Irc Forever

1984@lemmy.today to Technology@lemmy.world – 52 points –
koshka.love

I found myself loving what this guy writes about IRC, and I think a lot of his words will go straight to the heart of specially the older nerds here on Lemmy.

Hope you enjoy.

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I used to love IRC and have a fair amount of nostalgia for it. That said, a post advocating for IRC that doesn't even mention Matrix is failing to discuss the best replacement for IRC. Matrix is the IRC killer. After using Matrix, I don't understand how anyone could want to go back to IRC with its net splits, non persistent chat history, lack of rich text, etc.

I've used matrix myself, it's awesome. There is a good chance that it really takes off, the more people gets fed up with surveillance capitalism, which I guess is the best phrase to describe things right now.

would love to know some good matrix servers? do you have suggestions?

The server you sign up with doesn't matter all that much. Just pick one of the reputable ones and follow the rules. You can generally join rooms on any server.

Irc clients don't need to be in a web browser, and personally I don't want persistent chat saved forever. I also just want text much of the time.

That said, I do find some of the features in discord (and hence in matrix) nice. I just currently have only a support for lemmy in Matrix and haven't seen groups use those servers yet. Discord hasn't yet caused a migration.

There are a lot of Matrix clients to choose from; they're not all electron web apps and there's even a terminal app available. There could easily be a Matrix client that behaves the way you want, but I couldn't tell you if one exists. You'd have to try a few and see if they have settings that work well for you.

I guess I'm a little curious about why you wouldn't want persistent chat history. Major IRC networks log all chats anyway, so it's only you who's missing out on having that chat history available if you are ever offline.

I see the Matrix rooms being bridged with their IRC counterparts. So IRC servers can live a few more years, I think.

They certainly can and will live for a while, but the IRC side is missing out on useful features and I honestly find rooms that are bridged to IRC a little annoying in Matrix because IRC folks generate a lot of join/leave events.

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