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ICQ plus Winamp was peak PC

You might like the IRCv3 client I build at https://github.com/matt0x6f/irc-client. It's highly capable and modern but limited in its resource footprint and quite zippy. PRs welcome as well.

And apart from the advantages you mention, it was really configurable in terms of the level of involvement and openness you wanted. You could use it exclusively to chat with friends and otherwise be unreachable (as in MSN and their ilk later), or you could be open to chat with strangers. And you could find people by interests, I remember looking for coin collectors from countries whose coins I didn't have :)

Then MSN Messenger displaced it (at least in Spain) and it didn't have even 10% of ICQ's functionality.

I held off back in the day, for awhile but I remember my number 1202948; ICQ rocked! My sister had a much lower number and used to tease me about it, since I was the "nerd".

“Uh-oh!”

>information-dense

In other words, designed by IT guys. And a reason (among many others) normies would never get on board. Not saying I disagree personally.

I hope they enjoy communicating in plaintext, not having any chat history and being unable to send images.

Rather than claim a Discord-esque feel, you should point out the features you're referring to explicitly. Discord is infamous for its absolutely awful UX and hostility to open source ecosystem. I'm sure you're referring to neither of those aspects, but consider that those reading your reference might be entirely unfamiliar with the (presumably) positive aspects that you're actually imitating.

IRCv3 isn't a corporate body, its a semi-formal group of IRC developers. There's nothing prohibiting you from proposing protocol extensions if they are within the scope of the working group.

What would "new IRCv3 leadership" do to get all the different independent IRC client and server software developers to support IRCv3?

parley and ahoy both look quite interesting! Retrofitting irc into a real federated protocol is cool. Also like the idea of picking up discords ui/ux. How did you manage to get avatars for ahoy? Is there a ircv3 protocol i missed?

Emojis and reacts are the only extensions that can cause people to have a meaningfully different view. It's part of why it took so long to ratify replies, and reacts still are not ratified.

We're also discussing ways for servers to provide a fallback to clients which don't support them.

I visited the site to see what the extensions are and at first i thought that there might be a few of them but it doesn't look that bad.

Then i noticed the horizontal scrollbar :-P

Wow that is hilarious. This kind of fragmentation pretty much guarantees failure. I'm pretty sure it's what killed Thrift. See their similar "don't use this" table:

https://thrift.apache.org/docs/Languages.html

HTTP is also still somewhat popular.

But, seriously, that got me curious. There are many protocols from that early era that are still with us today. NTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, BGP, SNMP, NFS, ICMP. If you allow the 1990's as counting as "old" we can add SSH and SSL, DHCP, LDAP.

Actually, its just inertia and lack of reliable forum hosting, the actual "killer app" that replaced volatile and unarchivable chat content, but no one learned from it and people flocked to Discord, which is even more hostile to archiving/scanning chat history.

Yeah, but the major upgrades for things like telnet and ftp were adding appropriate encryption layers and improved authentication to include things like certificates. IRC shoehorned those into the connections awkwardly but it's still not often mandatory and registration is painful.

Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.

FTP is still used quite a bit. For what it’s useful for, nothing has come close to replacing it.

Everything decentralized will keep being used. Stuff is sticky.

More illuminating: To what (relative) extend? And what's the trajectory?

Looking at Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fm%2F03t2s%2C%2Fg%2F11...

There is still a niche community of people running Gopher servers. I wrote a small basic implementation of a Gopher server in Python before for fun once and it hosted a Gopher hole for a few years. I doubt even one person actually looked it at besides me, but the RFC is simple and can be implemented pretty fast.

what about SMTP?

I wonder if the LOC Gopher is still around; I used to use it as a "jumping off" point.

But as IRC has a social network component, it's more of a social thing than anything inherent to IRC.

I'm here looking for other telenet (not telnet) oldheads, finding nobody.

COBOL is still used 50 years later.

Back in the day you needed a bnc if you wanted chat history. The mobile experience has been abysmal until very recently.

Also when discord came out there was a certain appeal to having voip built into the same app, and not having to maintain a separate vent/mumble/ts.

Tried Halloy on macOS for ~6mos, has some serious issues ...

