from Hacker News

Why I Live in IRC (2015)

by spacebuffer on 2/6/24, 7:39 PM with 121 comments

• by swozey on 2/6/24, 8:14 PM

  I was an ircop on efnet for like half my childhood until they figured out I wasn't 18 and desynced my server. I just could never go back to IRC. I stopped using it probably 15 years ago or more after using it for 20ish years. Got my first job on it, learned linux and networking through it, definitely propelled my career.

  TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree to it in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those 1500 bots in a channel are doing.

  NO features. I'm just over the IRC client and protocol and whatever else. It won't preview gifs, you probably still have to do some xdcc crap to send a file. After using discord and twitch and anything remotely modern it just doesn't allow the same type of conversations, socializing, interactions, but a lot of people do love that about it. I don't include weird irc clients like AcidMAX or whatever would be hip nowadays that probably came from a russian warez group that now has your credit card numbers.

  No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7. No multi-device support, have to join the server and log in again etc. if it ever restarts or you're somewhere without a shell running it.

  Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone.

  And being an op the amount of absolutely depraved and creepy stalkery stuff that went on was insane. So many of the few women who identified themselves as women would be harassed and stalked all over irc and sometimes IRL. Lots of glining of creeps.

  This was very much an efnet problem with some of the communities it developed. Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.

• by susam on 2/6/24, 7:54 PM

  18 years and counting! Still living in IRC. I use the old and humble Irssi as the client with ZNC running on a Debian VM on Linode as the bouncer to maintain a persistent connection.

  It is simple, reliable, and well established. I initially used to hang out on multiple networks like DALnet, EFnet, etc. but I quickly settled on becoming a regular at Freenode and OFTC because those are where most of the free and open source software communities were active.

  The biggest recent event in IRC that happened recently from my perspective (user perspective) was the controversial change in ownership of Freenode. I switched to Libera like everyone else. The migration took only about 30 minutes or so: point my ZNC to the new server, register my nick, register my channels, and done!

• by zeamp on 2/6/24, 11:51 PM

  Back in the late 90s, my IRC server was rejected for linking on EFnet because my uplink was known to host rather shady suspects. Some IRC folks would go on to make the FBI's most wanted list for DDoSing satellites. My equipment was seized and never returned even though I was only being housed in the building, unrelated to the case itself. The data center owner and I are friends and he ran an amazing network, one of the best colocation facilities of its time in such limited space.

  I ended up getting back "in" with irc.home .com (@Home Cable), on their re-linking efforts. Around these times, we still had big names on IRC, universities, America Online even.

  I would go on to be linked to HybNet (Hey, Dianora, Hardy, everyone I'm forgetting) testing ircd-hybrid, the IRC server software that powered much of EFnet at the time. Since EFnet had no services, the server's software and its ircops were extremely important to the network. I would later mess with TCM and other auto-regulators, leading into my interest of bot making. Everyone's hailing ChatGPT when we'd write our own SmarterChild, and it could connect to AIM -AND- IRC -AND- Web.

  20....25... nearing 30 years later, I'm still on EFnet. My channel is still active, and yes I have quite a few bots. I also still talk to a few friends, some who are still IRC only for privacy or other reasons. We've lost over 100,000+ users, but I still enjoy randomly typing /list thinking I'm going to crash myself with the upcoming flood of activity. Not quite, but it feels good.

  Also, DALnet services banned me for hacking them and I think I'm still banned.

  Thanks for listening to my IRC Talk.

• by novagameco on 2/6/24, 8:35 PM

  I've tried to get into IRC but the public servers have so many dead channels. On the one channel I did find active someone called me a racial slur because I use Windows.

  I wish there were more people using these alternative, somewhat decentralized services that weren't just tech people. Whenever I see some cool new fediverse technology or alternative protocl (e.g gemini), 99% of the conversation is just people talking about the technology itself. I originally joined facebook because I had friends on there, not so we could talk about the tech behind facebook

• by rubinlinux on 2/6/24, 9:30 PM

  Surprised no one even mentioned the matrix protocol yet. Its still very rough around the edges, but for an old school IRC person talk of Discord as an alternative just hurts me.

  Do I want my community to be completely owned by a corporation, so that all the work we put into the network effect belongs to a company and they can impose/change rules at any moment? Have we learned nothing?

  Matrix is the modern IRC alternative, not discord. And in some cases, you can run a bridge between the two, so I use a matrix client as my daily IRC interface -- best of both worlds.

• by BMSR on 2/6/24, 9:58 PM

  What I like about irc is that the x-topic "communities" are one big channel, centralized. Compare that with Discord where you join a server/guild and you are presented with 10 or more channels and you have to take a guess into what the normal/off-topic/on-topic/general channel is. But irc is also very strange, I wouldn't be surprised if I had been chatting with a swarm of bots all these years.

