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It’s like ICQ
This sent me down a rabbit hole. Pretty cool! Do people still use IRC?
Yes, every day.
Brilliant, thank you
Yes
Apparently the answer is yes as people in this thread are saying. That’s pretty cool.
cherish it. the internet is gonna get progressively worse.
This video about the history of IRC has been shared a bunch in the past few days: https://youtu.be/6UbKenFipjo
Worth a watch if you’re into this kinda thing.
I’m subscribed and watched it the other day. What a trip down memory lane. I wasn’t quite old enough to witness it all (DALnet was already established when I joined), but IRC brings back lots of fond memories.
I remember playing Uplink some years ago and buying the in-game IRC client for fun. MOTD said the server is long dead and I wasted that run’s money.
IRC was and still is just fine. Not as flashy as some of the newer stuff it had everything you could ask for in text-based chat.
With all the garbage happening privacy-wise - breaches, data farming, ads, e2ee removal - with all well-known messengers, I’ve decided to take messaging into my own hands. The solution turned out to be a 25 year old system called XMPP. Like you say, XMPP isn’t as flashy (some desktop clients still look like AOL) but is solid.
what about matrix? its new, opensouce, decentralized and still actively developed, everything you could ask for
It lately had a bunch of controversy around it, development is pretty halted and the inability to stop randos from spam inviting you into chats with csam kinda is a nono for me.
XMPP is a protocol, not a program, so you can use whatever program that supports XMPP, it pretty much has the same functionalities as matrix, bar the screen share but there’s several clients like Dino that let you video call, which with something like OSB virtual camera, I can bridge in the screen.
I do like the shiny new fads but having a mature protocol that is the used by shiny programs and lets you talk to older program users too sounds better.
i missed the controversy, that clears it up
Matrix is also a protocol, which is implemented or federated as the instance admin(s) dictate. You make it sound like telegram.
France and Germany both have government departments running their own customized matrix clients and servers to facilitate secure messaging without relying on sketchy companies like meta.I’d love to know where you heard development is halted or that it has a problem with kiddie diddlers.
I second the controversy, owners of the program kinda suck (like Lemmy really) but mainly I was using a fork of Conduit for my server called Conduwuit but the single maintainer got bullied off the internet and they couldn’t hack the abuse, so they had to retreat and stop maintaining everything to recover their health. Here is their statement. They were open about having a furry/puppy kink and so constantly got people attacking them, spreading rumours and accusing them of bestiality and paedophilia.
Anyway, as my favourite fork was no longer maintained, and I heard that Matrix was only as strong as its proprietary protocol, I chose another.
Something like Movim.eu?
Yeah, exactly. Any client works with varied features, and the OMEMO key encryption is solid and - while it is a pain with no backwards decryption - worth it. Movim is really popular iirc. I use Monocles on Android
Yep I run my own ‘The Lounge’ instance now instead of using xchat or mirc or something, it gives me persistance and availability on my mobile devices.
Well no, it doesn’t keep a history of chats for once. You don’t have a record of conversations if your client wasn’t running at that time. There’s a few other limitations that I’m not familiar with, that prompted many people and orgs to switch to things like rocket chat or matrix
That’s why IRC bouncers exist, and then you have some IRC servers getting pissy about running one unless they like you or you’re special (staff)
So instead of keeping a record yourself, you pay someone else/use someone else’s computer to do it for you.
That’s what bash.org was for.
Bash. org was a dumb quote archival site.
where are some good servers?
Networks. Being on one server in an IRC network is more-or-less the same as being on any other server in that network.
A list of networks:
Twitch, at least did, have a IRC version of their chat. So you could stream the video with like mpv and have irssi to avoid the browser, and basically have the full experience
It’s not just text anymore.
I use TheLounge as a client. It’s web based and can show previews of images and videos. So my friends and I can upload images and videos to the server and watch them in the channel.
Convos also does this.
where are some good servers?
I’d really like to suggest servers or networks but I host my own private server with TheLounge for my friends. We ran away from Undernet around 2010 and just stayed on our own server since.
How did you get image preview to work?
In TheLounge? AFAIK it’s on by default. However prefetching is also disabled by default and that may cause some previews not to work.
Look for the prefetch setting in /etc/thelounge/config.js and set it to true.
So to me and the people using TheLounge on my server it looks like this
If working correctly, you can pretty much just paste URLs or images into a channel and it will display them. My only problem so far has been with YouTube, and I think it’s because YouTube is blocking my host. But to go around this, I have an eggdrop to fetch the title and the thumbnails of YouTube videos to display them when an address is pasted.
Who’s Gandalf, precious?
I downloaded my first 3 songs from IRC with MIRC. Took all night to download but man was I happy the next morning.
I downloaded my first “porn” image that I got grounded over from something that predated mIRC but I can’t remember exactly what it was, I ended up using mIRC and then ICQ a lot years later. Like a dumbass once the picture I got finally downloaded, I printed it because I wanted to delete it off the computer. Then I got really into the MUD I was playing at the time, gemstones III, and forgot the picture on the printer. I think it was just a sexy picture of Reece Witherspoon but my parents were the kind that thought I was a devil worshipper since I liked to play DnD and these satanic text games that don’t make any sense.
Hilarious, cool story bro
Reminds me of waiting for a porn image to load one row of pixels at a time on dial up. Teenage boys desperate for porn lol!
IRC came out in 1988, so an Internet chat service that predates it must have been exceptionally early.
