It's become a social network of sorts for geeks, despite the age of the protocol I still find it the least "invasive" and most friendly experience, but that's probably because I spent the time configuring a client that's nice for me. (preview: http://imgs.fyi/img/9ve2.png )
I run a network even, called darkscience and it's available at irc.darkscience.net (TLS only on port 6697) the lobby is #darkscience
ircs://irc.darkscience.net:6697/#darkscience (for those that can parse the url!).
Everyone here is welcome to join us of course, but we put a high emphasis on civility.
What I like is that the clients were written years ago and weigh almost nothing. I can leave them running in the background on even the wimpiest trash netbook and it doesn't care.
Compare to Slack or Signal or Discord where the client is some half a gig chomping behemoth that spins up the CPU fans constantly.
I thought I was the only crazy person that hates anything that spins up a fan on my laptop. Why Java sets of fans when I spin up anything (even an empty spring project) in my IDE I just don’t understand. Even IntelliJ and eclipse with no project loaded seem to set off the fan.
Yes, and lots of data fit into 80x24 xterm vs 1280x1024 Discord. Crazy that I need an entire workspace per Electron apps. I have no idea what goes in on the developers' mind when it comes to unnecessary padding/spacing.
You're the reason I joined DarkScience sometime back, event wound up paying for IRCCloud which I can't recommend enough for those who want to just have a "slack like" experience. They open source some of their solutions too.
DarkScience is a good community, I'm not very active, I lurk a bit, but these days my social network is all on Discord. I've ran my own independent IRCd before using ngircd and it was great for my small community, but now that they're just all on Discord, it's kind of pointless for me to run a daemon.
I do dream of hosting an IRCd again if Discord ever goes too far. We do talk about reverse engineering and such so we are kind of at their mercy. I think the one thing IRC is missing is a solid client for those of us who like desktop / mobile clients. There's no reason an IRC client can't preview images and render youtube videos like Slack does, at least for those of us who like that kind of thing, I know some IRC users like their terminal clients.
I'm interested in hearing more about how you've configured your client, do you have a repo or anything? Have you included plugins or add-ins from outside sources?
Edit: Just saw your other comment, I'll check out your setup later this week!
I find that what I want out of a chat client is something that can easily idle in the background and beep at me if someone @'s my username, with a way to handle missed messages, but I've never really gotten irssi setup in a way that feels comfortable for that kind of flow. Something about the way IRC works seems to encourage me to just hop on if I have a question for a community, and then hop off when I'm done to avoid people trying to follow up with me while I'm not there. It's hard for me to imagine what the IRC experience looks like for the people who hang out there seemingly semi-permanently
I think this is a fair ask, unfortunately I made my setup for me and it's not exactly designed to be packaged/reused, but I linked my configs (in tarball format) here: https://0x0.st/zl_O.tbz2
What you're requesting is actually the normal way most of the people I talk to use IRC. I have a highlight buffer[0] script which keeps a history of all the times I get mentioned, and weechat supports libnotify so if your desktop is able to get pop-ups then you will be notified on highlight. (I use dunst for this).
There are also Quake-like terminal emulators that drop down on hotkey- these are also quite common and can make it really easy to just check what's going on when you have a spare second.
I will write a blog post about how to achieve my setup for linux users since there seems to have been mild interest. And I'll do some work on packaging it up so it's easy to take the bits that people like. I am using a fair number of plugins though.
this is what I have loaded (they are all on the weechat scripts site, just google the filename and "weechat):
not irssi but I use ERC (an IRC client in Emacs) with a modified version of https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErcHighlightNicknames to automatically color nicknames (it takes the first 12 characters of the md5 of each nick and treats that as an RGB value, with some clamping and color space tweaks). Everybody has a perceptibly different color, even in channels with tons of people.
It's weechat, I can't really claim all the credit, I found blog posts online about minimal setups and I've just kept it up to date. Nothing special.
Since I don't know how to easily package it I just took a tar of my .weechat and .config/alacritty directories, which should at least help you get started if you want an identical setup to mine. You just need to change your username in .weechat/irc.conf
I never heard of darkscience before, so I will definitely check it out.
I seem to use IRC in irregular bouts, like half a year consecutively and then not at all for a year.
Is there a popular IRC plugin / protocol for pretty printed math formulas? This is also what I miss a lot on HN, but I understand it's due to a more programming centric audience. I wish either HN had math formulas, or a fork of HN directed toward scientists / engineers / mathematicians allowed it.
Nice to see SSL enforced ircd. Coming out of Dalnet, Ircnet and Efnet the only short-coming i really found in IRC was the fact that most networks until very late promoted clear-text transfers. I might even pass by your network this evening to revive that feeling /me once had :)
Many of the IRC networks offer a "cloak" if you register your nickname, and of course it's trivial to connect via a VPN or via Tor (if your network allows it).
Who really cares in this day if anyone knows your IP? It's not like that many of us are running servers from our home connection and thus vulnerable in some particularly pointed way. Behind a NAT you're pretty much fine unless some nation-state is out to get you.