• by cqqxo4zV46cp on 2/6/24, 11:25 PM

  I kind of miss IRC, but it was probably for a different ‘me’. I ran my own network, with lots of people on it, when I was like…13! Nobody should’ve let me do that. But it was what had me cut my teeth on FreeBSD and Linux. I wrote my own weird UnrealIRCd configuration generator with Perl. IRC bots! Again, with Perl. For all IRC’s downsides vs modern IM services, it sure was easy to start with socket programming and get a bot together quickly. “Scrolling” ASCII images! mIRC colour codes! PP4L! I remember getting help with installing Gentoo on Freenode #gentoo (or was it ##gentoo?), also as a 14 year old. I’d at times love to say that all that knowledge has exited me, but for better or worse some of it remains.

• by catherinecodes on 2/6/24, 8:55 PM

  The author describes the alerting and notification workflow really well.

  We use IRC at work for this purpose. Prometheus alerts flow into channels that anyone is free to join or leave depending on what they're working on at the given moment.

• by dang on 2/6/24, 9:06 PM

  Discussed at the time:

  Why I Live in IRC (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12267254 - Aug 2016 (83 comments)

• by gtirloni on 2/6/24, 8:02 PM

  Coincidentally I had to use IRC today, not much changed. Biggest hurdle continues to be messages when I'm away and it seems IRCCloud hasn't seen an update in a while.

• by zeamp on 2/6/24, 11:54 PM

  Back in the late 90s, my IRC server was rejected for linking on EFnet because my uplink was known to host rather shady suspects. Some IRC folks would go on to make the FBI's most wanted list for DDoSing satellites. My equipment was seized and never returned even though I was only being housed in the building, unrelated to the case itself. The data center owner and I are friends and he ran an amazing network, one of the best colocation facilities of its time in such limited space.

  I ended up getting back "in" with irc.home .com (@Home Cable), on their re-linking efforts. Around these times, we still had big names on IRC, universities, America Online even.

  I would go on to be linked to HybNet (Hey, Dianora, Hardy, everyone I'm forgetting) testing ircd-hybrid, the IRC server software that powered much of EFnet at the time, like a crash test EFnet admin. I had a blast! Since EFnet had no services, the server's software and its ircops were extremely important to the network. I would later mess with TCM and other automated connection regulators, leading into my interest of bot making. Everyone's hailing ChatGPT when we'd write our own SmarterChild, and it could connect to AIM -AND- IRC -AND- Web.

  20....25... nearing 30 years later, I'm still on EFnet. My channel is still active, and yes I have quite a few bots. I also still talk to a few friends, some who are still IRC only for privacy or other reasons. We've lost over 100,000+ users, but I still enjoy randomly typing /list thinking I'm going to crash myself with the upcoming flood of activity.

  Not quite, but it feels good.

  Also, DALnet services banned me for supposedly hacking them and I think I'm still banned from NickServ.

  Thanks for listening to my IRC Talk.

• by mxuribe on 2/6/24, 8:55 PM

  Back in the early 1990s up until about early 2000s, i would frequent IRC a bunch. It was so new and fun back then to chat with so many different people across the world; to this day, it remains impressive to me in several ways. Nowadays, i spend my time mostly equally across matrix and the fediverse. While i use fediverse clients quite typically (as they're intended), I use matrix in a few different ways (chat, yes, but also system/task notifications, server "logs", system "dashboard", etc.). But, its quite impressive to the extent that the author uses IRC; very clever and awesome indeed! I hope to stretch my use of matrix even more, but sometimes bridges make things a little annoying. Nevertheless, for me, matrix has replaced irc.

• by gerikson on 2/6/24, 7:46 PM

  I'd love to know if the author still lives in IRC after the Freenode meltdown.

• by dangus on 2/6/24, 8:33 PM

  No mention was ever made of why anyone would want their life filled with so many damn notifications.

  Half of these seem more appropriate for email, and email is already set up to handle them with zero configuration (like GitHub).

  Twitter, who cares, that’s a time waster.

  Home surveillance stuff is also a waste of time. It is basically entirely ineffective, every petty criminal knows to wear a mask and clearance rates are below 15%.

  And putting your sleep logs on your website publicly…really!? Seems like this is just data collection as a hobby with no end goal.

• by korse on 2/6/24, 8:06 PM

  I still live there. Rizon and Libera baby!

• by bitwize on 2/6/24, 7:56 PM

  All the action is on Discord and Mastodon these days.

• by nathias on 2/6/24, 10:12 PM

  you can also connect other chats to weechat like facebook messenger and slack, so you have a unified chat

• by ionwake on 2/6/24, 9:04 PM

  did the freenode startups channel die? It was active until atleast a few years ago...

• by ranger_danger on 2/6/24, 8:45 PM

  The reason I don't like to use IRC is 100% the people. Just so brazenly rude and egotistical, and always confidently wrong.