rust community on Mozilla
ulkesh|7 years ago
However, while IRC is a great collaboration tool, and one I also grew up using, I find that though users are anonymous and no one can see each other, there are still plenty of trolls who have many ways of getting under one's skin.
This utopia of IRC simply doesn't exist. It is still comprised of humans. Anonymous humans. And anonymity tends to bring out the worst in people.
geergar|7 years ago
- Moderation
- Small Groups
- Regulars who get to know each other
You can achieve this anywhere online. But I think IRC lends itself to smaller, closely knit communities.
pmoriarty|7 years ago
They could do even better by requiring everyone to register.
In my experience, trolling on IRC is mostly a thing of the past.
superkuh|7 years ago
What I'm afraid of are the centralized proprietary chat networks and the perverse incentives that creates for censorship. Censorship is the worst in people. Anonymity just means people aren't constantly playing identity and power social games.
agumonkey|7 years ago
sgt|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
orliesaurus|7 years ago
P.S. I been registered on rizon since 2002 - who else is a an oldschool IRC user in here?
trumped|7 years ago
csixty4|7 years ago
progval|7 years ago
I've been using IRC for about a decade, and almost all networks I have seen have such a bot.
noddingham|7 years ago
jaequery|7 years ago
I have been saddened to see the state of IRC declining year after year. I love the fact someone is trying to do something about it!
whywhywhywhy|7 years ago
I hang about in an IRC channel with less than 10 active users, still more valuable than any Slack channel I lurk in with hundreds.
st3fan|7 years ago
lerie82|7 years ago
badrabbit|7 years ago
prawnsalad|7 years ago
dredmorbius|7 years ago
ekianjo|7 years ago
Jigsy|7 years ago
valeg|7 years ago
wst_|7 years ago
I am torn apart here, because I really do like hacking things. The issue is - most people don't. They just want to use it, and they want to use it consistently - no matter the platform, the client, the server they are connecting to. And I totally understand that. More of it, I also understand that if you fail to provide this consistency your service have failed in the design phase and will never get widespread usage.
The sooner we, tech savvy people, understand that, the sooner we'll be able to deliver a successful open services that actually stand a chance with their closed counterpart.
So obviously, give people way to hack, but you must to:
* Design a rich protocol covering needs of the biggest target possible while allowing optionally disable features. Channels history, disappearing messages, embedded media, text formatting, emoji, stickers, web hooks, API for bots, you name it. The protocol must cover most of them, so there is no need to write scripts anymore, unless you need something niche.
* Design a strict spec for the clients, so all of them must keep to the spec, or they fail to be part of the service. And this is critical - do no allow client to behave differently and have a missing features.
* Design clients so they are trivial to use. They must be usable out of box and all (most) of the features must be enabled after installation. Necessary steps to start using it (connection, channels, etc.) should be reduced to minimum and intuitive.
* Keep a community of server and client developers so they can share info and be able to build uniform solution for the users.
* And probably most important - promote the service. And do promote it heavily, unless you want to design something niche, which, I guess, is not what we are talking here.
I've used IRC for years in the past. It was great, I do admit - not anymore. Today I require at least few formatting options (bold, inline code, block code) and no 3rd party tools needed to get anything else work properly. I have no time to hack things I need to use. I would rather spend my time to hack things I like. IRC is just a tool to communicate, I want to use it, not hack it. I loathe to jump here and there to accomplish tasks that should be done within a second with one click.
The biggest problem I observe with many things in the industry is - made by devs for devs. Never for average Joe. Average Joe have no idea about keeping your session attached so you don't loose nick, logs, etc. Neither he cares about that stuff. And honestly - the older I get, the less time I have for this kind of stuff as well. Just make it work or face the failure.
caiocaiocaio|7 years ago
xor1|7 years ago
nopacience|7 years ago
There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great.
IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it.
IRC is open.