(1) It silently disconnects from the server without indication, and does not reconnect. You might assume it is connected, until you send a message and see "message can not be sent". You will lose conversation history unless using a bouncer. Clicking around, all the buffers will clear indicating some major state issue, and you will have to restart it.

(2) Consistently uses ~5% CPU doing nothing at all.

(3) Doesn't behave like a macOS app, pressing the red "close window" button will close the window, but the main process goes ANR.

After leaving Textual since that was discontinued, guess I'm looking for a macOS IRC client again. Might give Mango a try.

Netsplit is a great and vital resource. But I'm wondering if it's actually the best entrypoint for people who just wanna chat with others about some topic. https://libera.chat/ seems a bit more user-friendly and "hand-holding", for the people who prefer that. If Libera doesn't fit their vibe, the huge network list on Netsplit will surely be of more use to them once they understand IRC just a tiny bit better.

I consciously use IRC like that: I don't have a bouncer, and connect only when I feel bored and want to see what is going in some channels (nowadays mostly just #emacs on Libera). I can only follow the conversation when I am online and there, and when I leave there is nothing to catch up to. In some sense it is like a digital third-space as oppose to a permanent dual presence that I have to share my attention with. Depending on your use-case this is not ideal, but for me it is a nice, relaxing addition to a lazy weekend evening when I have nothing better to do.

There are irc clients that work on mobile, like this one from the original author of sway: https://codeberg.org/emersion/goguma

It’s just they need a bouncer (an always online irc server you run) for things like push notifications (and chat history on servers without the chat history extension).

Bouncers (and some IRC v3 extensions on newer servers) allow you to be logged in to the same account from different devices.

I’ve also had some fun writing a bridge from discord to irc for some personal discord servers (but it uses some account impersonation hijinks that make it impractical for other to use).

IRCv3 gives you all of that, and I'm working on an ircd that has builtin support for multi-device access & chat history (which covers mobile between the two --- there are improvements you can do on top of that, but those two are kind of the foundation).

I'm also extending it with support for Discord/Matrix/etc-esque communities (in a 100% standard-client-compatible way).

really need the simple voice chat for me to use it.

It’s a matter of having a good client. Mango will give you everything you mentioned … https://mangoirc.chat

Goguma is an IRC client which runs on Linux Mobile, iOS and Android.

I mean, it seemed mobile enough for that tv presenter to get caught on a plane being a pedo on IRC

why wouldn’t mobile access work? Its just a protocol

in general discord has a very bad app and usability, irc regardless of client is a clear upgrade

IMO those are the main reasons IRC isn't still used. It's basically only usable on a desktop or always-stationary laptop, or with a bouncer which is obviously expensive to set up and doesn't provide a good user experience.

You can use a bouncer on IRC to retain messages while you were offline. In reality, it's the same with every other network: you need a server which receives and retains messages while you're offline.

With WhatsApp, Discord, etc, that server is provided by Facebook, Discard respectively. With XMPP, Matrix, that server is the instance in which you have an account or where the channel is hosted.

With IRC, you use a bouncer. What makes IRC unique is that a bouncer is _optional_. You can even join a channel without an account and without a server which keeps logs while you're offline. This ephemeral level of joining doesn't exist in WhatsApp, Discord, XMPP, Matrix, etc.

And, btw, this is not a new thing: I first saw bouncers 15 years ago and they weren't even new back then.

Concord channels on Nostr (https://concordprotocol.org/clients/) are handy for avoiding the centralization and privacy issues of Discord while also avoiding the reduction in asynchronous and media-enhanced functionality you'd get with IRC.

That said I can't say it's hard to just run irssi inside of tmux and attach/detach as necessary remotely. Nor is it hard to throw my media I'm sharing onto a web server. But yes, you do need to mix and match your utilities, rather than have an all in one package.

I do often enough find this to be more of a feature than a bug -- being stuck with Discord's UI is gross, but the network effect does have me continuing to use it for some groups.

The way some of us operated back in the day was to link to a forum post with a video upload or a chan board with a video upload from IRC. IRC was ephemeral, light-weight, fast and forums, chan boards were the semi-persistence, long enough for the majority of the intended audience to download. Some still do this today. [1]

[1] - https://altchan.org/sh/8

> they post something (very often media-based) and very often others see/respond to it in their own leisure much later

who pays for the storage to keep the file on a computer somewhere, and the network to serve the file to the internet indefinitely? in Discord's case, it's the users

usenet iirc tried to do a sort of "torrent" the data across enthusiasts' / participants' computers?

