IRCv3

I'll be tarred and feathered for saying this, but every time I see a modern chat app I pine for the days of ICQ (as it looked in the 90's).

It had a UI I prefer over anything since - compact, comparatively unobtrusive, information-dense, and fast. I could port my full chat history around with me between machines, and also search it reliably (no vanishing scrolling or lazy-loading handicaps). And it was handy you could advertise different presence states to different people/groups.

I'm playing around with IRCv3 currently, specifically persistent channel history (no bouncer).

I've set up an ergo^1 server for experimenting. Channel history is currently in draft stage; and maybe it will be forever.

If any of you want to drop by for some reason and want to try it out: #hn on exp3.irc.basilikum.monster:6697

See here for a list of IRCv3 capable clients (draft/chathistory for history support): https://ircv3.net/software/clients

[1] https://ergo.chat/

Does IRCv3 need new leadership to continue to drive it forward? Over at Parley/Ahoy (https://git.mills.io/prologic/parley https://git.mills.io/fastidious/ahoy) we've managed to create a federated decentralized IRC chat experience with a Discord/Slack-esque feel but true to both IRC / IRCv3 (Ahoy being a fully featured IRCv3 client).

If you look at "old" internet: fidonet telnet bitnet ftp fsp wais netnews whois++ gopher relaynet ... i mean irc is one of the only ones that is still used, and mostly as it was 35 years ago. Pretty impressive.

People love knocking on IRC but people are still on it, still using it...

I think the main problem with IRCv3 is that there are a million optional extensions (see https://ircv3.net/software/clients for a feature support matrix of popular clients)

This can get especially confusing when people on different clients have divergent views of the same conversation. e.g. some can see the emoji reacts, others can't. some can see "replies", others can't.

Just today I installed an irc server, well three, and will try to convince my small group of friends to switch our comms to that. Nice to see the protocol evolving.

Timely! This weekend I spun up a little friends-only server on a VPS I had laying around. I used Ergo, enforced TLS, enforced authentication, and I hand-create accounts with temp passwords for my chums. For clients, I'm using Halloy on my Mac and Goguma on iOS. Their are other prettier clients, but Ergo and they all support a nice set of IRCv3. For example, they all have client history built in. Whenever I connect, the server replays all the messages I missed while offline (with a 30 day retention), no bouncer required.

Honestly, I'm trying to remember why we collectively moved away from this. I was terminally online in the 90s and the hadn't touched IRC in many years, but this is... actually quite nice.

As someone who's still on IRC daily and has built multiple IRC bots and clients over the years:

- most of the jank of IRC is client-side and can be fixed on the clients, IRCv3 protocol changes are nice, but not essential for a good experience.

- bots can make channels more engaging, just posting the titles of URLs pasted on the channels so even people without fancy rich clients can see what's behind a YouTube link or Reddit share url without clicking it open makes the experience more "discord/slack-like"

- IRC bots and clients are super fun and easy first projects for any language, you get to do permanently open sockets to multiple destinations (multi-server of course), asynchronous stuff and text handling.

I went with IRCCloud for the longest time myself until early this year, due to the November Revolution of AI models getting super good, I figured out I can build my own IRCCloud just the way I like it with the price of a single Claude Pro subscription.

And so I did. I think I had an MVP running in a week (evenings on my free time) and over the summer I cancelled my IRCCloud subscription and I'm fully using my own system.

Now I have a TUI, Web UI, native Swift client (with iOS, but haven't tested it yet) and a Tauri client for Linux - all sharing a common backend that I run on a VPS 24/7.

Fired up the old mIRC license I've had for decades last week to explore old servers and channels. Many are dormant, but life is still teeming in many. I'll probably wind up re-donating to mIRC developers and investing some time into IRC communities. I find the experience preferable to Discord.

Anyone interested in exploring this segment of the internet, start with: https://netsplit.de/

Makes me wonder if moving away from discord back to IRC would be a fun move. But I think we'd miss mobile access and accounts on different devices maybe? Any thoughts?

Does anyone know which IRC group this descends from, if any? Back when IRC was the thing it was split into rival networks, there was EFnet and IRCNet - I still remember when they split from each other, rather acrimoniously, over questions of governance and network protocol. And then there were the alternative networks, Undernet and DALnet and possibly a few more.

I was involved in server-to-server protocol design for a while, and each network had very specific ideas of how they wanted it. IIRC Undernet pioneered the use of timestamps to keep track of channel membership priority, EFnet came up with a v2 twist on the same idea, while IRCNet rejected the approach in favor of some kind of limited server-side persistence. Heady times!

