It was a collection of silly quotes from IRC channels everywhere, many of which dated back to the 90s. It was rarely ever updated in the 2010s, but now, the URL no longer resolves.
Last capture was July 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230601000000*/bash.org
EDIT Someone archived all the quotes on the Internet Archive.
IRC was so much better than Discord. People are stupid.
Relevant xkcd
Oh that is so true!! Love it.
I hope you don’t mind me linking https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1782:_Team_Chat
I’ve lost a lot of my rose tint for discord, right around the arbitration clause thing, but I can’t deny that it’s convenient. Chat, streaming to friends, popping up a new server for whatever project or group, VC for playing games together. There’s platforms that do all of these things better, but few that do all of them decently well.
Of course, it’s a privacy nightmare and I stick to IRC for anything I wouldn’t feel comfortable having linked to my identity, but I wouldn’t call people stupid for using it.
Mostly I think its fine for all that.
But there’s a special circle of hell for projects that rely on it for “documentation”.
I get the temptation, I really do. But once you’re taking money or have more than a couple people involved and semi-organized you really need at least a small wiki/git-hub landing page with the basics.
I know documentation is a separate skillset and a lot of work in its own right but projects can also stagnate and die because there isn’t any.
Oh 1000% agree, having a discord for support is nice and all, but using it as a crutch in place of good documentation is a sin worthy of eternal damnation.
Heck, even support is a bit of a pain since projects also like to use it as their issue tracker and want you to search for your issue before posting (which it’s awful for). GitHub is free or at least cheap depending on what you need and is way more searchable, as well as giving a place for wiki and a basic website
Direct chat support, discord is fine, but beyond that, please use something actually designed for it
I haven’t used irc for years but isn’t it all plaintext unencrypted? And isnt your ip tied to it?
I’ve never looked into any of that for irc so maybe I’m way off base.
I do remember making my own fvwm config where an irssi irc terminal would slide out of the top of my screen with a hotkey and roll back up again. I was pretty proud of that.
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Closed source software without end to end encryption and has access to all chats, voice and video calls. How can it not be a privacy nightmare. You have no idea what they collect and what they don’t.
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I doubt that. If you do a gdpr request for your data, you’ll see how much they log about your activities. Obviously chats and VC activity, but also all the timestamps of what you play, session data over all time, etc.
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Or maybe… How is discord any worse of a privacy nightmare than IRC? I love me some IRC, but it ain’t exactly a bastion of secrecy.
IRC clients don’t have loads of telemetry like Discord does. And IRC is a protocol instead of a platform, so there isn’t a single set of servers hosting and logging ALL conversations.
That’s fair, but IRC also tends to leak information about users to everybody. They’re maybe bad in slightly different ways, but frankly if you care about privacy that much you probably shouldn’t use either, at least not with additional protections.
IRC doesn’t even see that much info about each user to begin with, especially compared to Discord, and if you’re talking about public IPs - hiding them from other users is now a common thing on servers.
It’s wild how a good deal of decentralization and FOSS focused communities insist on having Discord be their primary center for community. Worst one is privacy focused communities…
I can’t say that bridging them to matrix was a foolproof endeavor though
Amen. Guess it’s the curse of the unknowing youth. They grow up with this bullcrap. I hate discord so much. “oh buy nitro, have stupid stickers!” ugh.
I really really really miss IRC. What was wrong with it? Why did it die? Did we all die?
It is alive and well, never died. Many project still use it for communication, support…
I know, there’re even gopher, Finger and BBSs still around. But being around isn’t really the same as alive. Except technically.
IRC is only text chat, Discord does a ton of other things on top.
Personally I’ve been on the internet for the last… 27 years or so? I’ve used ICQ, Teamspeak, Skype, IRC, Mumble, Discord, Teams, … (Probably forgot a few).
I never really liked IRC, yes, it’s private servers which is nice, yes you can be relatively anonymous, but the channels were always a mess. Either too many people spamming so you can’t follow a single conversation, or for most channels you had 40 people idling and never responding, so it felt like a ghost town.
Just in my personal experience Discord works a lot better and is far more convenient. But yeah, not much privacy there obviously (though everything you said in IRC was often saved away by a bot, so either way whatever you said was out there).
CashewNut slaps Vlyn around a bit with a large troutYour personal experience is biased as fuck because having to go through phone verification or downloading a sketchy proprietary client is in no way far more convenient than firing up irc
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How is this different to Discord? You have huge, medium and small channels in both.
Most IRC servers I’ve been to had exactly one channel for the entire community/topic where everyone hung out. Either way, IRC is dead, it’s just fun how triggered some people get about it.
Far from dead and I have no idea which server you connected to but most servers definitely don’t default to a single channel.
/me slaps Vlym about with a large trout.
Except the lack of a decent mobile client that doesn’t require you to self-host something to receive all messages
This is genuinely the only problem why we switched to Signal for work communication. My colleagues wanted us developers to use Slack and other proprietary stuff but IRC was enough. Only issue was that you couldn’t get push notifications on mobile.
I asked about a good mobile client for Android, and was recommended Revolution IRC.
I mainly use it to keep an eye on my IRC server, but it’s worked well so far
Better how? I can’t message people when they’re offline, everything is completely boring text, no images, it’s not clear how I can easily setup my own server, everything feels archaic.
