YHK - yet another hacker news clone

IRCv3

127 points basilikum 2 hours ago 107 comments

meethkr 2 hours ago | parent

Maybe with all the age verification spyware around its time I finally went back to IRC chat.

9dev 2 hours ago | parent

That’s just nostalgia. You wouldn’t miss bouncers, worrying about presence, multiple devices, file sharing, and more.

mgaunard 2 hours ago | parent

I never worry about presence in any form of chat. I don't care if people are there when I message them; it's up to them to pick up my messages at their convenience.

jeltz 1 hour ago | parent

Which is never if the person you messaged did not have a bouncer or their bouncer crashed.

dewey 2 hours ago | parent

I've been using https://www.irccloud.com for years, it takes care of all these things and also has an app / push notifications. It's still IRC, but it takes care of a lot of the annoying parts of it that made it feel dated.

gsich 2 hours ago | parent

The Lounge https://thelounge.chat/

Balinares 1 hour ago | parent

Some never left. Notoriously, some bigtech companies have an internal IRC network for tech discussions because that's one communication system that you can rely on to stay up even during catastrophic outages.

smokeyfish 1 hour ago | parent

That's exactly what my tech teams did during outages of other channels. Spin up an ircd and carry on.

neals 2 hours ago | parent

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?

rylando 2 hours ago | parent

I mean, it seemed mobile enough for that tv presenter to get caught on a plane being a pedo on IRC

yieldcrv 2 hours ago | parent

why wouldn’t mobile access work? Its just a protocol

hengheng 2 hours ago | parent

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.

dewey 2 hours ago | parent

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.

progval 1 hour ago | parent

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)

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

Mobile devices are different devices with different constraints. The main blockers are intermittent connectivity and the need to save battery life.

javier2 2 hours ago | parent

really need the simple voice chat for me to use it.

pkal 2 hours ago | parent

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).

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

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.

trickypr 2 hours ago | parent

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).

mgaunard 2 hours ago | parent

in general discord has a very bad app and usability, irc regardless of client is a clear upgrade

jeltz 2 hours ago | parent

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.

OccamsMirror 1 hour ago | parent

imo Telegram is the least bad chat app that I've used. Discord has a lot of UX and performance issues.

pkal 2 hours ago | parent

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.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

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.

phavelsk 2 minutes ago | parent

It’s a matter of having a good client. Mango will give you everything you mentioned … https://mangoirc.chat

kristopolous 2 hours ago | parent

If you look at "old" internet: fidonet telnet bitnet ftp fsp wais netnews whois++ gopher relaynet ... i mean irc is one of the only ones that is still used, and mostly as it was 35 years ago. Pretty impressive.

People love knocking on IRC but people are still on it, still using it...

dist-epoch 2 hours ago | parent

COBOL is still used 50 years later.

pelagicAustral 2 hours ago | parent

COBOL is definitely a hallmark of this type of argument.

kristopolous 1 hour ago | parent

reminds me that fortran has a modern website: https://fortran-lang.org/

glimshe 1 hour ago | parent

Logo too!

unclet 2 hours ago | parent

what about SMTP?

kristopolous 1 hour ago | parent

I thought of that ... you could put it in the list but I wouldn't unless you're talking cron. I mean when I started it was like mail bob@froggy.ucla.edu and bob would open up pine or emacs and not get any spam or have to do anything crazy and we'd have a conversation.

that modality is long dead. we still have email but it's not that same ... I however could take mirc from like 1995 and still use everything.

zoky 1 hour ago | parent

FTP is still used quite a bit. For what it’s useful for, nothing has come close to replacing it.

kristopolous 1 hour ago | parent

like in enterprise? the browsers stopped shipping with ftp support I think 5 years ago.

terminalbraid 1 hour ago | parent

You might be surprised to learn there are dedicated ftp clients.

kristopolous 1 hour ago | parent

sarcasm?

TeMPOraL 1 hour ago | parent

Don't know of a client with that name, but there are plenty of others.

zoky 1 hour ago | parent

Hosting files to be downloaded via web browser isn’t what it’s useful for. If you’re going to do that, you might as well use… a web server.

FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).

charcircuit 1 hour ago | parent

HTTPS has largely replaced it. Pretty much all files uploaded or downloaded from the internet is going to be done via HTTPS and not FTP.

mathgeek 1 hour ago | parent

Only if you ignore the banking industry.

thiht 1 hour ago | parent

Fair point, but I would assume the AWS S3 by itself is bigger than the FTP/SFTP traffic globally including banks. No idea if it’s true, and I’m not sure we can get reliable stats on this

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

SFTP? Don't confuse it with FTP or FTPS - SFTP is a different protocol which runs on top of SSH.

