some of us do not want to be found. obviously the easiest way to opt out of (most) of these things is to use a port other than 6667 and 6697, but when you've been operating on those ports for 10+ years, and you have an old friend who wants to pop in, how do you announce that you've moved to port 12000? adding a server password is another option, but we run into the same problems.
my IRC network in the past has had issues with script kiddies disrupting us and causing drama and claiming that our IRC server was insecure (it wasn't), and we figured out that they had found us through another IRC indexing site - one which we weren't aware were indexing us. another problem was someone adding a "partyline" bot to our server, which opened a channel to all other "partyline" channels that the bot had been added to. cute idea, but we did not ask for this, someone just plunked it in our server and left.
I wish there was a robots.txt for IRC, or at the very least for the indexers to tell one of the admins, "hey, we're indexing your server, please let us know if you don't want us to do that". we want to be left alone.
For those looking for an IRC client; there's;
* The lounge (web based) :
* Halloy (rust, native) : https://github.com/squidowl/halloy
* Tiny (rust, TUI; easier to configure than weechat) : https://github.com/osa1/tiny
* Weechat (TUI; the goat but harder, here's a good guide to setting it up) : https://newblood.anonops.com/weechat.html
To sell The Lounge some more, it essentially acts as both a bouncer and a web-based IRC client that you can access on any device. If you want to get a friend into IRC, you can provision them an account on your instance too. I've been running an instance for years without issues.
edit: also just noticed parent post didn't include a link to it. https://thelounge.chat/
There's also http://irccloud.com, it's paid and includes a bouncer and mobile apps but I've switched to that from my self-hosted ZNC + Textual (https://www.codeux.com/textual/) setup and it's very worth the money. Just having push notifications on mobile and full backlog everywhere makes this a way better experience.
It got me back on using IRC every day after not using it regularly for years any more. Just following along in channels like #postgresql / #beets / #dokku on Libera I already learned a few new things.
A few more, which seem to be used somewhat commonly:
- Emacs clients: built-in rcirc and erc, non-built-in Circe.
- irrsi (standalone TUI)
- Quassel IRC (GUI; have not tried it myself, but saw others using it).
- mIRC (GUI, for Windows).
mIRC is one of the best chat programs on the market these days. It uses megabytes of ram at most for hundreds of channels. It's a modern technology miracle and I wish more people used it.
I haven't used IRC in years, but when I started out with IRC/MSN Chat in 2001ish it was using mIRC. That piece of software can basically answer for my becoming a developer and the career I've had over the last 20 odd years.
Long ago I installed dozens of irc clients, joined a few dozen servers, a few hundred channels. Most didn't do well. Then there was kvirc that just sat there at 0% CPU no matter what I did.
Back when I was maintaining an IRC client, my go-to stress test was to hop on Wikipedia's IRC network, where they have a bunch of firehose channels showing edits to Wikipedia stream by in realtime. Both super high load and occasionally edifying :)
> Long ago I installed dozens of irc clients, joined a few dozen servers, a few hundred channels
Maybe mIRC got bloated as of late, but my shitty Windows XP computer could easily handle multiple networks and 50-ish channels per network back in early 2000s, could it really have gotten so much worse since then?
I don't actually remember how good or bad mirc was. It was the most popular client at the time but lacked things I don't really remember, it was time to move on. I tried Quassel which was nice but it got slow as the logs grew. Then i tried a lot of clients.
Quassel is basically self hosted irccloud, I use it on 5 computers, Windows, Linux and Android, it's great
I used irssi for many years before switching to Weechat, and I can't imagine ever switching back.
I use Quassel because it's a so-called "split" client, where "quassel core" runs on a VPS, and then I can run actual clients of the quassel core on several different devices, including Quasseldroid on Android. It's a much better experience than sshing into a screen session.
I've spent over 20 years on IRC and im still on every day. Two years ago, I felt the community could use more client options, so I created Halloy. It has since become my primary spare-time project, and I love seeing people enjoy IRC.
And we're all thankful you did, for various reasons ;-)
On IRC since 1997 - even still in the first channel I joined!
Writing an IRC client is really a fun and rewarding exercise.
I also more or less started my career as a software engineer by maintaining a mildly popular Linux one, at the time.
Some things I learned ...
- A lot about shipping to real users and their pain points, since the devs are naturally accessible by IRC and you get to meet directly
- A whole lot about what makes a successful technology
- Equally much about tech warts, as IRC suffers from a fair number misguided early decisions and many years without functioning governance
- How incredibly rewarding it is to work on products that users directly "live their lives" in and that can help facilitate anything they do - it taught me to look out for jobs that have similar substrate-like qualities
Good luck with your project, I'm glad to see the cycle of renewal continue.
Use https://glowing-bear.org/ for a web UI to Weechat.
Catgirl it's fine. No Rust needed. And it has a very simple design.
A retarded C compiler, a TLS lib if you want TLS, and you are good to go.