It depends, most require you to register first before your IP is hidden, just like Wikipedia. In both cases, it's so the mods at least have some kind of tools to (hopefully) identify who a person is.
I started using IRC around age, I dunno, 10-12 (30s now), lots of efnet then freenode, at one point I was an ircop until our childish antics got our server desynced. I don't use it anymore. Between the insular cliques and the fact that I can look up archives of 20-25 year old messages I wrote on there because you never know who or where someone is writing logs really turned me off as I got older. I'm in a few community slacks and discords nowadays but I'm not a frequent user there either.
I dealt with a lot of user drama as an ircop on a large network. I really started to turn negative toward it (especially efnet/dalnet) when I started noticing that toxic users would basically create profiles of other users to use for trolling, blackmail or whatever else was on their imagination at the time.
You can think you're fairly anonymous but when you start having the casual conversations that IRC can lead to and a lurker is logging each users text into separate buckets they'll eventually be able to infer quite a bit about you over the 5+ years you're around casually chatting.
I'm just not comfortable entering rooms that have 50 active users and 900 lurkers anymore. This is probably a fairly paranoid outtake since I've seen these things happen, but they do or have happened and it really wasn't that infrequent back then (early 2ks).
This is what terrifies me about Discord, as well as the fact they store all their logs in plaintext. AFAIK it is impossible to delete logs in Discord and any new user joining a channel gets access to all the back history of chat, so it's even worse than IRC.
I actually think that is fine; private messages and private channels should not have public logs, but public channels should have public logs in plaintext. However, I think IRC is better than Discord, and it is possible in IRC to have server-side logging if the server software implements this (as far as I know, mine is the only one that does), without altering the protocol. But making logs with a special client is also possible (also without altering the protocol) and seems to be much more common in my experience.
Almost every IRC channel I've ever joined had users who logged the chat 24/7. Sure, it wasn't centralized but at no point is there any tacit agreement that public chat channel isn't being logged. I don't really see a difference in this and Discord giving the entire history of the channel the user is joining.
I'm in a couple of tiny communities on IRC. There seems to be no growth potential, and when I've suggested switching to IRC in a work setting people look at me as if I'm mad, and starts hugging their webbased monstrocities filled with emojis and memory leaks, but I think I will always prefer IRC.
For some reason, maybe cultural, maybe because many clients don't have a nice emoji picker, they seem to be used less though in my experience (which is fine by me).
Clocking in at 23 years on IRC, with likely very few days of missing coverage.
Mostly channels that started with mutual interest (gaming, music, movies, programming) and almost exclusively evolved into personal groupings rather than the initial interest.
I can grep things I remember talking about fairly quickly. And check back on what was going on at a certain point in my life (irclogs/[year]/[net]/#*.[date].log).
The same can't be said for Slack, Messenger, etc. And it's all quite tiny gzipped.
I bumped into a guy I had just met on freenode, playing WoW Classic. He was using the same handle and starting the same conversations.. really I probably could have guessed who it was without the handle, lol- guy just has a certain tone and range of topics. It was nice to see someone IRC culture pushing moderated discussion in /trade, but it also illustrates why I don't spend much time on IRC anymore. So many people going in loosely predictable circles, and I'd be one of them, until some angry and drunk incel or political sock-puppet shows up to try out whatever misanthropic chat script. As if getting booted for being annoying and disingenuous is some kind of gold-star accolade. And for that to be the interesting part - ugh. I enjoyed IRC a lot more when I would have had a tall glass of whisky to go along with it. IMHO its still the best social network on the internet, too bad that isn't saying much. It's great for languages including the non-programming ones still, for sure. And reading that one russian guy tell stories about being a kid among the intelligentsia and politburo of the late CCCP era - wow I don't know where else I was going to get any related personal experience about that. Pretty cool.
It's a lightweight server and client that can stay up even when most of Googles core tech is down. You can easily log data from channels, and it just works.
I could not do my job as a security engineer without Freenode and irc.hashbang.sh
Honestly IRC is better now than it ever was.
All the skiddies and people that chase the latest hot centralized proprietary web based gif machines are gone leaving only thousands of highly experienced folks who understand how computers work at a low level, maintain their own personal and server operating systems, and love a good problem to dig into and solve.
We also love the random curious new-world person that wanders in wanting to learn our ways ;)
If you are wondering where all the maintainers to your favorite FOSS software are... They never left IRC because they largely prefer to keep the internet decentralized and support open standards.
About the only thing competing with IRC is matrix.org which even has a fancy GUI if you are into that... And it bridges to IRC so you can join those channels too.
Perhaps only of passing interest to others here but in 1990s Portugal, IRC was the only way for gay people to chat and meet up outside of bars, before sites like Gaydar took hold and then of course apps like Grindr. I feel like something was lost along the way in the move to dating sites and apps; a general forum (channels) to participate in, rather than just one-to-one messaging which doubled down on the meat market aspects at the expense of any attempt at community building.