Bender 1 hour ago | parent

They are not confused. A lot of companies still use FTP internally and for B2B. Many people would be very uncomfortable if they knew how much companies including banks, payment systems, etc... and governments still depended on FTP and clear text authentication. That's even before broaching the subject of which of the applications and daemons in use are being actively maintained.

networked 1 hour ago | parent

What do you mean, "for what it’s useful for"? For me, WebDAV has replaced FTP where SFTP hasn't.

frumiousirc 1 hour ago | parent

HTTP is also still somewhat popular.

But, seriously, that got me curious. There are many protocols from that early era that are still with us today. NTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, BGP, SNMP, NFS, ICMP. If you allow the 1990's as counting as "old" we can add SSH and SSL, DHCP, LDAP.

fragmede 45 minutes ago | parent

TCP

terminalbraid 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, but the major upgrades for things like telnet and ftp were adding appropriate encryption layers and improved authentication to include things like certificates. IRC shoehorned those into the connections awkwardly but it's still not often mandatory and registration is painful.

Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.

kristopolous 1 hour ago | parent

Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.

hollowonepl 57 minutes ago | parent

I don’t believe it was or continually is limited to text only, but I do believe we had netiquette back then which helped to reconsider spamming internet with media and other decorators, only to have it all forgotten 72h later

cowlevel 47 minutes ago | parent

Still is, but a bit empty. https://eternal-september.org/

movsx 1 hour ago | parent

What about the registration you find so painful? It takes a single command to register a nick, if that's what you mean.

dijit 1 hour ago | parent

In his defence, its a single command, if you know the command

terminalbraid 1 hour ago | parent

This, which is not uniform across servers, and has more work if you want to do certificate-based auth. Additionally getting a nick cloak is good opsec and also extremely not uniform.

RyJones 1 hour ago | parent

I'm here looking for other telenet (not telnet) oldheads, finding nobody.

countWSS 1 hour ago | parent

Actually, its just inertia and lack of reliable forum hosting, the actual "killer app" that replaced volatile and unarchivable chat content, but no one learned from it and people flocked to Discord, which is even more hostile to archiving/scanning chat history.

Ekaros 1 hour ago | parent

I am starting to wonder is archiving or scanning history even possible with how hostile internet has become. Especially when so many tech companies will scan and download same content countless times without single care of damage or cost the cause...

Just imagine hosting that history on your instance for users and then some vibecoder without care in his work starts scanning it automatically every 5 seconds just in case it might have changed...

nmlt 1 hour ago | parent

But as IRC has a social network component, it's more of a social thing than anything inherent to IRC.

jstummbillig 1 hour ago | parent

Everything decentralized will keep being used. Stuff is sticky.

More illuminating: To what (relative) extend? And what's the trajectory?

Looking at Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fm%2F03t2s%2C%2Fg%2F11...

nubinetwork 2 hours ago | parent

IRC is dead to me, you can thank Andrew Lee (of Freenode infamy) for that one.

dewey 2 hours ago | parent

Isn't exactly the beauty of IRC that one person doing something to one node in the network isn't affecting the rest at all?

nubinetwork 2 hours ago | parent

I can't be bothered to sign up for both libera and oftc. When everything was on freenode, you didn't have to jump through any hoops just to ask a question.

dewey 2 hours ago | parent

You don't need to "sign up". You just open your client, connect to the server and ask your question.

gsich 2 hours ago | parent

Your loss.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

all of the Freenode staff just rebranded as Libera Chat, bought a new domain and continued on as usual.

dist-epoch 2 hours ago | parent

if you look at the linked roadmap, most issues are from 2020/2021, with one from 2017, when Discord appeared.

So yeah, we are going to have the Dyson swarm before this is done.

rie_t 2 hours ago | parent

An IRC client with an extension for image/video embeds and a voice chat (with video/screenshare support) would go far.

pkal 2 hours ago | parent

I know it is a different protocol, but doesn't Mumble provide this to some degree?

gsich 2 hours ago | parent

only voice and subpar text chat.

dewey 2 hours ago | parent

Many GUI IRC clients do image / video embedding, even 10 years ago. Voice chat / video / screenshare is probably not a good fit unless you run some kind of secondary infrastructure like Jitsi and make it look like it's part of the client. Doesn't seem like a great fit though.

rie_t 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah it'd need to be some kind of secondary infrastructure - I don't see it being part of any official IRC spec any time soon. But it would absolutely make IRC more appealing to the "average" user.

dewey 1 hour ago | parent

I like IRC, and I am online all day on various servers, for nostalgia reasons mostly, but I think everyone knows it's dated, had its time and will slowly fizzle out if we like it or not.

I think the main problem there is that there's not really any motivation to build that on top of a simple protocol like IRC. The strength of the protocol is that it's distributed, easy to understand, text based and lightweight and I'd guess most current IRC users are people who use it for a very long time already.