At the risk of hijacking the thread, for a somewhat equivalent on the Jabber/XMPP side of things, there is https://search.jabber.network
https://providers.xmpp.net/ to help find a provider
https://xmpp.org/software/ to help find clients/servers
For BBSes, MUDs, etc.:
- https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
- https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/
Plenty of boards run Multi-Relay Chat (MRC), which is IRC-ish.
Excellent, I was looking for new channels to join and idle on.
In all seriousness, I hope this helps index some more active servers and some communities to grow. IRC was a big part of my life back at the turn of the century, but I spent some time last year sniffing around for my old haunts. They were either graveyards or did not exist anymore, sadly.
Unfortunately we need this for Discord a lot more. Really should be a default thing instead of extra steps and on by default with the possibility to export to something else (static html with some search engine) so it doesn't depend on the discord server running.
That's why I loathe any project that picks Discord (or worse, fucking Slack) when Zulip exists, is open source, offers hosting for open source projects, and ships with "publish these channels to the web": https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#enabling-web-pub...
To see it in action, feel free to open this in an incognito window, it won't prompt you for credentials https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/
Discord community servers can already be searched and discovered. Which is effectively what this is about. I suspect you are more talking about the conversation on discord?
I don't think the actual chat conversations need to be indexed, in fact as a platform for chat I appreciate discord for what it is. though irc also worked fine for me back in the day.
What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.
For some topics and subjects that is fine. But for support for software (even open source) I feel that it is a loss and actually has contributed to a decline of information availability on the internet.
> What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.
Which would, of course, be solved by having those conversations indexed and searchable on the web.
I used IRC in my teens as an early social network but has since never used.
If I wanted to get involved in say more technical/niche channels outside my expertise, is there any advice or unwritten rules I should know?
Perhaps a better question, how should you participate (as noob) without getting Stack Overflow beatings, and show respect of other people's time?
> Perhaps a better question, how should you participate (as noob) without getting Stack Overflow beatings, and show respect of other people's time?
As long as you adjust when people give you guidance (if needed), you'd be fine.
Everyone does something bad/ill accidentally every now and then, it's not the end of the world, apologize, learn and move on. It becomes a huge hassle for everyone involved when it's repeated even after being told it's wrong, so just listen and follow what others (ops) tell you.
Perhaps take a look at https://libera.chat/guidelines/
I think it is about as varied as communications outside of IRC: there are different communities with different rules, which are sometimes written down and linked from the channel topic. Generally hanging around quietly for a bit may help to get a sense of any particular community's customs.
I just got sucked down the rabbit hole looking at all the super low pop servers here: https://www.ircdriven.com/networks/list/ definitely some interesting looking stuff, very esoteric websites. Cool.
This is a fun one to look at: https://www.desktopmasters.com/ I love how the download for Java still links to JDK7 :)
I ran a site like that in the late 90s/early 00s (iirc) where we'd make available a server file containing user-submitted servers. We also ran news and interviews of notable IRC people. Fun times.
Looking at the site I have my doubts, that this is modern at all. Don't get me wrong, I have no objection. I just wonder what justifies the modern predicate.
"Modern" can refer to more things than just "pretty" web design. If you reject things based purely on visual impression (especially technical communities), you'd miss out on lots of great things, Hacker News being a very relevant example :)
Why they call it "modern" is outlined in the very first paragraph:
> Originally started in 2006, inspired by the now defunct SearchIRC [...] Our goal is to bring awareness to IRC, help modernize the IRC platform and prove that IRC is not dead
The de-facto leading IRC indexing site is netsplit.de
Compared to that, IRC driven looks more modern.
Is it because it's lacking huge empty spaces (looks like HN)?
Looking at the statistics I can't help but notice how small IRC is these days. Specifically when you compare it to how many people use the internet. The biggest channels have a few thousand people in them, but those seem to be rare.
One of the biggest channels ironically is one for an IRC client called "the lounge". Which is a very nice web based client with bouncer build in. Though I might be biased as I did contribute to the project years ago.
I was a dedicated IRC user for a long time, even going as far as developing this monstrosity: https://github.com/creesch/discordIRCd
At some point I didn't see the point anymore, as it clearly was just old guard sticking around with no one new joining.
It is a shame that discord as a closed platform is the de facto standard though. I am not sure things could have gone differently. Considering how glacial IRC development was at the time and the convenience and features Discord offers over alternatives like Matrix. I know that Matrix these days has a lot of the same features but certainly is not there as far as convenience goes.
The small nature of irc is a benefit in my opinion. Theres a certain type of person that only seeks out the place with the biggest audience, and they are notably absent now. Way fewer trolls too. Libera is super cozy these days.
I think that the biggest IRC channels are on twitch. Large streamers have tens of thousands of people in their channels, and probably the servers must have millions in aggregate.
I didn't know twitch uses IRC, though I wouldn't categorize in the same box as traditional channels and networks either. I mean, the protocol might be the same, but it clearly is used in an entirely different context.
I mean, you can connect to twitch using a standard IRC client. And it works equally well, better in some respects, as the browser chat has become a sluggish mess. There are stand-alone twitch chat clients now which support all its extra bling, but AFAIK they are just glorified IRC clients.
