Comment by aboardRat4
2 days ago
IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.)
No wonder people don't want to join it.
(Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)
2 days ago
IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.)
No wonder people don't want to join it.
(Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)
It's not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord. Not as many features, but whatever strength discord has it is not UI.
Email really could have been great, but html and bad actors have made it so much worse than it needs to be.
In practice "better UI" would mean things like being able to trivially share files and images, or quote/link a specific message, or even making it easier to distinguish between users with similar nicks via their profile pictures. And those UI improvements are actually features which are integral to its protocol, so they can't easily be bolted on by a custom IRC client in a backwards-compatible way.
Literally every single modern chat platform has support for stuff like that, and for a reason. Discord became popular because it combined those modern chat features with the ability for every community to create its own private little "server" - while at the same time making it trivial to participate in multiple "servers" at once.
Quoting/linking is a client feature, not a server one.
IRC servers do also support profiles.
I think the real “issue” with IRC is that its users generally prefer the minimal UI. So there isn’t an high enough demand to make prettier UIs. But there are web clients that are a little less basic.
For what it’s worth, I’m in that minimal camp too. I wish I could still connect Slack to IRC.
I'd guess the important feature for Discord is it is easier for the administrators to get hosted and online, but "you could create a client with a better UI than discord" is a terrible line of argument. People could do lots of things in the OSS world and they don't. I can't recall any IRC client that I have found as easy to use as the Discord client except - ironically given the topic - ChatZilla which died off years ago because Mozilla decided that extensions were more of a 2000s technology than something they wanted to support.
Email is OK. The point is that most conversations moved to other media (mainly chats) and so 90% of my mail is notifications, 9% is newsletters, 1% are real messages. They used to be 99%.
I really wish Google's Wave went somewhere. It was the real solution.
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try deltachat. it's essentially a chat client with all the features you would expect but using SMTP as the protocol.
>It's not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord
No, you cannot. You cannot, because you need a team for this, and they need salaries, and unless you push ads into people's throats, there won't be any.
indeed, there is https://www.irccloud.com which is quite excellent!
I am puzzled by this comment. IRC is a protocol, it is not a software and doesn't have an UI. IRC clients do, and they aren't all the same.
Lol. You must be from the "wayland is just a protocol" bunch.
UI(IRC) = MIN_{c \in clients : #user(c) > 100 } UI(c)
But even if you take "max" and not "min", it's still horrible.
> IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it.
I consider it a feature that acts as a filter.
if you consider a high bar for entry to be a good thing, don't be surprised when your community dies
The entire reason Mozilla came into being is to do things like improve the user experience for IRC so we can keep the internet open. There has never been any other reason for Mozilla as an organization to exist.
It's been a while since I last used IRC, but afaik one of the issues with it was that servers revealed the IP address of users to every other user by default. Since the IP is geographic that's one piece of information you could use to doxx someone.
IP addresses aren't linked to a complete street address, and many times don't even show the right town, especially those on CG-NAT or a plain ol' direct public dynamic address. I have seen some IPs, like on AT&T and Comcast home Internet, showing a different state.
So in many cases, you don't need a VPN to prevent revealing your actual geographic location.
And some IPs stick to users for over a decade, and over time the data pieces add up and connect the dots.
Libera gives all registered users a cloak to hide their ip.
It'd be trivial (TM) for someone to make a web interface, and the connections would say "Connecting from some-data-center.aws-cloud.bl"...
There are many ways to mask your "real" ip address, VPN being an easy start.
The fact that this is needed at all is a serious problem. Making people who aren't aware of some obscure details accidentally doxx themselves is incredibly user-hostile.
Dunno man, it’s miles better than discord which bombards me with ads every single time I log in.
UI? Its a protocol.
They probably meant UX, which is arguably similar between implementations.
Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense.
Discord could well run on top of IRC the protocol and be open to federation without any change of UX.
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It hasn't been the same since Comic Chat was discontinued
I wish there was an article on the oral history of comic chat.
What? I just want to share cat pics, video clips, and memes with my friends and respond to their stuff with not-inline emojis.
It's a skill check.
It's gatekeeping. Don't be surprised when your pet project slowly dies because potential new contributors choose to join less hostile communities instead.
Gatekeeping is not always bad.
[flagged]
What’s wrong with IRCs UI?