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It's become a social network of sorts for geeks, despite the age of the protocol I still find it the least "invasive" and most friendly experience, but that's probably because I spent the time configuring a client that's nice for me. (preview: http://imgs.fyi/img/9ve2.png )
I run a network even, called darkscience and it's available at irc.darkscience.net (TLS only on port 6697) the lobby is #darkscience
ircs://irc.darkscience.net:6697/#darkscience (for those that can parse the url!).
Everyone here is welcome to join us of course, but we put a high emphasis on civility.
Compare to Slack or Signal or Discord where the client is some half a gig chomping behemoth that spins up the CPU fans constantly.
DarkScience is a good community, I'm not very active, I lurk a bit, but these days my social network is all on Discord. I've ran my own independent IRCd before using ngircd and it was great for my small community, but now that they're just all on Discord, it's kind of pointless for me to run a daemon.
I do dream of hosting an IRCd again if Discord ever goes too far. We do talk about reverse engineering and such so we are kind of at their mercy. I think the one thing IRC is missing is a solid client for those of us who like desktop / mobile clients. There's no reason an IRC client can't preview images and render youtube videos like Slack does, at least for those of us who like that kind of thing, I know some IRC users like their terminal clients.
Edit: Just saw your other comment, I'll check out your setup later this week!
I find that what I want out of a chat client is something that can easily idle in the background and beep at me if someone @'s my username, with a way to handle missed messages, but I've never really gotten irssi setup in a way that feels comfortable for that kind of flow. Something about the way IRC works seems to encourage me to just hop on if I have a question for a community, and then hop off when I'm done to avoid people trying to follow up with me while I'm not there. It's hard for me to imagine what the IRC experience looks like for the people who hang out there seemingly semi-permanently
What you're requesting is actually the normal way most of the people I talk to use IRC. I have a highlight buffer[0] script which keeps a history of all the times I get mentioned, and weechat supports libnotify so if your desktop is able to get pop-ups then you will be notified on highlight. (I use dunst for this).
There are also Quake-like terminal emulators that drop down on hotkey- these are also quite common and can make it really easy to just check what's going on when you have a spare second.
I will write a blog post about how to achieve my setup for linux users since there seems to have been mild interest. And I'll do some work on packaging it up so it's easy to take the bits that people like. I am using a fair number of plugins though.
this is what I have loaded (they are all on the weechat scripts site, just google the filename and "weechat):
[0]: https://weechat.org/scripts/source/highmon.pl.html/Since I don't know how to easily package it I just took a tar of my .weechat and .config/alacritty directories, which should at least help you get started if you want an identical setup to mine. You just need to change your username in .weechat/irc.conf
https://0x0.st/zl_O.tbz2
I seem to use IRC in irregular bouts, like half a year consecutively and then not at all for a year.
Is there a popular IRC plugin / protocol for pretty printed math formulas? This is also what I miss a lot on HN, but I understand it's due to a more programming centric audience. I wish either HN had math formulas, or a fork of HN directed toward scientists / engineers / mathematicians allowed it.
https://0x0.st/zl_O.tbz2
Doesn't it just broadcast your IP address pretty plainly?
Deleted Comment
I dealt with a lot of user drama as an ircop on a large network. I really started to turn negative toward it (especially efnet/dalnet) when I started noticing that toxic users would basically create profiles of other users to use for trolling, blackmail or whatever else was on their imagination at the time.
You can think you're fairly anonymous but when you start having the casual conversations that IRC can lead to and a lurker is logging each users text into separate buckets they'll eventually be able to infer quite a bit about you over the 5+ years you're around casually chatting.
I'm just not comfortable entering rooms that have 50 active users and 900 lurkers anymore. This is probably a fairly paranoid outtake since I've seen these things happen, but they do or have happened and it really wasn't that infrequent back then (early 2ks).
Gotta have a way of putting up baby yoda sipping gifs when people ask how i'm doing
Mostly channels that started with mutual interest (gaming, music, movies, programming) and almost exclusively evolved into personal groupings rather than the initial interest.
I can grep things I remember talking about fairly quickly. And check back on what was going on at a certain point in my life (irclogs/[year]/[net]/#*.[date].log).
The same can't be said for Slack, Messenger, etc. And it's all quite tiny gzipped.
https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/managing-in...
It's a lightweight server and client that can stay up even when most of Googles core tech is down. You can easily log data from channels, and it just works.
Honestly IRC is better now than it ever was.
All the skiddies and people that chase the latest hot centralized proprietary web based gif machines are gone leaving only thousands of highly experienced folks who understand how computers work at a low level, maintain their own personal and server operating systems, and love a good problem to dig into and solve.
We also love the random curious new-world person that wanders in wanting to learn our ways ;)
If you are wondering where all the maintainers to your favorite FOSS software are... They never left IRC because they largely prefer to keep the internet decentralized and support open standards.
About the only thing competing with IRC is matrix.org which even has a fancy GUI if you are into that... And it bridges to IRC so you can join those channels too.
I was very much on local and punk channels. I guess at some point half the people I knew / hangout with in meat space were from IRC.
Also had one of my most successful websites at that time (2001)... I guess only 3 years ago starting working on something with as many pageviews.