You can’t even see the history in many channels.
A lot of the reason is /because/ it’s hard to use. Discussion on Libera Chat (formerly Freenode) is usually higher quality than on your average discord channel for example, no doubt because people who go to the trouble to properly set up an IRC bouncer and learn the other idiosyncrasies of IRC are more interested in having serious conversation.
On the technical side, IRC is a very simple protocol compared to all serious alternatives. There are clients to satisfy anyone’s needs, no matter how niche. There are less distractions for those of us who only want text.
Assuming that the history is not stored anywhere, that’s a pretty big advantage for security. A hacker can’t breach what doesn’t exist anymore.
- There is literally nothing better, discord is closed source, matrix is slow and buggy
- It gets the job done with no fan fair
- It self moderates, only people willing to jump through the hoops to talk constructivly will do so
- Retro tech is fun
It self moderates
From what Mozilla found, the opposite is true. It’s quite difficult to stop abuse, to the point where they ended their IRC network. It is, however, fabulously good at being a barrier to entry into any community that chooses to use it, and not in a good way. When the community locks itself away behind technical walls, we exclude people based mostly on current technical ability.
If you want to (constructively) participate in a technical community and are held off by a decades old chat protocol with literally hundreds of tutorials and step-by-step guides online, maybe this barrier of entry is exactly for your kind…
Despite the common opinion (mainly prevalent in IT), not everyone should be given an equal platform just because he has something to say. The opinion of a conspiracy nutjob on vaccines is not equal to that of an epidemiologist with a PhD, the opinion of a DIY tinkerer on wiring a house is not equal to that of a trained electrician, etc. For all those fields, gatekeepers are common and far greater than simply the ability to install a freaking IRC client.
The Mozilla case was a clear example of giving an “explanation” for something that upper management had decided for other reasons anyways.
They simply wanted to get rid off running their own infrastructure and having to actually moderate their own channels properly… hence they handed that off of EMS. I am sure originally they wanted to just use Slack (as they apparently do internally), but that would have been a PR disaster.
P.S.: I like Mozilla, but their upper management is complete crap.
Because there are a multitude of clients that work with it. it’s open. It’s not a walled garden. You aren’t stuck in yet another horrid browser app.
Also for some purposes the lack of history can be an advantage. For a channel that’s real-time social interaction, people coming and going and only having access to the things that happened when they were there can be a positive.
Why is seeing the history so important?
If you mean backlog from when you were away then you can solve that with a bouncer.
Anyone can host an IRC server. Discord is not a charity, you don’t get all that cotton candy for free.
There is matrix
Matrix is slow, buggy and the moderation tools don’t work well with guest accounts.
IRC is “battle-tested” for exactly these things for as long as the internet exists pretty much.
Not sure, it seems relyable like SMS and has the same security, but just like SMS there are better options available. And most people don’t use IRC or SMS and use WhatsApp or Signal instead, because they have more and better features and security.
Signal became a nonstarter for me when it turned out the person running the project is actively hostile to third party clients and bullied one out of existence.
That and, at least historically, it was pretty heavily wedded to mobile phones in a way that disqualifies it for anything I want to have long conversations with.
Why not?
