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That's what's configured in your client's
realnamefield.If for irssi, it's
real_name.@DP Thanks! Will fix the user account's real name field. Best!
@DP Fixed!
#lowendtal Not_Oles H ~Not_Oles@$IPv6 (Tom)Well, the problem is not that much about choosing the wrong tool anyways. I haven't choosen IRC for anything in about 15 years and so have a lot of other people. The only place where IRC really fills the niche of best tool is in the category of text-chat-exactly-the-same-as-20-years-ago. The later years i've used to idle away on IRC already at least half the people where simultanously in Teamspeak, Ventrillo, etc servers to bridge the gap and over the years that gap just got wider and wider with IRC doing nothing. That's pretty much what brought IRC to the point where it is these days: Near extinct with only a single direction to go forward.
Sure, you can cling to saying it's just not the right tool for other people but the masses don't see it as a tool at all and that's what's going to decide it's fate in the end. All the elitism surrounding IRC sure doesn't help it either. If anything it is making things worse.
The masses ↓↓↓
Agreed but sitting on channels with 5 people out of which 2 are bots and the other 3 are some elitist old farts, which - if they break their 5 month idling streak - talk about why your host blocks ident or some similarly boring ancient shit, is no fun. Like it or not but without being able to draw from the masses things are destined to die out.
I wouldn't consider either a wrong choice perse. Niches and masses coexist by definition. The atmosphere of hacker space in IRC still carries on, if one wants to feel elitist about it, well they can. The same can be said for Matrix, Discord or the various flavors. What separates IRC from others made it durable, similar how E-mail (listings) still carries on. What you consider a gap is a feature to some. Both masses and niches have their desires fulfilled. The trend of bridging worlds is cool imo, in the end we want to be connected
That is absolutely true but i'd still argue that those kind of people being pretty much the only population IRC has left these days isn't exactly healthy.
Is it? IRC has been on a continuous downwards trend for decades, which only was countered in parts by the FOSS movement and even there IRC is going to be slowly replaced. Like i've said earlier IRC will surely creep along for a couple more decades but i highly doubt it'll manage to plateau and simply slowly but steadily fade out.
Yeah, i also thought about drawing an arc to SMTP. The things is IRC and SMTP can't really be compared. SMTP is basically the lowest common denominator when it comes to communication. It's plainly visible that it's ill suited for the modern internet but the mere impossibility of replacing it (which might be for the better as a modern replacement would likely be a quite horrible beast...) still keeps it alive. Mailinglists pretty much just profit off of that.
How is lack of features an actual feature? Having features just means having options. There is no requirement to use any of those. Just like you can sit on IRC writing private messages all day without ever joining a channel. Multiuser chat being a feature is just an option in the end.
Well, as long as those niches manage to draw in enough new blood to at least replace people dropping out it can work. Anything below that and you have a dying medium.
I figure it can work sometimes but it's also a ton of overhead and at times rather clunky. In a way fragmentation is obviously a good thing but i still think there can be something like too much or to drastic fragmentation.
Depends on your definition of healthy I guess. Personally, I do not mind the masses leaving. 99% of the users are completely irrelevant to me and a lot of them are like you, complaining that irc cant do this and cant do that. They should clearly not use irc in the first place, as it is not what they want.
A protocol with very few users can still be considered healthy, as long as it does what it's designed to do.
Durable is not the same as widely adopted. Irc is already one of the oldest protocols still in use, to claim that it is not durable is already proven false.
As is irc. I think you will find it very hard to find a more basic protocol for plain text multiuser chat. Instead of just "communication", think "realtime communication" and you will find that irc is the "lowest denominator".
If I want something that is unable to transfer files or voice, the lack of those features is a feature.
No, multiuser chat is the goal of irc, it was never optional. The whole point of irc, the one and only reason for it's existence, is multiuser chat. Calling it an option is missing the point completely, that's like saying driving is an option in a car, the main feature is the ability to store things in the trunk.
Options means bloat. I do not wish to have a bed in my car or a fridge that plays music. Even if I have the option to not use those features, I do not even want them present.