The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful
Email, IRC, HTML, FTP
And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different from the newer trendier platforms. Back then people used to engage a lot more before they became curios to put a face on a nickname.
The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX. Looks like average people need apps that are simpler to use than IRC, apps that allow them to promote their profile to the next level, have followers and likes statistic. Which is alright, in the end they are just the average people that wont put effort to learn nonclickable platforms like IRC.
The web really exploded when the smartphone came and apps like facebook came also and made the average people go online and understand what internet was for. There was a time when only the nerds understood what internet really was. Nowadays the internet guy is not a "nerd" anymore. Nerd is not perjorative as it once was.
IRC is still open, IRC is still kicking.
If you are on IRC, dont let the shiny and newer take you out from IRC.
Long live IRC
tptacek|7 years ago
I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either.
I guess that makes me "average".
IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s era of protocol design. All are on their way out, some more gradually than others. Good riddance. How sad it would be if the Internet of 2020 looked the same as it did in 1995.
Shorel|7 years ago
I remember channel takeovers.
I remember the flooding and the script kiddies with their obnoxious scripts.
In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles.
thaumasiotes|7 years ago
You know, I have a hard time blaming "average" people for not wanting to use bitchX. That's a pretty huge unforced error in terms of marketing.
themodelplumber|7 years ago
justin66|7 years ago
> Email, IRC, HTML, FTP
FTP sucked back in the day and it still sucks. Otherwise, yeah.
cmsj|7 years ago
_arvin|7 years ago
floatingatoll|7 years ago
Write an IRCv3 scrollback and search extension, and you’ll win the hearts of millions.
dmitriid|7 years ago
I'm an average person (with 17 years of professional programming career behind me). I wouldn't give two craps about IRC in 2018. Yes, I really enjoy having a smooth cross-platform experience with inline media, public and private chat rooms, search, file transfers etc. without having to set anything up and without having to deal with half-baked poorly implemented clients who can't even agree on a feature set between each other, and can't produce a single decent mobile client.
Same goes for XMPP.
BTW, it's extremely hard to make a decent product for the "average user". Self-proclaimed über-men should try it sometime.
stickshift|7 years ago
minitech|7 years ago
> Email, IRC, HTML, FTP
These protocols are anything but simple. “Be liberal in what you accept” was a huge mistake we’re still paying for. E-mail effectively can’t be made private. There’s lots of room for improvement in open protocols. (Start by not making them text-based, please.)
kqr|7 years ago
xkcd-sucks|7 years ago
welly|7 years ago
[deleted]
app4soft|7 years ago
> There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great.
Here is XKCD[0] for this ;-)
[0] http://xkcd.com/1782
shitloadofbooks|7 years ago
Do you take a horse and cart to work or are you an average person who drives a car or catches the train?
Do you mill your own bread, or are you an average person who eats machine milled and produced bread?
Do you pump and sanitize your own water, or are you an average person who turns on the tap?
Calling people "average" for not using outdated and poorly designed applications that were written by 1 or 2 people in their spare time, versus applications and services designed by tens-to-hundreds of people, with the input of designers, UI and UX engineers, etc is moronic.
IRC, FTP, SMTP, Token Ring, etc are as good as they could have been at the time, but they are awful by modern standards. We should learn from them and design better successors.
slater|7 years ago
Just how high are these folks on their own supply?
toomuchtodo|7 years ago
"Indeed, to assess WeWork by conventional metrics is to miss the point, according to [Chief Executive Officer Adam] Neumann. WeWork isn’t really a real estate company. It’s a state of consciousness, he argues, a generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs."
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-27/wework-ac...
drb91|7 years ago
giancarlostoro|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
J0BC6xEIDNi4|7 years ago
[deleted]
GyYZTfWBfQw|7 years ago
[deleted]
Fukkaudeku|7 years ago
gsich|7 years ago
[deleted]
lcnmrn|7 years ago
orliesaurus|7 years ago