Just yesterday i was working on my game engine for the original Xbox using the open source NXDK kit (which is much lower level than the official XDK) and i finally, after literal years, managed to find and fix a couple of bugs that caused flickering (much more obscure than you'd expect and didn't show up even in the emulator).

So i decided to share it with a couple friends and retro enthusiast communities on Discord. I took a video capture of my engine working, showing the 3d rendering, audio, video, etc with an Xbox->HDMI->USB capture chain. Then attached the file on Discord's input field and posted it (i have a tab with the web UI pretty much constantly open in Firefox). People weren't around at the time but some saw it today and commented while i was sleeping (with my computer off).

Last time i checked, this wouldn't be possible with IRC because:

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

2. IRC discussions are ephemeral, you either need to be online all the time or setup some sort of proxy that keeps the discussions around while you or others are away (or do what i used to do 15+ years ago - run a terminal-based irc client in a screen session in a VPS :-P).

AFAIK #1 is still impossible and #2 is an optional extension (that i've never seen in real life). Meanwhile i can now connect to a new Discord community and not only not worry about losing any messages while i do other stuff (i often check what people have talk about in Discord since my previous "visit" to be up to date) but also search what people talked about previously - e.g. did anyone brought up some XYZ topic i want to talk about?

IME the above two (also add images and audio to the mix - in two of the communities i'm in there are people who post WIP music they make) are basically 90% of how i see people use Discord: they post something (very often media-based) and very often others see/respond to it in their own leisure much later (in some channels people even live on different timezones so they can't do otherwise).

TBH nowadays if i wanted to set up some community in a self-hosted manned and wanted to stick with open stuff, i'd probably use RocketChat or something like that (Godot uses a self-hosted RocketChat instance that while a bit more janky than Discord, it seems to provide pretty much the same features i mentioned above).

Some of the actors that are listed on that page already implement many of the v3 features (Like https://www.irccloud.com), so it's not really something that will come with a big bang and we have to wait for a release, it's just that not all clients support it yet.

An IRC client with an extension for image/video embeds and a voice chat (with video/screenshare support) would go far.

I have been using SourceHut’s IRC client to access it for a while, but never quite found a good iOS client, since Goguma is just the Android client compiled for iOS.

I wonder if I can find the time to build a native iOS IRC client that follows Liquid Glass, and works as well as Goguma. Not many people would use it, but it’d scratch my own itch, as they say.

The protocol is so simple[1] that it shouldn’t take that long or be that hard[2], I think.

[1]: Which is the beauty of it, ofc.

[2]: Famous last words.

I’ve been using mango on ios recently, and I’m really impressed: https://mangoirc.chat/ - native ios/macos irc client with many ircv3 tags enabled.

Any companies running an internal IRC server instead of wasting money on slack?

I've ended up managing to vibe an IRC client for Twitch over the last couple of weeks to make following the sometimes flood of the [Hasan] 'Piker Broadcasting Service' stream chat a bit easier;

https://hasanabi.neocities.org/?theme=nightshade

Maybe with all the age verification spyware around its time I finally went back to IRC chat.

What is the use case for IRC these days? Honest question.

IRC was great. But I don't think it can bounce back with the alternatives that we now have. A focussed effort to get Matrix working, or any of the open source alternatives would be better. Of course, people invest their time in what they think is fun and that is fine. But the already existing alternatives provide what people need and want today, so IRCv3 will have it infinitely harder.

On this topic: https://robustirc.net/

It's a server side change, robustifying the server-to-server links and its effects on connected clients.

I really hope IRC supports WebSocket transport

I largely credit mIRC for getting me into computers and programming. But I haven't used IRC in a decade... I wonder if kids these days even know what it is.

No mIRC on the list, oh well.

I wish IRC supported images. It's weird that to share a screenshot I need a chat platform that also support VOIP when I just want to paste an image in the chat.

if you look at the linked roadmap, most issues are from 2020/2021, with one from 2017, when Discord appeared.

So yeah, we are going to have the Dyson swarm before this is done.

I built a terraform based box that runs ergo ircd with The Lounge as a front end. So basically irc3 as an app server, but you can still federate where needed. Works great. Cheap, performant, I can integrate services into it without all Slack’s bullshit.

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Go linger in the ircv3 channel for a week or two, the answer is yes.

Mostly complainers who would rather see IRC stay the same. Right now one of them is complaining the author is a vibe coder, as if that somehow makes the critique that IRC continues to be far behind everything else less real.

IRC is dead to me, you can thank Andrew Lee (of Freenode infamy) for that one.