Our small group uses The Lounge web client for IRC which is a very good PWA, acts as a bouncer, has history search (not unlimited, but pretty long), supports image upload, and basically builds a modern group chat on top of IRC as a backend. We have a few folks who still use traditional IRC clients, but almost everyone just uses the web app. It's not a bad middle ground.
Personally I see that as a feature. Chat is ephemeral, discussions/texts that aren't should be saved elsewhere anyways, otherwise it gets lost with all the other ephemeral stuff.
That’s what I thought until I learned that history really seems to refer to persistence. So if you’re not connected, you won’t get messages, even after you reconnect? For many that’s not very useful.
> So if you’re not connected, you won’t get messages
That's true, if you're not connected, you don't receive messages.
> even after you reconnect?
That's not true, once you're connected, you start receiving messages again.
> For many that’s not very useful.
Yeah, I understand it isn't useful if your perspective is that you should be able to read what happened when you were away. But I guess my previous point is that people shouldn't have to do that, there should be another resource for catching up what happened when you were away, and instead it should be OK to return without having to read through all the messages.
I think this is the number one reason more people don't end up using IRC nowadays. The flow for newer, younger users is:
- Use some software project, want to ask a question, see they have an "IRC channel"
- Hopefully it's a hyperlink to an IRC web chat, or else they'll have to do a lot of research to find out what IRC is
- Join the web chat link, see a room with a list of names
- See no messages
- Ask a question
- Wait ten minutes, get no reply
- Assume it's just dead and leave
The ability to see older messages would be a huge boon, and to see messages between connections as well. I've seen it happen that a user joins a channel, they leave because nobody talked to them, somebody answers their question after they leave, they rejoin, they ask the question again, then disconnect.
IRCv3 has "chathistory" extension. It basically involves combining an IRC network and a bouncer. There are at least two server implementations using it: ergo, which is more or less production ready, but does not have support for multi-server networks, and Libera's sable, which is under (very slow) development.
I wonder why such thing wasn't done 15...20 years ago. Now it seems to be too little too late, with Matrix more or less having been taken the place of IRC.
I guess that because of the "we don't need that here" attitude that ran a lot through the first generation(s) of Internet population.
And it's a shame because with a more dynamic IRC development we wouldn't be in the Slack/Discord silos situation.
Or maybe we would have been anyway because adding more and more complex features to federated, open-protocol systems with many actors involved with different, maybe even competing interests is not easy at all.
But also if I think back at late '90s, IRC had almost the needed critical mass and non-tech users to become something more mainstream...
