Comment by neals
12 hours ago
Makes me wonder if moving away from discord back to IRC would be a fun move. But I think we'd miss mobile access and accounts on different devices maybe? Any thoughts?
12 hours ago
Makes me wonder if moving away from discord back to IRC would be a fun move. But I think we'd miss mobile access and accounts on different devices maybe? Any thoughts?
I consciously use IRC like that: I don't have a bouncer, and connect only when I feel bored and want to see what is going in some channels (nowadays mostly just #emacs on Libera). I can only follow the conversation when I am online and there, and when I leave there is nothing to catch up to. In some sense it is like a digital third-space as oppose to a permanent dual presence that I have to share my attention with. Depending on your use-case this is not ideal, but for me it is a nice, relaxing addition to a lazy weekend evening when I have nothing better to do.
There are irc clients that work on mobile, like this one from the original author of sway: https://codeberg.org/emersion/goguma
It’s just they need a bouncer (an always online irc server you run) for things like push notifications (and chat history on servers without the chat history extension).
Bouncers (and some IRC v3 extensions on newer servers) allow you to be logged in to the same account from different devices.
I’ve also had some fun writing a bridge from discord to irc for some personal discord servers (but it uses some account impersonation hijinks that make it impractical for other to use).
IRCv3 gives you all of that, and I'm working on an ircd that has builtin support for multi-device access & chat history (which covers mobile between the two --- there are improvements you can do on top of that, but those two are kind of the foundation).
I'm also extending it with support for Discord/Matrix/etc-esque communities (in a 100% standard-client-compatible way).
really need the simple voice chat for me to use it.
If you really insist, it can be hamfisted into IRC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R--_ATzE6o. (Though besides the official PoC https://github.com/asiekierka/voirc and my reimplementation https://spectra.video/w/vBd8cUmo9yYD5CtKbyjrL6, I have never seen this actually being used).
VoIRC is a joke project. It encodes your voice to base64 and sends that to an IRC channel at a rate that would get you kicked off most servers for spamming. Saved you a click.
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It’s a matter of having a good client. Mango will give you everything you mentioned … https://mangoirc.chat
Goguma is an IRC client which runs on Linux Mobile, iOS and Android.
I mean, it seemed mobile enough for that tv presenter to get caught on a plane being a pedo on IRC
why wouldn’t mobile access work? Its just a protocol
Yes, but compared to "modern" apps IRC is very rudimentary and you would not get messages if you "close the app". You always have to run some secondary infrastructure like a bouncer to get offline messages or see what happened while you were away.
I know that's not the fault of the protocol itself, but that's always one of the biggest hurdle for IRC adoption when everyone is used to just open apps and see the full history at all times.
It is the protocol's fault, and there is a solution at the protocol level: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory . So now, you can get messages while offline when using a modern server (eg. https://ergo.chat/) with a modern client (eg. https://codeberg.org/emersion/goguma)
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The protocol needs ugly extensions to have a variety of devices plug into the same user account. For me back in the day this was an ssh session running the IRC client in a screen, and it was no worse than whatever else was available.
Mobile devices are different devices with different constraints. The main blockers are intermittent connectivity and the need to save battery life.
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in general discord has a very bad app and usability, irc regardless of client is a clear upgrade
Very bad is pretty harsh for the possibly least bad chat app that I have used. I don't like the centralization on Discord but the reason it is popular is because their app is better than the competition.
imo Telegram is the least bad chat app that I've used. Discord has a lot of UX and performance issues.
Slack is a very bad that is super slow no matter what time of day I use it. It completely locks up on a spotty network. Discord works way better and their voice chat is several leagues above.
Try alternative, native, Slack clients like msga.app or similar. They tend to use Slack's API pretty efficiently.
IMO those are the main reasons IRC isn't still used. It's basically only usable on a desktop or always-stationary laptop, or with a bouncer which is obviously expensive to set up and doesn't provide a good user experience.
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