I tried using it before Discord was even a thing, and I already thought it quite sucked. If you think it’s great, then good on you for knowing everything inside and out, but the discoverability with any IRC client tends to be in the negatives. It feels awful to use.
You literally just listed some of the reasons IRC is better. That said, I don’t see any reason an IRC client couldn’t be made to support images, with the understanding that it would have to be done in a way that falls back to posting it as a link for people using text-only clients, but that shouldn’t be too difficult.
This functionality can be enabled on IRC servers or on a per-channel basis using bots.
Again an advantage of IRC. Not every group of 2 people need their own server. And a simple 2 second Google search (or learning your IRC client) will show you how to create your own channel in seconds.
That really depends on the client. There are (or at least used to be) plenty of user-friendly IRC clients. How many alternate clients can I use with Discord?
And heaven forbid someone should have to think for more than 3 seconds when learning something new to them.
I swear I sometimes think that once all of us Gen-Xers are gone, there won’t be anyone left who actually understands how the Internet or the technology that runs on it actually works, as prophesied by Idiocracy.
Inb4 using an image to compliment no images
ICQ was nice. It had an IM, a user directory, and alternative clients without games etc, until its owners went crazy.
Old Skype was nice. It had fast file transfers, a good Linux client, network efficiency etc, until Microsoft.
I think everybody thought that just like from proprietary ICQ everybody went to proprietary Skype and it was nice, there’s going to be an equally good alternative when Skype rots and people will move to it.
There are fscking none among the popular IMs.
ICQ … when you haven’t logged in for a bit and then when you do your computer emits a fast-paced streak of uh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-oh
https://youtu.be/f0iqM_AnSuo
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/f0iqM_AnSuo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
How?
Not centralised for a start. Think of it like ‘federated Discord’.
Also, IRC doesn’t constantly try to throw “upgrades” (Nitro) in your face every single moment that it gets.
Matrix?
I have used both, aside from the monetisation (Nitro), Discord (and Slack) has a lot more functionality. Not sure it’s ‘correct’ to say that people are stupid because they prefer a 21st century version of IRC.
Matrix stack would be the 21st century equivalent. Discord is just another Skype - entirely a proprietary product that you don’t operate yourself. Fine for corporate use where people don’t care about longevity because it’s not their problem or interest, but trash for everything else.
I just searched for “Matrix stack” but I’m none-the-wiser, what is it?
Right, you don’t run the thing yourself at a program level, but you can create and moderate channels as you wish, which is what most people want. Sounds like the Windows v Linux argument, just because a lot of people prefer something doesn’t mean we have to shit on it. Discord seems to work well with lots of integration (including on consoles) and fulfils its purpose pretty well from what I can tell.
How?
It’s an entirely closed source, proprietary codebase, run by a for-profit company where you have little control over anything. These corporations don’t care about actual users and they will leave you high and dry. There is a reason people still use IRC - it’s open, easy to connect to and has been around for literal decades. Remember CompuServe? AOL? AIM? ICQ? Google Chat shutting it’s doors to xmpp? If so, you understand the pattern. It’s about walled gardens and blocking interoperability. The industry doesn’t need more of that. We are chatting on an open source link aggregation site because bean counters at Reddit decided to shut off APIs to existing apps arbitrarily.
The matrix stack solves most of those problems by providing an open source codebase and protocol, easy to connect to solution that is akin to Slack. I am fortunate enough to not have to use discord much beyond checking on a class schedule and downloading some sheet music, so I will never be a discord power user. Maybe some there is crazy awesome feature that discord provides that no open source platform does, but I have some serious doubts about that.
It would go into discord feature parity megaissue on github
I don’t think any open source platform brings together the kind of functionality Discord currently has, but I’m open to being corrected on that. If there was a better platform doing what Discord does then that would be great to use. Having had to switch from different platforms for video calling for various reasons I get what you mean.
Any guides on how to get started on IRC? I gave it a try a couple months ago but couldn’t find any good communities.
Have you tried asking on alt.irc.die.die.die?
I discovered IRC only 1.5 years ago and now all my social life is there.
I find it difficult to get started. I have the client and everything but had trouble finding communities on irc.
Why don’t you ask them what communities they use?
Go on, I’ll stand here for moral support. You can do it! I believe in you!
Which communities do you find are worthwhile? Like others have mentioned everything I’ve pursued has definitely felt like a ghost town.
Very sorry, but it’s quite personal. Ye, I had a similar problem. First started by joining random servers preset in Hexchat (so was on the big ones), but now I am mostly on the small networks. It just happened like that.
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Do they support embedding images yet?
No, you still have to link them externally. Not that I mind tbh, I don’t even have embedded image view in xmpp enabled.
I haven’t used it for… I recon about 19 years. Met some cool people on there. Well maybe not cool but you know what I mean.
It was better before, now non tech savy people prefer something I don’t like, therefore they are stupid.
No it’s not cause it’s easy to use, it’s cause Discord is controlled by a single company with various features behind paywalls and only one functional client app.
None of the paid features are necessary for effectively using it, they’re just “fun add-ons”
No API for third party apps is a genuine complaint though, it would be nice if there was at least some competitive push for them to have to strive to meet pushing them to be better