You're right, this is a solved problem. On the other hand, mobile access on IRC not being unpleasant isn't and won't be, though, so the search for something better for users will continue.
(To their credit, IRCCloud tries. They are the best swing at it I've seen. They aren't Slack-good, let alone Discord-good. The search continues.)
Thank you for linking this--this is cool! I'm not in a place where I want to run software to solve the problem of chat, but this looks like a really good One Of Those for those so inclined, and I'm going to keep it in my back pocket for the future.
I am well aware it isn't "an app". I was using IRC in about 1997 and stopped in about 2017 because other options that were better suited to my needs, and had the people I wanted to talk to, arose.
The second part of your response isn't helping you move towards the end state you want. If anything, it's going the other way. Product empathy isn't optional--ask yourself: why would I write or fund an IRC client when I have things that work for me already? Like, this is the Linux-on-the-desktop advocacy all over again. "Your thing doesn't work for me because of X [usually literally X on Linux, but you get the idea], but Y does." "Well, expend time or money to fix X!" Why? You're the one who likes X. You're advocating for it. Why would I fix the thing you like when the thing I use already works?
Take the sibling response to yours--I learned something new in seeing https://thelounge.chat, and while I don't want to run software to deal with chat, that was a cool thing to see. I learned something! I'll remember it later!
I did "solve the problem". I use Slack and Discord to talk to the cohorts who used to be on IRC.
Your behavior in this thread is really strange. Discord's a fine tool. So is Slack. I have nothing to fix, and my posts in this thread have been explaining why for me they're fit for purpose when IRC isn't. Why would I "do something about" a situation that isn't a problem for me?
Then why bring up IRC’s lack of a “pleasant” app? Just seems like a problem you can and should solve for yourself, but is otherwise wholly unrelated to the protocol.
One doesn’t complain about http because the mobile browser options aren’t to one’s liking.
You don't have to take responsibility for fixing something just because you criticized it.
Fixating on the term used is a tad disingenuous. I think most people reading hacker news understands that the IRC ecosystem is being referenced here - not the protocol itself. IRC has been around 30+ years and it still doesn't have any great clients.
If you wanted to build a featureful chat client IRC wouldn't even be a good choice because there is so many things missing from the spec.
Let's put it as simply as possible, because there's the genuine possibility that you don't understand, rather than are just being an acrimonious troll.
You wouldn't be Linux-on-the-desktopping as hard as you are if you didn't want people to use it. As such, if you, as an advocate of a thing, want other people to use it when the alternative is "continue using other things", then the least effective response is "fix it yourself".
I don't need to fix it. I have alternatives that already do what I want. If you want to hector people to use the thing you want them to do, then you had best come correct.
> Then why bring up IRC’s lack of a “pleasant” app?
Because...I was expressing why it isn't fit for purpose?
> One doesn’t complain about http because the mobile browser options aren’t to one’s liking.
If HTTP was functionally unusable in the application model provided by mobile operating systems, you bet people would complain! But HTTP is stateless. IRC isn't. As such, HTTP is not inherently incompatible with a quality mobile experience. IRC is.
And that's not incumbent upon me to fix it--I have no stake. I'm happy with the tools I have. That's incumbent upon people who want other people to use it to fix: the necessity of making something people want to use in order to get them to use it. You get that this is really basic human-interaction stuff, yeah?
You either have a problem or you don’t; since you complained, you do have a problem, and it absolutely is on you to fix.
The “basic human interaction” you are failing to understand here is that you’re refusing to accept your role in fixing your own issues. Nobody is obligated to help you, and it’s frankly insulting to presume someone else ought to do anything about your problem for you.
The open source community doesn’t owe you shit. Your entitled attitude is toxic.
I have participated in open-source communities for over a decade now. It is likely--not guaranteed, but pretty likely--that I have written more open-source code, both for money and not, than you have. And I am befuddled how you are so toweringly angry about something you're interpreting so directly backwards.
