Never used it, what's so great about IRC? All I know is that's it's self hosted chat with no history retention, which doesn't sound like a solution to anything fancy in particular. The latter bit strikes me as an anti-feature even, if anything.
There isn't much. It's an old protocol, and very simple. But it's simple to the point of naivete and networks only really function with a bunch of ad-hoc extensions on top of it, but there's very little standardisation of those, and that's basically to get things like the concept of having a persistent identity that can't just be hijacked by anyone else on the server, let alone something like persistent message history, media sharing, or end-to-end encryption.
Well, all the stuff you listed is pretty much why it's great. It's almost the simplest thing that could possibly work, and so, it does work, pretty reliably and without fuckups. If you try to turn IRC into Matrix, it just becomes Matrix and you should use Matrix instead - it exists. IRC occupies a particular niche of being simple, but not so simple it doesn't work.
The lack of server-side history is a severely underrated feature, actually. Lack of history means you aren't legally obligated to moderate history (because there is no history) and you aren't legally obligated to have someone on-call to moderate the history. Spam has a lower impact because the spam is not saved.
IRC's severe flaw is not the lack of server-side history, or images or emoji reactions - it's the reliance on constant connection between the client and server. This makes a very bad experience on mobile devices. It works badly on the other side of the equation, too - the online/away/offline social protocol is designed for an era where you log into your computer at the start of the day and shut it down at the end. And in general, the social protocol is from the era where you messages targeted at you are few and mostly interesting, and you may also subscribe to a small number of small social groups or topic subscriptions - none of that is true in the modern social era.
If you want to solve at least the non-social part of that, you end up designing servers that buffer messages on behalf of clients, which is the same as server-side history and creates a legal obligation to moderate it. Bouncers don't have this problem because the bouncer is under the control of the end user, so they can do what they like with it. But bouncers have to run on devices with stable power and internet access.
> Well, all the stuff you listed is pretty much why it's great. It's almost the simplest thing that could possibly work
And that's all well and good, did recognize that, but then isn't it a bit disingenuous to present it as some sort of "real" solution in a thread about a communications technology that aims to cover much more? It's like arguing that Prometheus is the be-all end-all of monitoring, even though the remaining concerns still remain, and are just shoved aside to be some adjacent solution's problem.
> Lack of history means you aren't legally obligated to moderate history (because there is no history)
Is that actually right? Feels pretty suspect to me, you have to hold onto the data at least a little bit to transmit it to all connected clients, being a client-server protocol. I don't think this passes by the courts, not any more than holding onto a few dozen or a few minutes of logs in a non-persistent fashion (i.e. in-memory only) would.
It's not right, there's so many legal contradictions in their statement it's hilarious. And the cherry on the top is that they were recently banned from libera IRC.
"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding."
> Is that actually right? Feels pretty suspect to me, you have to hold onto the data at least a little bit to transmit it to all connected clients, being a client-server protocol. I don't think this passes by the courts, not any more than holding onto a few dozen or a few minutes of logs in a non-persistent fashion (i.e. in-memory only) would.
It doesn't excuse failure to moderate the service at all, but if there is no chat history, you cannot be excepted to moderate it specifically. Basically, in any even remotely fair legal system, one cannot be excepted to delete something that doesn't exist in the first place.
It's got a simple protocol that's easy to implement.
There's no company who "owns" IRC, as there is with Matrix, and no "reference implementation". Extensions and enhancements are done by consensus of the people writing the clients and servers, there's no central agency that maintains extendion proposals like Python's PEP or Java's JEP. As a result, to be as interoperable as possible, most implementations stick to supporting the existing status quo. If you want to add something new to a client or a server, you run the risk of having that feature only work for a small fraction of users. If it's popular enough, other impementors may choose to make their clients and servers support it.
IRCv3 is an attempt to make collaboration a little more formal, but it's a slow process.
"In fact", yes. But does Element still have an outsized influence over the foundation? Just last month the foundation posted a bit of a defensive blog about how "open source" they are to clear the air, but as far as I can tell, it appears that a majority of the foundation "Spec Core Team" are Element employees. I can't strongly back that up since the page that lists the members doesn't say who they're employed by, so I'm guessing based on what their linked GitHub profiles show.
from memory andrew & uhoreg all joined the team before later applying for jobs at Element - the fact being that if you wanted to be paid to work on Matrix back then, Element was pretty much the only place to do so (being the company formed by the team who created Matrix). I’m not going to fire people from Element or kick them off the SCT and lose their braintrust though.
While long-term chat histories aren't maybe that useful, the problem with IRC is that if your connection dies, you miss all the messages until the connection resumes. That is a big deal on mobile.
Bouncers are an option, but the need to use that sort of extra services will make non-technical users turn away.
Why? With chat history present, reasonable people can search for previously answered questions. Without it, if somebody joins afresh, even if their question was answered just before them, they could have no idea.
IMO it's partly because it's an inefficient platform for storing knowledge, its purpose is instant communication.
If that knowledge is actually valuable, it should be stored elsewhere, in a structured manner. But I get your point, it's better than not having any answer at all.