What you are describing here is microblogging like Twitter or Instagram, not using a chat to do chatting. Chatting, by design, is ephemeral and text only.

There are draft specs to fix both of these but they haven't been worked on recently because nobody has the time or energy to work on it.

This is fundamentally the main problem with IRC development nowadays. People want IRC to have features but are unwilling to support IRC developers to actually implement them and as a result pretty much every single IRC developer (myself included) who isn't churning out slop is burned out because its a thankless job.

> There is no video (or any other file) host on IRC servers.

Ircv3, the thread title, supports file sharing

Many GUI IRC clients do image / video embedding, even 10 years ago. Voice chat / video / screenshare is probably not a good fit unless you run some kind of secondary infrastructure like Jitsi and make it look like it's part of the client. Doesn't seem like a great fit though.

I know it is a different protocol, but doesn't Mumble provide this to some degree?

I feel like this is completely missing the point of what IRC is.

I appreciate its text-only nature and would never want to see image/video embeds and/or voice chat in my client.

Give Matrix a try.

I've been building my own (native) mIRC clone for MacOS as a side project, exactly on the scratch my own itch kind of thinking! :)

Didn't really look into iOS though, I'll have a think...

So far:

- Swift 6/AppKit built with SwiftPM only, no Xcode project. As a stack of modules.

- The default behaviour is native window(s), but have a classic MDI frame (with child windows inside one main window) that I really enjoy playing with and debugging.

- Behaves "the mac way" (menu bar, text editing, scrolling, full-screen, dark mode, VoiceOver), and anything that belongs to mIRC behaves the mIRC way. Still lots of rough edges though.

- Conversations are tabs in one shared window, the tab bar acts as mIRC's switchbar, the treebar becomes a sidebar. DCC transfers get their own standalone windows as I felt that makes it better as p2p.

- The options, defaults, and menus are an exact copy of mIRC 7.85 - I'll evolve it after "finishing"

- Only the top UI layer touches AppKit, so the parts that have to match mIRC exactly can be tested headless in CI.

- The IRC protocol, session state, mIRC formatting, a mirc.ini-compatible config, a scripting interpreter that copies mIRC's evaluation model (PCRE2 tuned to behave like mIRC's PCRE 8.45), DCC, and the display format strings are all pure Swift.

- Some decisions go beyond mIRC to fit MacOS: an untrusted server certificate is asked the user and pinned, never just trusted. Router port mapping uses MacOS's own port mapper. And also created a few new pixel icon sets I haven't fully decided on.

Sadly https://x.com/palaverapp is no more, it was a great iOS client. I just tried to find it in the app store and saw it got removed.

Seems you never found Mango IRC on iOS

Note: Twitch chat isn't real IRC, but exposes an IRC-compatible interface.

https://github.com/mxmilkiib/hasanabi.neocities.org

Same use case as for Discord and Slack, only it's not centralized or owned by any corporation.

Some never left. Notoriously, some bigtech companies have an internal IRC network for tech discussions because that's one communication system that you can rely on to stay up even during catastrophic outages.

That’s just nostalgia. You wouldn’t miss bouncers, worrying about presence, multiple devices, file sharing, and more.

> A focussed effort to get Matrix working

At what point do we say matrix isn't going to work? It's been like this for years. It's so overengineered on an immutable chat history on a blockchain it has crossed the line into "way too expensive to run and maintain for streams of cat pictures and memes". Worse is better.

All the IRC server hosts I've talked to said they would never enable WebSocket support from fear of bot spam :(

Mango IRC does! So does Halloy I think

It's still active.

You don't need protocol support for uploading images to storage, and then rendering it inline. Many clients have been doing that for years.

You are using wrong client then, try Mango. It gives you image uploads and other modern features

Isn't exactly the beauty of IRC that one person doing something to one node in the network isn't affecting the rest at all?

all of the Freenode staff just rebranded as Libera Chat, bought a new domain and continued on as usual.

Your loss.