IRC is centralised and a very old protocol. There are much better alternatives for support chat. It lacks many features, too: https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-difference-between-matrix-and-irc%3F
Matrix is a modern, federated, open standard with default E2EE (with unique cross-device signing feature), media, video and audio call support, widgets, guest users (no registration needed) and many more.
Several open source communities have been switched to Matrix already: Mozilla, KDE, GNOME.
Recently, Gitter announced that it will switch to Matrix as the backbone of gitter.im, connecting it with the whole federated Matrix ecosystem.
https://matrix.org
There are many Matrix clients available for all platforms (Android, iOS, Web, TUI and GUI for Linux, *BSD, macOS, Windows): https://matrix.org/clients/
On 2020-11-11 2:34 PM, notramo@protonmail.com wrote:
> IRC is centralised and a very old protocol.
Old indeed, but it is actually federated.
> There are much better alternatives for support chat.
I'd argue that "better" is subjective. I like IRC. I don't like Matrix. For me,
IRC is "better". For you, it is not.
> It lacks many features, too: https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-difference-between-matrix-and-irc%3F> Matrix is a modern, federated, open standard with default E2EE (with unique> cross-device signing feature), media, video and audio call support, widgets,> guest users (no registration needed) and many more.
Being modern is hardly a feature. Just a function of time. Being old is not
bad. Being bad is bad. Most bad things don't get gold. They get abandoned.
Media, video, auto calls, widgets are just annoying as far as I'm concerned.
I'd rather not have them forced onto me.
I know this will sound like herecy to you, and you'll probably demand I be
burned at the stake, but I don't think IRC should have E2EE by default. There
are better platforms for that kind of thing.
Matrix also does one thing in particular that I absolutely hate: When a user
writes a message longer than IRC allows, it won't split it. Instead, it will
drop a link to matrix in IRC for everyone else to see that says "user posted
a long message, click on this link to see". This alone is enough for me to
write the entire platform off as hostile.
> Several open source communities have been switched to Matrix already: Mozilla, KDE, GNOME.
You clearly think Matrix is the future ("already").
I think Mozilla wanted more power to punish and censor, and they could not do
that on an actually open platform. I'm willing to bet there was similar motive
for KDE and Gnome. The Contributor Covenant and its ilk are quite popular these
days.
> Recently, Gitter announced that it will switch to Matrix as the backbone of> gitter.im, connecting it with the whole federated Matrix ecosystem.> https://matrix.org
I already connect to gitter over IRC, and I don't need it to be federated with
anything. I don't understand why that would be useful.
---
BOFH excuse #198:
Post-it Note Sludge leaked into the monitor.
On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 02:34:06PM +0000, notramo@protonmail.com wrote:
>IRC is centralised and a very old protocol. There are much better >alternatives for support chat. It lacks many features, too: >https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-difference-between-matrix-and-irc%3F
Features like history, replies, etc. are better suited for a mailing
list. IRC is for unstructured, casual conversations that don't need to
be saved.
>Matrix is a modern, federated, open standard with default E2EE (with >unique cross-device signing feature), media, video and audio call >support, widgets, guest users (no registration needed) and many more.
E2EE is good for private communication. E2EE does not make sense for
public, open rooms. Discussion in #sr.ht shouldn't be hidden from
unauthorized parties because there are no unauthorized parties.
>Several open source communities have been switched to Matrix already: >Mozilla, KDE, GNOME.
These communities are quite different from Sourcehut. For instance,
Sourcehut does everything through vanilla git/mercurial + mailing list
integration, but KDE and GNOME use GitLab. Mozilla uses a hybrid of many
services, partly because they have to handle a ton of interconnected
services that were written with some assumptions in mind that don't
translate well to mailing lists.
>There are many Matrix clients available for all platforms (Android, >iOS, Web, TUI and GUI for Linux, *BSD, macOS, Windows): >https://matrix.org/clients/
These clients all support different feature sets, so different users
will see different things. The only client that supports it all is
Element. IRC's simplicity makes it easy for many clients to support
everything (this statement does not apply to much of IRCv3).
A less extreme solution would be to improve the matrix-appservice-irc
bridge so that matrix messages don't end up looking very different to
IRC users. If
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/701 gets some
progress, Drew might consider un-banning Matrix users who connect via
the matrix.org Freenode bridge.
On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 01:34:03PM -0800, Rohan Kumar wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 02:34:06PM +0000, notramo@protonmail.com wrote:> > IRC is centralised and a very old protocol.
Are you sure you know what “R” in “IRC” stands for?
For instance, Freenode—the most popular, albeit dying out—IRC network is a
*network*, not a *server*.
Re: bells and whistles such as history —
Yes, IRC is for casual communication, but so is any other chat. Chats are at
most full-text-searchable. If you care about for searchability, use a weechat
in tmux, or attach your GUI IRC client to a server running an IRC client.
Or use an IRC indexer, of which there are plenty.
Jonn <jonn@doma.dev> writes:
> Re: bells and whistles such as history —> Yes, IRC is for casual communication, but so is any other chat. Chats are at> most full-text-searchable. If you care about for searchability, use a weechat> in tmux, or attach your GUI IRC client to a server running an IRC client.>> Or use an IRC indexer, of which there are plenty.>
I'd also like to note that Freenode and OFTC are implementing a ircv3
compliant server forked from charybdis which will probably come with
HistServ playback. So the issue of history for Freenode will soon be a
moot-point.
There are other ircv3 ircds like oragono, inspircd, and (eventually) my
orcircd (which is hosted on sourcehut, but is still private) which all
offer some form of history playback.
Point is, don't let IRC's "lack of features" fool you. There is an
elegant balance in effect between clients, networks, and their
respective backend runtimes.
Long live IRC.
--
Brett M. Gilio
brettg@gnu.orghttps://brettgilio.com/
GNU Project webmaster [https://gnu.org/help/]
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