from Hacker News

IRC turns thirty

by worez on 8/24/18, 12:50 AM with 208 comments

• by tapland on 8/24/18, 6:55 AM

  Met my fiancée over IRC many years ago and we're both using it as our main social communication with others online.

  It's an enclave untouched by much of the current toxicity of social media. It requires you to make friends with others based on your words and not content filtering algorithms. You are exposed to other people with other ideas since it isn't filtered. All with a reasonably high lowest level since the lack of bells and whistles turn a lot of people away from it.

• by donatj on 8/24/18, 2:54 AM

  If you've never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet.

  You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It's all human readable and understandable. It's incredible. It's what an open protocol should be.

  Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!

• by subhro on 8/24/18, 1:56 AM

  I am invariably going to see in the world of Slack, "IRC, why don't you die already".

  No, IRC is not going to die. FreeNode is alive and well. And while you busy slamming and wishing death of IRC, just check the memory usage of your Slack client.

• by dewey on 8/24/18, 8:29 AM

  The communities around torrent tracker was and is always very active on IRC as having your own IRC network is pretty standard for a tracker. I probably spent the majority of my time during my studies on IRC, and because of timezones it was mostly during the night. I have very fond memories of this time and I'm a bit sad that I don't use it that much any more.

  I really can't wrap my head around how communities, especially for programming languages use Slack where all the information gets fed into some silo and is not publicly available. Especially if they don't pay for it, which most open source projects don't do for money reasons and the history gets wiped after a while. If I were to decide what to use in a company I'd probably go for https://www.irccloud.com/ - it's an open protocol but still has the convenience of not having to set up a bouncer and run your own IRC server.

• by josteink on 8/24/18, 7:29 AM

  And the IRC network I help run must have turned 15 by now.

  It’s not filled to the brim with thousands and thousands of users. It’s not monetizable.

  But instead we have a nice, small community where we can hang out, be ourselves and do whatever we like without having to adhere some other company’s “community standards”.

  It’s how I like the internet to be, and I don’t care one bit if it’s old-fashioned.

• by yeukhon on 8/24/18, 2:33 AM

  I hate Slack and I particularly despise Gitter. All the communities I had to go on at one point were totally out of service or totally uninterested in helping newbies. I am glad some organizations still use IRC as their main online network.

• by keithnz on 8/24/18, 2:06 AM

  very cool. I started with IRC circa 92, on a VAX VMS system after discovering it using Gopher :)

  Was great, though very addictive. The internet wasn't very well known, and not many people were online, and it was very common to make friends all around the world. I travelled and met a lot of people all over the world through IRC. I remember quite a number of people starting relationships and having babies ( many of which would be late 20s now... crazy).

  I remember in 93 when tanks were rolling into moscow getting live updates from people who were there. Was a glimpse of the future yet to come around major world events.

  Slowly more and more people started turning up on IRC, new IRC networks appeared, people started to perfer networking with people in their local country or local state.... then later mostly people in their local city.

  Then it started to die off with the rise of the web and alternative chat software.

• by gt565k on 8/24/18, 2:52 AM

  ahhh IRC

  It brought me the joys of learning how to program while trying to write some tcl scripts for eggdrop bots and goofing around in a shell setting up said bot.

  Every time I think of IRC I get this nostalgic feeling of the good old times when communities were vibrant. It was so much easier to just hop on gamesurge or quakenet and find people to game with, organize pugs, find random channels where you can discuss things that interest you, and of course your favorite local's city mingle spot.

  I made some good friends from my local city's IRC channel in the early 2000s that I still talk to this day.

  I feel as though communities aren't as strong as they used to be as IRC has been slowly losing its population. It just had this quick and fluid way of hopping channels and finding people with similar interests. Listing all of the channels with their user count, and seeing what's popular, or even creating your own channel and community was so empowering.

• by sysashi on 8/24/18, 2:10 AM

  I feel like we will end up with another program that abstracts Slack/Telegram/IRC into neat CLI interface and we will go full circle again. :)

  Happy birth day IRC!

• by xvilka on 8/24/18, 4:13 AM

  It is worth noting that IRC is in the middle of overhaul and upgrade with IRCv3 [1] standard. Sadly not many clients and servers support it (almost none of them).

  [1] https://www.ircv3.net

• by asdojasdosadsa on 8/24/18, 7:15 AM

  IRC brings back some memories. I haven't personally used IRC in a few years directly, but I can remember how when I started university, every freshman "had" to login to IRC through SSH and screen :-). That's where the course channels were sitting and you could get help, either if you didn't want to ask face to face, go to school or just needed to ask something. There were other channels too, some where you were invited and had small social groups you chatted with daily.

  Nowadays, most of the communication has migrated to Telegram from IRC.

  EDIT: If one was to start using IRC, I guess there isn't a channel or a server where most or some of the people using also Hacker News go?

• by VectorLock on 8/24/18, 2:06 AM

  Somebody unearthed an IRC server in the hinterlands of the intranet of the huge tech company I work for. There was nobody there.

  The company is big on Jabber though...

• by protomyth on 8/24/18, 2:07 AM

  If someone was going to install an irc server, which one is recommended? Also, any client reconditions for Windows and Mac?

• by mabynogy on 8/24/18, 8:48 AM

  IRC is simple and efficient. It's a real pleasure for me to use it daily to talk to my fellow programmers. Yeah we don't have images but we have links and a pastebin (https://github.com/solusipse/fiche) to replace that.

  I'm on #dailyprog at irc.rizon.net (https://dailyprog.org/). It's an irc-based programming community. We also share a server with ssh access.