Tucking all these mainstream features that people are used to this days to get feature parity with any other competitor (Slack / Teams / Discord / Matrix etc.) will not make IRC more popular, it will make the protocol more complicated and fragmented.

movsx 1 hour ago | parent

I feel like this is completely missing the point of what IRC is.

I appreciate its text-only nature and would never want to see image/video embeds and/or voice chat in my client.

smokeyfish 1 hour ago | parent

I agree. Part of the beauty is the limitations, the simplicity and transient nature of it.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

Give Matrix a try.

dewey 2 hours ago | parent

Some of the actors that are listed on that page already implement many of the v3 features (Like https://www.irccloud.com), so it's not really something that will come with a big bang and we have to wait for a release, it's just that not all clients support it yet.

prologic 1 hour ago | parent

Does IRCv3 need new leadership to continue to drive it forward? Over at Parley/Ahoy (https://git.mills.io/prologic/parley https://git.mills.io/fastidious/ahoy) we've managed to create a federated decentralized IRC chat experience with a Discord/Slack-esque feel but true to both IRC / IRCv3 (Ahoy being a fully featured IRCv3 client).

obsoleszenz 26 minutes ago | parent

parley and ahoy both look quite interesting! Retrofitting irc into a real federated protocol is cool. Also like the idea of picking up discords ui/ux. How did you manage to get avatars for ahoy? Is there a ircv3 protocol i missed?

prologic 13 minutes ago | parent

It's part of the IRCv3 Metadata spec: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/metadata -- It just isn't very well documented or prominently displayed on the spec's page(s) I think. Took me a while to find it too.

7bit 1 hour ago | parent

IRC was great. But I don't think it can bounce back with the alternatives that we now have. A focussed effort to get Matrix working, or any of the open source alternatives would be better. Of course, people invest their time in what they think is fun and that is fine. But the already existing alternatives provide what people need and want today, so IRCv3 will have it infinitely harder.

terminalbraid 1 hour ago | parent

> A focussed effort to get Matrix working

At what point do we say matrix isn't going to work? It's been like this for years. It's so overengineered on an immutable chat history on a blockchain it has crossed the line into "way too expensive to run and maintain for streams of cat pictures and memes". Worse is better.

broodbucket 36 minutes ago | parent

I don't get this, it is working. It's largely replaced IRC in open source spaces. It's not going to penetrate the mainstream but it's fine for what it is and people do use it all the time.

jpeeler 5 minutes ago | parent

People have different definitions for "working". I assume that the people who claim that Matrix doesn't work are the ones comparing to alternative commercial solutions and all the polish that usually accompanies those.

A decade ago Moxie Marlinspike argued[1] that to develop Signal more quickly, he and his team could not be distracted by federation. At the time I wasn't sure what to think, but it does seem that the effort level of using the integrated approach of client/server/protocol may just logistically be easier.

[1] - https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

mxmilkiib 1 hour ago | parent

I've ended up managing to vibe an IRC client for Twitch over the last couple of weeks to make following the sometimes flood of the [Hasan] 'Piker Broadcasting Service' stream chat a bit easier;

https://hasanabi.neocities.org/?theme=nightshade

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

Note: Twitch chat isn't real IRC, but exposes an IRC-compatible interface.

mxmilkiib 1 hour ago | parent

fair point

fwiw, I was logging in with Quassel for several weeks before I started that project, that needs an OAuth token for the IRC login

pjmlp 1 hour ago | parent

No mIRC on the list, oh well.

smokeyfish 1 hour ago | parent

It's still active.

pjmlp 34 minutes ago | parent

Great! There is a whole generation raised on ICQ, Y! Mensager, MSN and naturally mIRC.

knorker 1 hour ago | parent

On this topic: https://robustirc.net/

It's a server side change, robustifying the server-to-server links and its effects on connected clients.

Retr0id 1 hour ago | parent

I think the main problem with IRCv3 is that there are a million optional extensions (see https://ircv3.net/software/clients for a feature support matrix of popular clients)

This can get especially confusing when people on different clients have divergent views of the same conversation. e.g. some can see the emoji reacts, others can't. some can see "replies", others can't.

progval 1 hour ago | parent

Emojis and reacts are the only extensions that can cause people to have a meaningfully different view. It's part of why it took so long to ratify replies, and reacts still are not ratified.

We're also discussing ways for servers to provide a fallback to clients which don't support them.

badsectoracula 42 minutes ago | parent

I visited the site to see what the extensions are and at first i thought that there might be a few of them but it doesn't look that bad.

