Our small group uses The Lounge web client for IRC which is a very good PWA, acts as a bouncer, has history search (not unlimited, but pretty long), supports image upload, and basically builds a modern group chat on top of IRC as a backend. We have a few folks who still use traditional IRC clients, but almost everyone just uses the web app. It's not a bad middle ground.
Personally I see that as a feature. Chat is ephemeral, discussions/texts that aren't should be saved elsewhere anyways, otherwise it gets lost with all the other ephemeral stuff.
That’s what I thought until I learned that history really seems to refer to persistence. So if you’re not connected, you won’t get messages, even after you reconnect? For many that’s not very useful.
IRCv3 has "chathistory" extension. It basically involves combining an IRC network and a bouncer. There are at least two server implementations using it: ergo, which is more or less production ready, but does not have support for multi-server networks, and Libera's sable, which is under (very slow) development.
I wonder why such thing wasn't done 15...20 years ago. Now it seems to be too little too late, with Matrix more or less having been taken the place of IRC.
I guess that because of the "we don't need that here" attitude that ran a lot through the first generation(s) of Internet population.
And it's a shame because with a more dynamic IRC development we wouldn't be in the Slack/Discord silos situation.
Or maybe we would have been anyway because adding more and more complex features to federated, open-protocol systems with many actors involved with different, maybe even competing interests is not easy at all.
But also if I think back at late '90s, IRC had almost the needed critical mass and non-tech users to become something more mainstream...
scblock|7 months ago
diggan|7 months ago
Personally I see that as a feature. Chat is ephemeral, discussions/texts that aren't should be saved elsewhere anyways, otherwise it gets lost with all the other ephemeral stuff.
barbazoo|7 months ago
AAAAaccountAAAA|7 months ago
I wonder why such thing wasn't done 15...20 years ago. Now it seems to be too little too late, with Matrix more or less having been taken the place of IRC.
darkwater|7 months ago
Or maybe we would have been anyway because adding more and more complex features to federated, open-protocol systems with many actors involved with different, maybe even competing interests is not easy at all.
But also if I think back at late '90s, IRC had almost the needed critical mass and non-tech users to become something more mainstream...