I am not saying that IRC has to change to suit me. I never said that. I am saying that IRC is unfit for my purposes. You, as somebody who is advocating for its use, are taking the latter and inferring the former when it was never implied. I don't care if IRC changes, because I have options that better suit me--the net result if nothing changes is that I continue to not use IRC.
And I'm fine with that! I'm not over here bemoaning it. There is no value to me unlocked by pulling up stakes from Slack and Discord and going to IRC that is being kept from me because of bad mobile experiences on IRC. My initial post, which has apparently spun you off to the moon for some reason, was pointing out that it remains unfit for my purposes, and that's why I don't use it. Nothing, and I mean literally, nothing else.
But you're the one pushing the thing.
If you (or other IRC advocates) want me to use it (for whatever reason, network effects usually chief among them), then perhaps you have a problem to solve pursuant to LOE and other needs and all that. That's not my problem, because I have a solution. Usage of your pursuant-to-network-effects protocol of choice is...your...problem. To borrow a phrase from elsewhere, you have product-market fit problems. And it's not other people's responsibility to make the thing you like fit them--they have other choices.
If you insist that don't care--well, to me that's also fine, but advocating for the use of something that is unfit-for-purpose and then having an extremely normal day of responses to mild feedback about why other people use alternatives instead is...I mean, if you want to talk about toxic, find a mirror. Your behavior in this thread is shameful.
None of this changes at all the objective fact that IRC is an open source protocol that you can either adopt in the form of writing a client that's to your satisfaction, or propose changes to the protocol sufficient to resolve your remaining issues with it.
Either you agree with this and recognize your complaints as moot, or you disagree with this and your complaints end up being recognized as incessant, entitled whining about a problem you want someone else to solve for you.
What's shameful is that you're more likely doing the latter than the former, and seem to think you're immune to this because you've worked on open source projects in the past. You're not.
I don't personally give a shit about if you use IRC or not, I just saw your comment and decided to point out the entitled attitude it seemed to present. I haven't used IRC in years.
Generally speaking, when somebody wants other people to adopt a practice, they make sure that practice is fit-for-purpose themselves rather than expecting the people to whom they advocate to stop using things that are fit for purpose, then adopt something unfit-for-purpose, and then fix it.
Your implication that lots of open source communities have historically not done that is absolutely true. But also it's why people don't want to talk to them much, too.
No, you said third party and meant Discord, falsely presuming Discord stores the content of your private conversations in an accessible way, and in this context in a way that makes it… harder? To publish as documentation (you know, the original topic).
And since you’ve apparently never joined an IRC channel before, you don’t get any history of the channel at all, you only get the messages that are sent while you’re in there, and IRC servers don’t log every message to some file. If you knew how these servers worked you’d know how that wouldn’t work very well.
> falsely presuming Discord stores the content of your private conversations in an accessible way
What do you mean presuming? I can log in from anywhere and access them, and they're not encrypted with any key I'm the controller of.
> and in this context in a way that makes it… harder? To publish as documentation (you know, the original topic)
You can't add a bot to an existing direct chat. You can only make new group chats. So you can't export it with a bot. So bots can't solve everything.
> And since you’ve apparently never joined an IRC channel before, you don’t get any history of the channel at all, you only get the messages that are sent while you’re in there, and IRC servers don’t log every message to some file.
Sure? But I didn't say you got history on IRC.
Being a bot is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting every message. The real requirement is staying connected constantly, which is a completely separate issue.
> If you knew how these servers worked you’d know how that wouldn’t work very well.
It's not 1993 anymore, it would work fine. It's a good chunk of the IRCv3 efforts.
Private conversations are completely irrelevant to this discussion, so not sure why you keep bringing them up.
And you did say IRC logged without bots, which it doesn't. You were wrong.
And a bot would stay connected to get every message, regardless of the year, and no a "good chunk" of IRCv3 efforts aren't around server logging, that's hilariously incorrect and just shows you're randomly saying shit to try and be right.
> Private conversations are completely irrelevant to this discussion, so not sure why you keep bringing them up.