You have the option to use a protocol that supports the feature you want. Clearly, it's not irc. Instead of trying to make irc to what you want, you should chose a different protocol that already supports the features you want.
Again, use the right tools for what you are trying to accomplish.
I would argue that most people on irc today use console based clients. I know I do, one of the things that makes irc a favorite protocol is that I can keep my client running in a screen on a vps and reconnect to it from wherever I want as long as I have a ssh client. Voice and filetransfers does not fit well into such an environment.
"New blood" has never been the goal of irc. Gaining mass acceptance is not a goal in and of itself for every product or technology out there. The goal of irc has always been an open, simple, effective protocol for text based chat with as little governance as possible. At that, it excels.
IRC is already dead, i mean for the general community.
Bunch of old people, and one binary gender.
I was there and see how its dying slowly, losing to the rapid pace of Onlyfans and Discord.
Well, that's obviously a stance one can take. Purely technically speaking IRC will still be healthy when the figurative dead brushes are rolling through the channels. As far as i'm concerned that's a pretty sad idea but given your attitude is not exactly that uncommon among the remaining IRC community i'm not sure if i care all that much.
While i know that there is obviously no general consensus on this for a lot of persons IRC is kind of an elitist hiding space and they'll fight tooth and nail to resist change, even if it leads (or for the most part has already led) to the mediums irrelevancy. Well, to each their own, i guess, but one shouldn't be surprised then if the informal IT scene keeps dying. At some point the people that came before largely slammed the door proclaiming "Get out with your newfangled bullshit, while we keep pretending it's 2003".
I was pretty active during the prime of IRC's popularity and IT was a blast back then. Everyone was permanently exploring new things. Exciting times but then people grew old and declared "problem's solved - this is as good as it'll ever get". As to what degree that's healthy... i have my doubts. If it would make any step towards getting the vibrant interaction that was happening in the open space of 20-30 years ago back i personally wouldn't shed a single tear over some crusty protocol.
Great argument, so IRC is durable in the same way Telnet is durable... If that's somehow a milestone to achieve i'll not fight it.
No. IRC might fit the lowest part here but certainly not the common one. Out of 100 people you might find a single person which even knows what IRC is while practically everyone will know and at least be capable of using email.
And the advantage of something being unable to do so would be what? I might be a bit overly jaded here but i kind of expect the answer to be along the lines of "deterring ordinary people". (I was answering while reading, so i didn't get yet that your point was bloat - i guess i'll still leave this here as it pretty much displays my initial reaction).
Goal or not. It in fact is optional. Beyond that your comparison doesn't work. Writing private messages still is an activity you won't trivially achieve otherwise, while using the trunk of a car as an expensive storage box very much is.
Well, fair enough. In my opinion it's a somewhat generic knee jerk reaction/thin excuse but oh well it's an opinion anyways.
Which i obviously do, as i've finally left IRC over a decade ago. I'd rather use something that's a continuation of IRC though, even if that would mean taking people's beloved tree house away. Sorry, i'm kind of inconsiderate in that regard.
That's true on both counts. Nothing would stop such usage though, even if more options would be available but i still see your point here. The whole situation is kind of self reinforcing. With 20 years (and counting) of stagnation having driven out practically all persons interested in any kind of progression there'll obviously always be less and less interest in this regard.
Hehe, you seem to be very knowledgeable on the subject of goals. A technology that noone uses can be as effective (even if how effective IRC as a protocol really is would probably be a topic in it's own right) as it wants while still being pointless and that's pretty much where IRC is heading but who knows, maybe it's real goal is containing grumpy old farts after all
After a couple short visits what must have been ages ago by now i pretty much decided to spare myself the sad sight.
is that from year 2000 ?
There's a healthy stream on Libera/OFTC. I've never been part of other communities like the piracy scene or general chitchat, no idea.
I mean yeah, they obviously would benefit from decent file transfers or realtime video sharing.
Objectively having a limited scope and therefore features has the highest guarantee delivering the imagined result within specification. Interfacing scopes such as in a modular design or monolithic design requires harmony of every bit to still deliver the imagined result within specification.