I've always wondered, why was IRC not developed further? Some of the features people take for granted in chat clients today never made it to IRC.
> I've always wondered, why was IRC not developed further?
Personally, part of the charm of the IRC protocol is the simplicity. You can implement a client effortlessly in most languages in just an hour or two.
It was, someone already pointed you to ircV3 which attempted to bring a lot of modern features to irc. But besides the specification process being slow you also had to content with all the different clients and networks. Most of which at that point in time already had stagnated in development.
Because there is nothing wrong with good old IRC. It was developed to a point and left alone. Trying to improve it could actually lead to overengeeniring and spoiling the protocol. If IRC is not what you want, look for alternatives. There are plenty of those.
Moxie Marlinspoke thought hard about that, here’s his conclusion: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
That's more Moxie's PR department rationalizing why they didn't go for the better (more resilient, more privacy respecting, more flexible, freer) decentralized approach. It's also extensively debunked: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
Ok. So what do you think are the reasons that IRC has lost marketshare to Slack and Discord?
I would assume it's mostly marketing. There's no entity behind IRC to push its adoption and herd the cats to a singular goal.
The lack of features that Slack/Discord specifically added to differentiate themselves from IRC are also important, but it was a lot simpler to add them to their brand new designs, than to work through having to specify them onto the IRC protocol and then get servers and clients to adopt it. You can look at the IRCv3 page linked higher in the thread to see some of the efforts, but this is 10 years later and we're still not there. :D
If it supported things like picture messages, then it wouldn't really be IRC any more. I suppose you could create a new protocol that's most similar to IRC, but when creating new protocols, people typically want to make other improvements at the same time, such as the ability for a user to stay in a group while offline.
In my opinion, most of the differences between IRC and Slack/Matrix/Discord/etc stem from trying to keep users in a group chat while they're not actually online, since this requires servers to store message history, and then you're legally required to have a way to moderate the message history, and you might as well send back-history to clients who just joined, and so on. Additionally, since each message is stored authoritatively on the server, it can be updated with things like text edits and emoji reactions.
Some of the differences, like being able to send pictures, do not stem from that.
I read and responded to a similar comment recently here on HN about email security. The gist of the question is "why don't we create something like email but secure?" and the gist of my reply is "if we created a whole new system, we'd add all the things we can now have that we couldn't have when email was invented, like instant notifications, and then it would be a reinvention of a newer protocol (I didn't name Matrix, Fediverse or XMPP), nothing like email.". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42633785
IRC supports picture messaging.
Encode the image to Base64, post the string and have your client decode. Or use your browser.
Simple.
The instant messengers did that.
Then slack did the modern IRC client.
I'm so old I remember the days when Slack had built-in IRC integration :)
I thought I read somewhere the early versions of slack actually ran on irc.
> I know that Matrix these days has a lot of the same features but certainly is not there as far as convenience goes.
For what it's worth, the whole Matrix community has been solidly plugging away improving convenience and making good progress - all the new Matrix 2.0 APIs, and on launching Element X on the Element side: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/ and https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-... etc. A lot of the "Matrix isn't good enough" trope is a few years old now.
I mean yeah, that is all true as Matrix has slowly been improving over the years and is more user-friendly than it was years ago.
But the reality is also that it has also been a decade since Discord was released. Meaning that for almost a decade people have been able to experience a very low threshold experience of joining entire servers and creating their own.
I don't want to discredit all the work that went into the protocol and clients. All I am saying is that after almost a decade it is quite clear that as far as IRC replacements go most of the internet moved to Discord. Which I also am not a fan of, but I can see why it did happen as Matrix simply didn't have all the features back then. I also do recognize that Matrix at this stage is much more user-friendly and offers many of the features discord also does. Spaces in place of servers and at least one client that is still quite okay. Though I do think some of the things I said a few years ago still apply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30328120#30333252.
And the fact that after a decade there is still only one client having feature parity still stands out to me. I know that discord officially only has one client. But since there are multiple clients advertised for matrix it does add to confusion and therefore detracts from convenience.
Having said that, I firmly believe there is a place for matrix. It is clear there are vibrant communities on the platform, so I am not saying it is a dead platform. Just also not one that I see being more widely adopted in the near future.
I also have seen other applications that I found quite novel and pleasant. Just last year I had to do an online interactive training with a trainer. The platform itself with breakout rooms and trainer interaction was all based on matrix and element as far as I could tell.
I wouldn't expect any other sentiment from the head of Matrix, to put it more bluntly.
I wonder how they choose which networks to index.
I’ve been running an IRC network for 20 years, that currently has a few thousand users on it. Yet it does not seem to be indexed.
there was another topic recently about nostalgia regarding the old Internet, one of the arguments presented in centralisation is that discoverability is much improved-
There is a "submit network" button in the menu ;)
Looks like it is broken, I got a HTTP 5XX error.
The couple of channels I took a look at have logging disabled. So this is more of statistic information?
MM/DD timestamps is big yikes.