IRC was and still is just fine. Not as flashy as some of the newer stuff it had everything you could ask for in text-based chat.
With all the garbage happening privacy-wise - breaches, data farming, ads, e2ee removal - with all well-known messengers, I’ve decided to take messaging into my own hands. The solution turned out to be a 25 year old system called XMPP. Like you say, XMPP isn’t as flashy (some desktop clients still look like AOL) but is solid.
what about matrix? its new, opensouce, decentralized and still actively developed, everything you could ask for
I second the controversy, owners of the program kinda suck (like Lemmy really) but mainly I was using a fork of Conduit for my server called Conduwuit but the single maintainer got bullied off the internet and they couldn’t hack the abuse, so they had to retreat and stop maintaining everything to recover their health. Here is their statement. They were open about having a furry/puppy kink and so constantly got people attacking them, spreading rumours and accusing them of bestiality and paedophilia.
Anyway, as my favourite fork was no longer maintained, and as Matrix the devs were working on proprietary modifications (Element X) that were basically already invented, plus some security issues alongside trusting them, the first of which being that some of my traffic between my server and my client was routed through them, I chose XMPP.
Speaking of Matrix, there is a recent vulnerability for federated servers that needs to be addressed by hosters.
XMPP does have its downsides, though. No pretty desktop clients, and the OMEMO verification with no backward decryption meaning when you use a new client, your previous encrypted messages are never readable… In this Matrix trumps.
It’s just really hard to stay mindful of ethics, privacy and stuff.
I just learned that Conduwuit has been officially taken on by both a stable team of developers under a fork called Tuwunel, and an unknown amount of volunteers under the name Continuwuity. The whole situation is messy as fuck. I might migrate back.
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It lately had a bunch of controversy around it, development is pretty halted and the inability to stop randos from spam inviting you into chats with csam kinda is a nono for me.
XMPP is a protocol, not a program, so you can use whatever program that supports XMPP, it pretty much has the same functionalities as matrix, bar the screen share but there’s several clients like Dino that let you video call, which with something like OSB virtual camera, I can bridge in the screen.
I do like the shiny new fads but having a mature protocol that is the used by shiny programs and lets you talk to older program users too sounds better.
Matrix is also a protocol, which is implemented or federated as the instance admin(s) dictate. You make it sound like telegram.
France and Germany both have government departments running their own customized matrix clients and servers to facilitate secure messaging without relying on sketchy companies like meta.I’d love to know where you heard development is halted or that it has a problem with kiddie diddlers.
i missed the controversy, that clears it up
Something like Movim.eu?
Yeah, exactly. Any client works with varied features, and the OMEMO key encryption is solid and - while it is a pain with no backwards decryption - worth it. Movim is really popular iirc. I use Monocles on Android
Well no, it doesn’t keep a history of chats for once. You don’t have a record of conversations if your client wasn’t running at that time. There’s a few other limitations that I’m not familiar with, that prompted many people and orgs to switch to things like rocket chat or matrix
So instead of keeping a record yourself, you pay someone else/use someone else’s computer to do it for you.
That’s what bash.org was for.
Bash. org was a dumb quote archival site.
That’s why IRC bouncers exist, and then you have some IRC servers getting pissy about running one unless they like you or you’re special (staff)
It’s not just text anymore.
I use TheLounge as a client. It’s web based and can show previews of images and videos. So my friends and I can upload images and videos to the server and watch them in the channel.
Convos also does this.
where are some good servers?
I’d really like to suggest servers or networks but I host my own private server with TheLounge for my friends. We ran away from Undernet around 2010 and just stayed on our own server since.
Quakenet is where I sit
How did you get image preview to work?
In TheLounge? AFAIK it’s on by default. However prefetching is also disabled by default and that may cause some previews not to work.
Look for the prefetch setting in /etc/thelounge/config.js and set it to true.
So to me and the people using TheLounge on my server it looks like this
If working correctly, you can pretty much just paste URLs or images into a channel and it will display them. My only problem so far has been with YouTube, and I think it’s because YouTube is blocking my host. But to go around this, I have an eggdrop to fetch the title and the thumbnails of YouTube videos to display them when an address is pasted.
Twitch, at least did, have a IRC version of their chat. So you could stream the video with like mpv and have irssi to avoid the browser, and basically have the full experience
Aye, in the early days you could connect straight to twitch chat with any old IRC client. It’s probably still possible, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has deviated too much to be a pleasurable experience. There are still dedicated chat clients. I used to use a Java based one called Chatty back in the day.
Yep I run my own ‘The Lounge’ instance now instead of using xchat or mirc or something, it gives me persistance and availability on my mobile devices.
where are some good servers?
Networks. Being on one server in an IRC network is more-or-less the same as being on any other server in that network.