  We do small programming projects together. At the moment the idea is to make an exhausive list of all existing IRC servers with massscan and nmap (the output of the running massscan instance: https://dailyprog.org/~mabynogy/irc-servers.txt).

• by schindlabua on 8/24/18, 7:15 AM

  I always envy the guy who registered the nick "e" on freenode. He must be ancient, one of the first users since NickServ came into being, and I imagine him as this grey-bearded programmer wizard who speaks in x86 assembly. He hangs around in ##C and I've seen him speak occasionally I think.

• by dakom on 8/24/18, 7:24 AM

  IRC was where I learned to program in the late 90's. Both through instruction on channels like #C, and also literally implementing the RFC's - building both bots and servers.

  It was a rush building "bot/server" combos like Nickserv... felt like superpowers and you could do all kinds of things through spoofing names and whatnot.

  (I mean it was pointless since the only servers I could pair with were other empty ones with one or two people... but still - it was fun!)

  I guess at some point my trajectory just.. changed - moving from that world to less heady stuff like Flash and so on... but the nostalgia is strong and I feel very lucky to have gotten my start in tech that way.

• by triviatise on 8/24/18, 7:22 PM

  I used IRC (a lot) in the early 90s. I built the first online texas holdem poker game hosted as an IRC bot around 1994. There were a few hundred players, many of them asked to play for real money. People created graphical clients and another guy extended the code to add tournament rules.

  Apparently poker pro chris ferguson first started playing poker on IRC.

  I definitely missed a huge opportunity to monetize it.

  IRC these days is a bit of a mess with custom authentication protocols that make it too hard to use. Slack is extremely easy to setup for an organization and just works.

• by Sir_Cmpwn on 8/24/18, 12:04 PM

  Here's to the next thirty years! There's no better way to chat online than IRC. You'll have to tear it from our cold, dead hands.

• by fouc on 8/24/18, 3:22 AM

  Has anyone noticed that Slack communities are a lot less active these days?

  And IRC communities are less active these days.

  Where are the chatters going to now?

• by walrus01 on 8/24/18, 1:56 AM

  A CLI for a workstation without irssi on it is no workstation at all.

• by kilon on 8/24/18, 8:15 AM

  I was never a fan of IRC although I am still a part time user since 1995. I was always annoyed losing replies just because I went offline and of course all the weird self disconnects and occasional banning bots. Sending files was also a big pain. But was simple to use and with tons of communities so I never actively complained about it. I converted to Discord and never looked back. On the other hand I was never deep into social activity online.

• by crtasm on 8/24/18, 11:01 AM

  Smart filtering of join/part messages makes irc so much nicer to use, available in my preferred client Weechat as well as Hexchat and surely others.

  I only see a join/part if it happens within x minutes of someone speaking, and there's a shortcut to switch to unfiltered view when I want it.

• by nullify88 on 8/24/18, 9:32 AM

  Would anyone know of any active communities for sysadmins on IRC or otherwise? Or a directory to find such channels?

  Never really been one for being involved in online communities but being a one man team at work has got me looking for people of similar interests.

• by lx3459683 on 8/25/18, 3:35 AM

  For anyone wondering where IRC users have migrated these days, the answer is Discord.

  There are several programming-themed servers with thousands of concurrent users, and many more high population servers for other interest groups.

• by agumonkey on 8/24/18, 4:34 AM

  You could take away the web 2.0 I may not bother. IRC on the other hand ...

• by mxuribe on 8/24/18, 11:39 AM

  I remember back in 1992 (my freshmen year of college), my first exposure to this thing called the internet was via email AND irc. Ah, good ol' irc; what wonderful memories! Happy birthday irc!

• by bkircher on 8/24/18, 5:29 AM

  Love IRC. But what client should I use on my telephone?

• by dcow on 8/24/18, 1:56 AM

  Barely 30 and all the cool kids have already moved on... I think there's a metaphore in there somewhere.

• by rhlala on 8/24/18, 9:39 AM

  My issue with irc is everyone can see your ip adress right?

  Is there any chanel of hackernewsers with the same spirit as HN?

• by yawz on 8/24/18, 5:08 AM

  I heavily used IRC in the early and mid 90s. Glad to see that it’s alive and kicking. Happy 30th!

• by davidw on 8/24/18, 5:15 AM

  It's interesting that it's actually older than the "World Wide Web".

• by lcnmrn on 8/24/18, 8:32 AM

  Superthread, https://superthread.net/ is a web based alternative to IRC. You might want to check it out.

• by fuzzyoneuk on 8/24/18, 1:40 PM

  I've met some great people and fellow Devs on efnet back in the day, it used to be pretty much my only socialising back in the late 90s, some really disturbing toxic people too but a great experience all together.

  Still pop in every now and then.

• by anfilt on 8/24/18, 10:00 AM

  Long live IRC!

• by dagenix on 8/24/18, 3:49 AM

  /me slow claps

• by cambalache on 8/24/18, 2:07 AM

  It is refreshing to still use a technology which mainly has not been tainted with current crap (share, like, subscribe). You have to deal with some mods on power-trips, but it is rare. Happy thirty!

• by modells on 8/24/18, 6:25 AM

  Interesting. Last IIRC, Stanford ITS used tinyfugue (tf) MUD which is sorta like IRC.

• by Karrot_Kream on 8/24/18, 3:59 AM

  For those that just want to use Slack through your IRC clients/bots/whatever, take a look at https://github.com/nolanlum/tanya