Then i noticed the horizontal scrollbar :-P

AlienRobot 1 hour ago | parent

I wish IRC supported images. It's weird that to share a screenshot I need a chat platform that also support VOIP when I just want to paste an image in the chat.

jamesponddotco 42 minutes ago | parent

I have been using SourceHut’s IRC client to access it for a while, but never quite found a good iOS client, since Goguma is just the Android client compiled for iOS.

I wonder if I can find the time to build a native iOS IRC client that follows Liquid Glass, and works as well as Goguma. Not many people would use it, but it’d scratch my own itch, as they say.

The protocol is so simple[1] that it shouldn’t take that long or be that hard[2], I think.

[1]: Which is the beauty of it, ofc.

[2]: Famous last words.

phavelsk 1 minute ago | parent

Seems you never found Mango IRC on iOS

zensecure 36 minutes ago | parent

Go linger in the ircv3 channel for a week or two, the answer is yes.

Mostly complainers who would rather see IRC stay the same. Right now one of them is complaining the author is a vibe coder, as if that somehow makes the critique that IRC continues to be far behind everything else less real.

badsectoracula 27 minutes ago | parent

Just yesterday i was working on my game engine for the original Xbox using the open source NXDK kit (which is much lower level than the official XDK) and i finally, after literal years, managed to find and fix a couple of bugs that caused flickering (much more obscure than you'd expect and didn't show up even in the emulator).

So i decided to share it with a couple friends and retro enthusiast communities on Discord. I took a video capture of my engine working, showing the 3d rendering, audio, video, etc with an Xbox->HDMI->USB capture chain. Then attached the file on Discord's input field and posted it (i have a tab with the web UI pretty much constantly open in Firefox). People weren't around at the time but some saw it today and commented while i was sleeping (with my computer off).

Last time i checked, this wouldn't be possible with IRC because:

1. There is no video (or any other file) host on IRC servers.

2. IRC discussions are ephemeral, you either need to be online all the time or setup some sort of proxy that keeps the discussions around while you or others are away (or do what i used to do 15+ years ago - run a terminal-based irc client in a screen session in a VPS :-P).

AFAIK #1 is still impossible and #2 is an optional extension (that i've never seen in real life). Meanwhile i can now connect to a new Discord community and not only not worry about losing any messages while i do other stuff (i often check what people have talk about in Discord since my previous "visit" to be up to date) but also search what people talked about previously - e.g. did anyone brought up some XYZ topic i want to talk about?

IME the above two (also add images and audio to the mix - in two of the communities i'm in there are people who post WIP music they make) are basically 90% of how i see people use Discord: they post something (very often media-based) and very often others see/respond to it in their own leisure much later (in some channels people even live on different timezones so they can't do otherwise).

TBH nowadays if i wanted to set up some community in a self-hosted manned and wanted to stick with open stuff, i'd probably use RocketChat or something like that (Godot uses a self-hosted RocketChat instance that while a bit more janky than Discord, it seems to provide pretty much the same features i mentioned above).

jareklupinski 23 minutes ago | parent

> they post something (very often media-based) and very often others see/respond to it in their own leisure much later

who pays for the storage to keep the file on a computer somewhere, and the network to serve the file to the internet indefinitely? in Discord's case, it's the users

usenet iirc tried to do a sort of "torrent" the data across enthusiasts' / participants' computers?

AnonymousPlanet 21 minutes ago | parent

What you are describing here is microblogging like Twitter or Instagram, not using a chat to do chatting. Chatting, by design, is ephemeral and text only.

sdcfgy 20 minutes ago | parent

This is actually a really good point and perspective. Couldn’t agree more.

cykros 18 minutes ago | parent

Concord channels on Nostr (https://concordprotocol.org/clients/) are handy for avoiding the centralization and privacy issues of Discord while also avoiding the reduction in asynchronous and media-enhanced functionality you'd get with IRC.

That said I can't say it's hard to just run irssi inside of tmux and attach/detach as necessary remotely. Nor is it hard to throw my media I'm sharing onto a web server. But yes, you do need to mix and match your utilities, rather than have an all in one package.

I do often enough find this to be more of a feature than a bug -- being stuck with Discord's UI is gross, but the network effect does have me continuing to use it for some groups.

ido 13 minutes ago | parent

I think you underestimate how hard it really is. I don’t think anyone I know who isn't a professional programmer (and some who are) would have found either of your examples easy.

Bender 8 minutes ago | parent

The way some of us did this back in the day was to link to a forum post with a video upload or a chan board with a video upload from IRC. IRC was ephemeral, light-weight, fast and forums, chan boards were the semi-persistence, long enough for the majority of the intended audience to download. Some still do this today.

olalonde 17 minutes ago | parent

I largely credit mIRC for getting me into computers and programming. But I haven't used IRC in a decade... I wonder if kids these days even know what it is.

stevefan1999 14 minutes ago | parent

I really hope IRC supports WebSocket transport