A song with limited musical notes or instruments can be enjoyable and with the least attempts of every actor. Once scaled with additional instruments or musical notes there's the extremities of becoming a muddy blur, or that minor imperfection that ruins the entire play. It takes rehearsal to come in tune and prone to "good enough", not great not terrible.
Yeah, i figure FOSS channels/networks are still pretty active. In the early days IRC used to be quite open ended though. You'd have just about every kind of topic right next to each other, which made for some interesting crossovers and a kind of openness practically impossible the even imagine these days.
You might just have been some housewife (admittedly there weren't that many non-technical persons online yet and women were as underrepresented as always when it comes to IT) hanging around in some channel related to your local community while doing dishes but feel like getting into some more sketchy shit would be fun, so you'd hop into some adequate channel and befriend people there (or maybe you just met someone by pure accident). Sure, getting into the more secluded inner circles would still take some time to build trust but it wasn't hard at all.
The other way around was obviously also very possible. You might usually just be chilling with your genius/evil hacker friends to exchange some toll-free dialups or whatever the current hot shit was but feel like some distraction so you'd join a chat channel or meet some strangers while playing the ever popular trivia games (a good keys per second ratio is a major advantage there
).
Basically an internet before there was a clear distinction between technical and non-technical or scene or non-scene people. All in all a great place to be for everyone with a lot of social interaction.
Yeah, it's not like it would make sense or even be beneficial to add a ton of things. I wouldn't even know what this figurative ton could be. Just a little something to keep in line with the possibilities of the times. I mean, when i got online (which was still years after IRC's inception) noone would have thought about being able actually speak (or even stream video) to people. Typing into this gray box and having it magically appear on the other side of the planet was future tech enough already.
If one were to press it maybe adding a stupid little profile with the ability of writing some text and adding a picture might be a way to satisfy the modern need for self portrayal but this won't be the make it or break it part anyways.
Agreed. It's not like i have a problem with the minimalism of IRC. In fact i like it a lot. It's just some minor things that i feel could improve it or make it more accessible/successful. For the most part it's pretty brilliant.
Edit: Thinking about this, it might actually be a nice little project to hack some irc server codebase and 1-2 clients (CLI + GUI) to add voice/video capabilities by crossing them with something like µmumur/mumble. I doubt it would even be that much work. I guess i'll add it to my ever growing list of interesting things i'll never get the time to actually do
I'll just focus on this, since this really hammers down the point I've been trying to make. The rest was mostly just rambling and attempts to insult anyone using irc anyway.
So you left irc because it didn't suit you and you found something else that did. Well hooray, you actually picked a tool better suited for the job! Perfect, that's what I've been advocating all along!
If irc does not accomplish what you want to do, use something else! If you want to send files or chat via voice, use something that supports that! If you just want text based chat, use irc. I really can not understand how this concept is so hard to grasp.
Well, here is the thing: you didn't take anyone's tree house away. Fact is, nobody even noticed you left. Sorry to burst your bubble or dent your ego, but you are really not that important. You leaving irc does not affect the people still on irc in any way, shape or form.
I've been trying to say this so many times now, but it just doesn't register, so lets try one more time.
Lets say I want to hammer in a nail. I pick up a screwdriver. It is useless at hammering nails, so I quickly exclaim that this is a useless hammer. It's true, it is a useless hammer, but that's because it is a screwdriver.
Now, should everyone in the world that uses screwdrivers immediately throw away their screwdriver since I just proclaimed how useless it is? Or should I maybe pick up a hammer instead of a screwdriver and use that, since I want to hammer in nails and that is what a hammer is intended to do?
This is exactly what it sounds like when you complain about irc not supporting voice. It's true, it does not support voice, but that's because it is a text based chat.
If you move away from irc because it does not support the features you want, it affects the people on irc just about as much as it would affect people in the world using screwdrivers when you realize that what you need is a hammer.
This will be my last post on this subject. I don't have time for this, I have to write a letter to Mozilla and complain because their Firefox browser is useless, it really sucks at creating spreadsheets.