You said "Literally all of your concerns are 100% solved by adding a log bot to the channels you care about, both on IRC and Discord." to someone that was talking about Discord being bad at logging in general, which to me would include private conversations.
> And you did say IRC logged without bots, which it doesn't. You were wrong.
I said you can log it without bots. Every standalone client I have ever used did it by default.
A client can stay connected all the time. A bot may or may not stay connected all the time. You should not conflate the two.
On Discord you need a special bot account to log without breaking the ToS. On IRC you not only don't need a bot account, you can just connect your normal client and be done.
> and no a "good chunk" of IRCv3 efforts aren't around server logging, that's hilariously incorrect and just shows you're randomly saying shit to try and be right.
Specifically I was saying that in response to "you only get the messages that are sent while you’re in there".
I'd call this a good chunk. Every time I've seen someone list the features of IRCv3, servers buffering messages to send channel history to clients is one of the features they mention.
The client is the “bot” , which you know and are intentionally being obtuse.
And your links aren’t in any way suggesting the server logs messages, please try again.
But none of this is relevant to the original point that you can 100% obtain equal or better outcomes using Discord in all cases for conversation persistence. Complaining about Discord as a replacement to IRC is ignorant and pointless.
The biggest problem with discord bots is that you need a completely different kind of account to have a bot, and even worse that account can't join servers normally. You're not allowed to run a logger on your own personal account.
Because of that, IRC gives better results in many scenarios. Discord is not equal or better in all cases. If I don't set up a special arrangement with the moderators or break the ToS, all my channel messages are vulnerable to being deleted forever on a moment's notice. And if I get locked out of my account I lose all past private messages.
Just because you don’t know how to write a Discord bot doesn’t mean it’s meaningfully difficult due to it requiring a different account type, in fact that makes it easier in many respects.
And in the case we’re discussing, you run the server and can freely allow whatever you want.
Discord is superior or equal to IRC in every meaningful way here.
> Just because you don’t know how to write a Discord bot doesn’t mean it’s meaningfully difficult due to it requiring a different account type, in fact that makes it easier in many respects.
The difficult part isn't writing it. It's getting in a situation to use it.
> And in the case we’re discussing, you run the server and can freely allow whatever you want.
You seem confused. The very first complaint in the big post you responded to with "Literally all of your concerns are 100% solved by adding a log bot to the channels you care about" was this:
"1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever."
It's not just about servers you're running. It's also any channel/message you join.
Sorry but you've completely lost the plot here. We're talking about using Discord vs using IRC as a means of capturing company documentation, and in this task Discord is superior in every meaningful way.
You could use a bot to push everything to a persistent, searchable location, and as a corporation this would be braindead easy. Obviously you wouldn't want to push private convos, so your continued reference to them isn't relevant at all, and your concerns about how "hard" it would be to add a bot to the server to do this is moot considering you control the server in question.
Why would you be banned from the server? Why would you ban yourself? Why would Discord ban you? Why and how would Discord banning you remove your ability to write a bot that pushes your content out to a storage place you control?
You keep trying to find a way to be right, but you keep stumbling.
> Sorry but you've completely lost the plot here. We're talking about using Discord vs using IRC as a means of capturing company documentation, and in this task Discord is superior in every meaningful way.
No, I just double checked all the way back to the start of this thread, that's not right.
People made very general complaints, and you said bots solve all their problems. You also said that Discord matches or beats IRC in all situations.
I agree that discord bots will solve that particular problem.
General logging was in the specific list of problems. Servers you're not in control of were an explicit part of point number 1.
Bots can possibly solve the issue of "I need to get logs of arbitrary channels I'm in", but discord in particular makes it difficult in a way that IRC does not.
Discord is in some ways much worse than IRC for logging.
It's also better in some ways. But there are important differences in each direction.
Discord could largely solve this with a ToS change. But until that happens, it's a problem.
I’m beyond sick of the helplessness performative shtick around Discord. This is an ancient problem with obvious solutions. Do better.