Comment by inopinatus
11 years ago
Also in-client searchable archives, media handling, history editing. All require going outside the IRC protocols.
IRC was designed by hackers, for hackers and it shows. Twenty years ago, IRC was my talk destination of choice and I operated a server within a major IRC network; these days my startup uses Slack which I determined to be the "least irritating" of the 21st century options.
I had high hopes for Google Wave but it was sadly stillborn.
Much of that can be had with a IRC bot. That doesn't include media handling, but you could do search via 1-on-1 /msg (query) with a bot. Then it'd truly be "in client" search.
Most would probably prefer a web ui, with search -- but recording chat could still be done via a bot.
I wouldn't say you could get most of the whole slack experience with just IRC, and you'd probably have to do some work (if only configuring channels/bots/find a web ui etc).
This doesn't resolve the multifarious issues with identity, reliability, scalability, federation, standardisation &c &c that further rule IRC out from being the universal panacea.
It doesn't have to be. Go help with IRCv3 - http://ircv3.net/. Almost everything that's in Slack and Zulip would just be a capability extension.
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It depends on the context. You can't federate with Google, Microsoft, Facebook anyway -- and you won't convert the world to use your favourite new protocol (most likely).
So that just leaves you with an easier problem: how can I host conversations etc for my team/org/my friends? And I think a single, isolated irc server should work fine for that use case, and work fine with many different irc clients?
So no, it's not a universial solution -- I just think it's strange when people bring up slack as somehow "better". Sure it's "better" in that it's a product with backing from some fine people -- but if you wanted a solution based on open standard, Free code that you could self-host without worrying about license costs etc ... then a battle-tested IRC server still seems like a half-decent option?
Or put it a different way: if you have 100s of users, could you get many of the features with IRC, and some bots? (Or maybe a slightly tweaked IRC server etc etc)?
[ed: Not that I claim there aren't problems with IRC -- and I've yet to run a personal ircd, so I don't know a) how much work it is to force TLS+SASL[1] and disable plain IRC, or b) if there are other solutions that might be better, that are available right now.
[1] https://freenode.net/sasl/ ]
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Matrix.org is heavily inspired by Wave, albeit using HTTP rather than XMPp, for those searching a more alive option :)
> I had high hopes for Google Wave but it was sadly stillborn.
Yeah me too. Google really effed that one up. RIP