A list of networks:
It still has its perks.
I mean, other ways of transferring are faster, but I do like it still existing, even though it’s not secure at all.
It’s like ICQ
Damn, forgot about that flower logo, but it’s there now. So many chat clients back in the day. I guess there’s plenty now, but it’s just nuts how they’ve all pretty much disappeared and been replaced.
20 years ago I was in college, it was earlyish days of piracy and the net admin had locked down all p2p protocols. I actually used irc bots to cruise file servers and request downloads. Not sure what protocol they were using for file transfer over mIRC but I got a lot of music that way. Netflix was also handy as a DVD burning service but that’s another topic.
Back in the day I used direct connect, we had 100mbit internet (at my university), that was extremely fast back in the day.
it was probably DCC
DC++ was what we used at RIT that one year I went there. Cable internet first showed up near me in 2003 or so. I graduated high school in 2005 and cable was fairly ubiquitous, but still in its infancy compared to now. Getting to college and downloading at like 25MB/s blew my mind, versus what was essentially just Kazaa, Morpheus, and Limewire before that. It also probably had a direct impact on my failing to go to classes too, as I had what was essentially unfettered access to any show or movie I wanted almost instantly.
Good times, wouldn’t change it for the world.
I downloaded my first “porn” image that I got grounded over from something that predated mIRC but I can’t remember exactly what it was, I ended up using mIRC and then ICQ a lot years later. Like a dumbass once the picture I got finally downloaded, I printed it because I wanted to delete it off the computer. Then I got really into the MUD I was playing at the time, gemstones III, and forgot the picture on the printer. I think it was just a sexy picture of Reece Witherspoon but my parents were the kind that thought I was a devil worshipper since I liked to play DnD and these satanic text games that don’t make any sense.
Reminds me of waiting for a porn image to load one row of pixels at a time on dial up. Teenage boys desperate for porn lol!
Progressive JPEG was a major advance, as one saw a low-resolution image that gradually became higher resolution, had some idea as to the contents of the lower half of the image prior to waiting for half of the data involved to be transferred.
IRC came out in 1988, so an Internet chat service that predates it must have been exceptionally early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)
talk (software)
talk is a Unix text chat program, originally allowing messaging only between the users logged on to one multi-user computer—but later extended to allow chat to users on other systems.
Although largely superseded by IRC and other modern systems, it is still included with most Unix-like systems today, including Linux,[1] BSD systems[2] and macOS.[3]
No Wikipedia page, but there’s also PHONE:
https://marc.vos.net/books/vms/help/phone/
Invokes the OpenVMS Phone utility (PHONE). The Phone utility is designed to simulate some of the features of actual telephone communications. You can use the Phone utility to communicate with other users on your system or with any other system connected to your system by DECnet for OpenVMS. To invoke the Phone utility, enter the PHONE command at the DCL prompt and press RETURN.
I’ve used both on VMS.
It was just what I used before mIRC, it may very well have been IRC, I just don’t remember what the app was. This would have been in 90-91
Hilarious, cool story bro
We took care of Reddit, we can take care of the Fediverse.
of course gen x is overlooked again
That’s usually the case, sure, but you realize in this instance they don’t mean boomer as actual boomer, but as anyone and everyone over 30?
That’s a shit use of the term
I think for most teens everyone older than 30 is the same age – old.
Ok boomer. /s
All of these terms are shit anyways.
Oh, this was referring to “internet boomer” as a legally distinct class from the general term “boomer”.
I agree
yes, that was my (likely poorly executed) joke
And we prefer it that way.
gen x fucking made it before the housing crash and pandemic, they can sit over there with the boomers
some did
most did notGenX home ownership rate in the US is 73%.
til
Preeeeeach son
I met my wife on IRC.
I also met your wife on IRC. Nice person, good choice. I’d say neither of you are the reacher in your relationship. Well done.
This sounds like a compliment, but I sincerely am not 100% sure.
Therefore, I choose to interpret as one. Thank you!
It was meant as one. :) Just trying to turn around some harass-y and insulting comments I’ve seen around and tried to make it somewhat funny.
Then I shall reiterate, thank you! I am rather fond of her.
Anyone from 28 and above will be easly called a boomer by 14 years old 😂 as a xenial here I used to feel weird maybe slightly offended…but I decided to enjoy it and keep my self entertained by dumb online fuedes and the alleged generational online wars that comes with…so yeah Long live the IRC
Anyone from 28 and above will be easly called a boomer by 14 years old
I’m sure there’s some kind of meme to describe this. Or maybe they’re all TikTok dances now, idk.