There is no need to hammer in anything. I totally get your point. I just think the underlying idea is somewhere between misguided and bogus. By the way the alternatives are all non-optimal too and a modern version of IRC likely would easily beat just about anything (with one hand tied behind it's back that is).
Obviously i didn't. I'm not even sure where you get the idea that i think i would have. Actually me leaving plays no part in this at all. Improving IRC and moving forward is what would take people's tree house away (well in their minds at least as in reality it wouldn't really affect them at all).
Like i've said above what your doing is pointless. The dedication is somewhat admirable though, even if the major takeaway is mostly a somewhat condescending display of... how do i say this?... seemingly having no visions. IRC is obviously a text based chat but not necessarily because it's meant to be but rather since at the time it was invented anything else would have been absolutely unthinkable.
Well yeah and so did about 90+% of it's other user base, which is also a continuing trend but i get it you'll still be posting your "Right tool for the job!" mantra into the digital wasteland of an empty server feeling content because if it's fine for the 80's it's obviously fine for all eternity. Maybe there'll even be some other lonely grey beard left to wholeheartedly agree closing with "Damn kids!" and how you showed them by resisting all their stupid changes. I mean not that it matters to me...
That's kind of relieving. Your general attitude doesn't exactly make for a very pleasant discussion. Like i've said initially people like you somewhat cure my sadness in relation to IRC falling out of favor.
You seem to think that my standpoint somehow comes from some kind of love for irc and its users? Let me assure you, it doesn't. Irc for the last 15 years have been a terrible environment. I left the public servers 10 years ago and will most likely never return.
My arguments does not come from some kind of fanatic love of irc and its community, it is simply the complete and natural logic of choosing the right tool. Choosing a textbased chat and complaining that it does not support voice is just mind-boggling to me, I can not for the life of me comprehend how that idea somehow manifested itself inside someone's head.
Says the man that uses terms like "grey beard", "elitist hiding space" and similar and constantly tries to make fun of anyone still on irc.
That's your opinion and you have the right to have it. Speaking of general attitude, yours really shine.
Me, I'm just glad that the internet still is big enough for irc, Discord, Teamspeak, Mumble or whatever you prefer can coexist. If you do not like something, don't try to change it to your liking, just chose something else. Some people probably like it the way it is, just because you do not should not take away their option.
Well, for one i'm obviously not choosing it. It's rather that i'd like to choose it but doing so would require me to vastly split up my communication habits as being a child of it's times it only supports a portion of which is possible these days and exactly this positioning makes it a though sell. I'm actually quite flexible in this regard and if even i don't want to run it as an additional tool because of the superior text chat it'll be a non-starter for the vast majority of people, which drives my chances of convincing them to switch to IRC - thereby eliminating some of the need for being present on multiple protocols - right into the ground. This is also very much represented by the steadily declining popularity.
The reason you can't follow how that could lead to wanting to improve it is (likely - i can't look inside your head) because you don't get beyond works for me. It's great that it works for you but it doesn't for a lot of other people and nothing is lost by admitting that it could be better. I'm not implying that you would necessarily have a lot of warm feelings for the remaining community but rather that the line of thinking you display ("Everything is perfect as it is and if you don't like it you can get the fuck out.") is sadly rather common there.
Certainly not everyone as i've also made pretty clear stating that there obviously isn't any kind of consensus on the topic. As for the usually somewhat condescending if-you-don't-like-it-get-the-fuck-out crowd, well... it's basically about fighting fire with fire. Besides, gray beard being some kind of derogatory term is certainly news to me and as far as the remainder is concerned it's really just a sad truth for a certain part of the population.
Well, if that's something you care about, you certainly aren't doing a good job to preserve it. As is IRC is on it's way out. Obviously not the protocol itself - being an abstract concept it'll stay around forever - but it's users are literally dying off. Sure, nothing drastic is going to happen tomorrow and you personally will likely have the option to stick to it until the end of your days but it's overall future is predictable and it's a future where IRC ceases to exist.