It was just what I used before mIRC, it may very well have been IRC, I just don’t remember what the app was. This would have been in 90-91
20 years ago I was in college, it was earlyish days of piracy and the net admin had locked down all p2p protocols. I actually used irc bots to cruise file servers and request downloads. Not sure what protocol they were using for file transfer over mIRC but I got a lot of music that way. Netflix was also handy as a DVD burning service but that’s another topic.
it was probably DCC
Back in the day I used direct connect, we had 100mbit internet (at my university), that was extremely fast back in the day.
Slack is just an IRC skin - change my mind
If you know how xerygraphy works, which is what the most popular fax machines used before laser printers, that statement is actually not far off. Heat drums were the first piece to fail in them.
Easy - IRC worked way better and was way less miserable
/me slaps kboy101222 around a bit with a large trout.Did you ever play sa:mp or is the trout slapping more common than I thought?
It was a default user command in the IRC client mIRC, that’s why it’s such an iconic phrase. Old school coders, including the ones that became game developers back in the GTA San Andreas days likely came up through the demo scene or similar, because there weren’t really “game dev” educations, so they all sat on IRC at one point.
Oh that makes sense.
I played sa:mp on a RP server and there was this one guy who always did
/me slaps x with a large trout
He also was Norwegian and I think trout is pretty big there (or I know salmon is at least) so I thought he’d come up with himself lol. This was nearly 20 years ago.
Nerds in the USA and the UK used to almost unanimously be Monty Python fans. I’m fairly certain it is a reference to the Fish Slapping Dance.
I’ve hosted IRC servers on a windows XP laptop that were more resilient and reliable than slack lmao
What exactly makes discord more like irc?
IRC was basically a persistent online text chat. You could have a community and because everyone accessed the internet via computers, people would leave their IRC client open and just have this chat server with different rooms running in the background.
You could jump in and see what was happening. Today, discord serves the same function, but instead of having a client always connected, it uses an app that can push notifications to the user.
The other big difference was that IRC was open, so you had many clients that could connect to servers, and they were available for many different platforms. Hell for a while I had an irc Client on my T-Mobile sidekick that used the old 2g pager network for data.
Discord added a lot of quality of life features like easy attachments , images etc , but that comes at the cost of a closed network run by 1 company.
That’s not what I meant, and probably also not what the OP meant. Something is suddenly different for discord to feel like irc, but it’s not articulated.
Besides, irc is anything but persistent. If you disconnect, your chats are gone, unless you logged the chat. If you reconnect, you don’t catch up on what was said when you were offline, unless you use a bouncer like znc with history (which is also limited to the last x number of lines). John Doe sure as heck doesn’t even know what a bouncer is.
Discord is so ideal for having a federalized decentralized platform, with a main customizable client to connect to servers, but it seems no one has built a good enough clone yet that fills the server swapping role and being open source well enough yet
You have no clue about what a privacy nightmare that concept is. Of course, the alternative is that everyone is anonymous like Lemmy. But it would be, as discord already is, a public and traceable record of accounts linked to people that can be easily exposed if a central auth point of failure gets compromised. To preserve privacy, persist chats, be decentralized, secure. It’s almost too much. Something’s got to give.
Matrix tries to be that but it’s not polished, and some architectural decisions might mean that it will never be.
Discord shouldn’t have the expectation of being private anyway.
It should be two systems: decentralized chatrooms with little guarantee of privacy (if not being publically searchable), with a ‘private chat’ button to farm out to some separate E2E app when it matters.
Honestly one of my biggest gripes about Discord is that so much info is ‘locked way’ from being search engine accessible. If a publicly scrapable alternative caught on, that would make my day.
Discord is already a privacy nightmare. I’d much rather a privacy nightmare controlled by the people instead of faceless corporations.
What would make it any less private than lemmy, though?
Hey friend, I’m people, I’ve got a face, and I’m no corporation. Can I control your privacy? I promise I’ll be good ^^
A corporation I know is selling my data vs a person who might be. Obvious choice?
Sorry, I shouldn’t be so obtuse on the internet. The point is that corporations in general are not exactly non-people. They are a groups of people. The greed, selfishness, choices to violate privacy, these are all of people, granted in conjunction with the machine of late-capitalism. But there is always this false assumption that just because it’s “people” and not a “corporation”, it’s inherently better, or for the benefit of all people. Your choice isn’t between a group of people and some faceless entity, your choice is between different groups of people.
The same people who make up the faceless corporations will participate in your “owned by the people” system. Just look at the US government, supposedly “by the people and for the people”, which controls/regulates corporations. Where there is power there is politics and where there is politics there is the accumulation of power. You have to do more to manage the accumulation of power that oppresses than just say “oh just let all the people own the system”.
my guess is they mean the caliber of user / conversation, not the features of the platforms themselves
Yeah, obviously, maybe they mean its a bunch of idle users saying nothing nowadays because there’s so many “servers” now.
IRC - I Recall Correctly. Yup. I’m sure that’s what it was. No relation to ICQ.
I refuse to believe someone has that SA emote hasn’t heard of irc
I’ve seen kids with Nirvana t-shirts who knew nothing about the band. This might be similar.
Anyone from 28 and above will be easly called a boomer by 14 years old 😂 as a xenial here I used to feel weird maybe slightly offended…but I decided to enjoy it and keep my self entertained by dumb online fuedes and the alleged generational online wars that comes with…so yeah Long live the IRC
Anyone from 28 and above will be easly called a boomer by 14 years old
I’m sure there’s some kind of meme to describe this. Or maybe they’re all TikTok dances now, idk.
All I know is that the damned kids today need to get off my lawn.