Besides, if everything came down to a static choice between existing technologies none of the options you listed would exist at all. There is nothing lost in recognizing that while IRC might be perfect for oneself it might still be a little dated leading to room for improvement on a general level and making it more viable works towards preserving choice ideally without affecting the usage of people who aren't interested in such modernization.
By the way, if it isn't obvious anyways, i like IRC quite a lot (if i didn't i certainly wouldn't dedicate so much text to it and just be like "Meh, whatever...") and i think it's great in a lot of ways. I'm kinda sad that it's no longer a viable choice for me. Compared to IRC pretty much every available alternative is subpar in my opinion (i totally can't be arsed to get into the administrative side of Discord but at least for Teamspeak and Mumble the text side of things pretty much sucks as much as the channel management does - that's before getting into their respective protocols). Their main claim to fame is being actually designed for this century giving them some generic practicability, which IRC regrettably lacks.
inspircd + atheme-services ( + thelounge)
I'm running this setup for the "Russian internet doomsday", it allows to join chat without account registration right in your browser, in case of external network shutdown.
@ValdikSS Thanks for your suggestions! I will look at InspIRCd, atheme-services, and thelounge!
I've had ircII running for a few days on NetBSD and on Debian. I've been in #lowendtalk on libera.chat.
This is on NAT VPSes made with bashvm on one of my bare metal servers at Hetzner Redacted. The bashvm VPSes are running well!
GitHub has an IRC daemon server topic page at https://github.com/topics/ircd .
I liked https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd but I haven't actually tried it yet. Soon!™
Believe it or not, but I can see your point here. People of today want everything, immediately, free and with little to no effort. Using irc for textchat and something else for something else does in fact scare off a large part of todays users. But I do not necessarily see that as a bad thing. People that cant even be bothered to use a tool suitable for what they want to do but instead expect every tool to adapt to their needs rarely contribute much other then elitism and entitlement.
So yes, you are completely right that irc being textbased only probably eliminates a lot of users that do not want a textbased only chat. Is that a bad thing? Not sure I agree there.
It's not perfect, far from it. But irc is a textbased chat, adding voice would not make it a better textbased chat. I may be a purists and molded in the old unix "do one thing but do it good" way of thinking, but I refuse to accept the "modern" way of thinking that just randomly adding as many features as possible makes something better.
That's not the point. The point is that if irc wants to be a text only chat, it should be allowed to be that. If it means that it dies a slow death, so be it, I'm not expecting it to be in use more then 10 more years, at best.
I'm all for choice, that's why I think irc should remain just the way it is. If you want voice chat you can use Teams, Skype, Discord, Mattermost, Matrix, Slack, Teamspeak, Mumble or surely thousands of others. Irc has been basically the same for 30 years, why should we transform it into yet another clone of the thousands of alternatives that already exist in that niche? Text based, multiuser chat that you can run in a terminal does not leave many options, and I would hate to see the last good one ruined by added voice capability that very few wants.
Try Slack or Mattermost, text wise I would say they resemble irc in a lot of ways. You will still have to persuade your acquaintances to use it, but that's true for every protocol I guess, even if you had irc with voice.
Yeah, those damn kids
It "scares" them because it's needlessly inefficient. Also i don't really see why a tirade is needed here. For a start i expect absolutely nothing, i'm simply stating that having more features would be cool and given an appropriate amount of free time i could also just implement this myself - no big deal. I simply have way to many projects that do nothing in regards to paying my bills already. Besides having such features wouldn't affect you the slightest (beyond maybe being able use IRC more often as more people have it), so how is this much of a big deal anyways?
Also i obviously have to select a suitable tool since otherwise i wouldn't be able to do what i need/want to. Suitable is a very broad definition though. Strictly speaking a telephone is a suitable tool for voice communication but does this make it a good tool? In a lot of situations probably not and the same goes for practically all the other options too, so i choose Discord because its suitable but it still pretty much sucks. It's just that its the least suck available. You make it sound like there was some (at least somewhat) good solution available, when there really isn't.
Would you agree that it's a good thing then? I mean improving on IRC could be an opportunity to create a great tool, which could be very useful to a lot of people. Isn't that desirable?
Come on, adding another form of communication to a communication tool isn't really all that random. When reading your posts (and i know i'm somewhat repeating myself here) i get the impression that making IRC text-only was some kind of deliberate choice, when it certainly wasn't. I have obviously no idea what the authors would have done if at the time of IRC's creation sending voice in real time would have been something that was at least on the horizon but in any case there definitely couldn't have been an active decision against it.
I don't know how close to the actual protocol/code side of things you are but i can assure you it wouldn't really need a whole lot to make voice chats possible. The biggest question to answer would likely just be how to transfer the voice data (i.e. is TCP good enough latency wise/can the data somehow be transferred without needing a ton of encoding the work with the cleartext nature of IRC or is an optional UDP channel desirable/needed). Beyond that it's really just a minimal number of modes/commands and some code on the server.
Well, see above. Besides i don't think an abstract concept is conscious enough to formulate desires
Letting it die just because would be kind of sad. I mean sure, it's pretty late for some kind of evolution anyways (if IRC had used the momentum it had during it's prime Discord might not even have been invented) but still, why let a good concept go to waste? Purism alone doesn't seem that reasonable to me but then that's obviously totally subjective.
... and compared to IRC they all suck. Besides modernization doesn't necessarily mean cloning Discord. I somewhat understand how modernization is a scary word though (it usually means turning to shit these days after all...) and i probably should have avoided it. Anyways if this was to be done in a clever way it wouldn't really affect anyone's usage. Old clients would still be able to connect new servers and function like they always did (besides using new features obviously) and updated clients would still be able to connect classic servers. Moderation and thoughtful implementation is key here. Turning IRC into Discord would be the biggest waste of time and the most counterproductive thing ever.
By the way, it's certainly not impossible to do voice on the console - likely even over SSH. This might actually really be something very little people want though (kind of in contrast to the millions of people that left IRC, which likely at least in parts might have stayed if IRC would have been more versatile).
Sadly still quite a long shot. The closest thing to IRC+voice really is Discord in my opinion and well... it does the job but that's pretty the most favorable thing i can say about it.
Why not, instead, create a new protocol that incorporates all the good, necessary, wanted and/or cool features in a new tool/app?
It would be way more work for not that much gain. I mean it's not like i'd want to add a lot (like i've said before, i think IRC is great for what it does) and the only somewhat problematic part is somehow making the data transfer play nice with the existing protocol. Since TCP is non-optimal for low latency an additional UDP channel might be preferable anyways though kind of making this irrelevant (admittedly the IRC protocol has a couple warts but it's nothing overly concerning).
Besides there is decades of work done around IRC in every form imaginable, which would just continue to work. Starting something new would need many years to get away from the centralist one client approach of something like Discord, let alone all the other tooling, which would need to be reinvented.
TL;DR: Pragmatism.
Wow! I installed ngircd on a Debian VM with a simple
apt-get. I took a quick look at the default configuration file, and, since ngircd already was running, I connected to it with ircII. It all seemed too easy!It's off now. But I plan to mess with it a lot more. Fun!
the most appropriate way in my opinion (i.e. IRC way), for this problem is just using webRTC + IRC.
Hmm, how would that work when the server has no clue about it or do you mean for the voice data transfer part? If it's the second i'd personally rather try to keep any kind of web tech very far away from IRC.
Besides i don't really see WebRTC as being that good of a fit in general as it's really intended for P2P scenarios and even if it can be used as a simple client-server channel the whole thing is very, very convoluted and finicky. I've build such a setup in the past the get a pseudo UDP channel for an emscripten/webassembly based webapp and after this experience i really wouldn't use it unless i absolutely have to. It might be an interesting alternate option to provide for supporting web based clients but i really wouldn't want it to become a default and given that as far as i know browsers are in the process of getting real UDP sockets anyways that angle might not even be that important anymore.
just like we send images thru web links, we send voice channel thru webRTC links. IRC server provider can easily provide this