All I know is that the damned kids today need to get off my lawn.
idk if discord pushes server creation or if people are just real eager to moderate a space, but i cannot stand that seemingly every single one of my discord contacts has their own server with like 5-10 people, and that’s the only way they ever wanna chat.
like “yeah let’s play helldivers, pop in my discord so you can also listen to 3 people you don’t know who aren’t playing.”
maybe i’m just old.
The issue with the friend group on discord is that if you start a call it starts ringing everyone, even people who are obviously offline (at least thats my experience, though I haven’t used that feature in about a year). That’s why it ends up everyone having their own server
Uhh it doesn’t ring everyone. You just join a voice channel and just ping anyone you want on DM or in a text channel.
It’s not a server, the thing I’m talking about is the group chat feature https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/223657667-Group-Chat-and-Calls
That’s why I’m saying everyone makes a server, because the group chat feature is 90% useless
Oof, mea culpa. I thought you were talking about the server calls. Yeah, the group chat is mostly used for impromptu discussion on my part. Like when making an ad hoc call to discuss something that shouldn’t be shown on the server.
No worries, it’s such a niche feature I didn’t even remember the official name of it lol
Isn’t the voice channel in the server?
It’s been a good 3rd place replacement for me. I’ve made so many new offline friends through discord. At first I just play online games with voice on, and then I met some party who enjoyed playing with me and they invited me to their discord and so on.
Some friend group has been going strong for 10 years now.
Slack is just an IRC skin - change my mind
Easy - IRC worked way better and was way less miserable
/me slaps kboy101222 around a bit with a large trout.I’ve hosted IRC servers on a windows XP laptop that were more resilient and reliable than slack lmao
Did you ever play sa:mp or is the trout slapping more common than I thought?
It was a default user command in the IRC client mIRC, that’s why it’s such an iconic phrase. Old school coders, including the ones that became game developers back in the GTA San Andreas days likely came up through the demo scene or similar, because there weren’t really “game dev” educations, so they all sat on IRC at one point.
Oh that makes sense.
I played sa:mp on a RP server and there was this one guy who always did
/me slaps x with a large trout
He also was Norwegian and I think trout is pretty big there (or I know salmon is at least) so I thought he’d come up with himself lol. This was nearly 20 years ago.
Nerds in the USA and the UK used to almost unanimously be Monty Python fans. I’m fairly certain it is a reference to the Fish Slapping Dance.
Ah yeah, I never watched too many of those sketches. Loved Holy Grail and Life of Brian and of course I never expect the Spanish Inquisition, but I think that’s pretty much all my Python knowledge. What has Monty Python ever done for us?
If you know how xerygraphy works, which is what the most popular fax machines used before laser printers, that statement is actually not far off. Heat drums were the first piece to fail in them.
The only good thing with Slack/Discord is the feature the branch off threads. I don’t recall IRC having anything like that, but I guess it would be easy to implement
cherish it. the internet is gonna get progressively worse.
Im old as hell, what tf is IRC?
“Internet relay chat” it was the first major messaging protocol on the Internet. You would register an IRC number that was unique to you, and join one of the many different chat channels that anyone could create. The name of the chat would be what the intended topic of discussion was supposed to be, and show you how many people were in the room. Often times completely unmoderated, with a few select users having the rights to ban people if they happen to be in the chat at the time.
It was a wild time.
So that is what IRC is. I always just called it chat.
Gen X Discord
I downloaded my first 3 songs from IRC with MIRC. Took all night to download but man was I happy the next morning.
Why did IRC even fail. It had it all.
Has it failed? Or have you failed at being loyal?
Hahaha!
IRC is still around. I have no data but would guess more people use it now than in the “heyday” (mainly just because there are a lot more people online)
Possibly. I’ve heard some niche communities use it, but I also heard that there is a strong transition to matrix.
Heyday was wild though.
It has usability problems (can’t even fucking write a newline
, no voice chat, file uploads only with third party links, no screen sharing, no end to end encryption). As a zoomer, I’m not surprised it didn’t catch on with younger generations compared to easy messengers.
It’s still kinda cool tho.
Not to mention that you don’t get messages from when you were offline and that by default no login system exists without a bot to handle that stuff.
Correct me where I’m wrong, I’d be happy if irc is actually amazing.
You’re right that it does lack the luxuries that makes discord better, especially video clip and picture sharing in channels.
There were ways to set up something called an IRC bouncer, which acted like a middle layer or puppet between you and IRC network allowing that to receive messages and the like while you were physically offline.
And for everything else you’d just send the files directly to whoever you wanted to share it with. Cumbersome, not to mention the pain port forwarding used to be.
Regarding screen sharing, back when IRC was king, the bandwidth wasn’t even really there for that. I guess one would use a VNC server/client or some other remote desktop application if that was needed.Yes. I understand that the limitations were less relevant when it was at its high, but it’s 2025 and those features are now common place and essentials, at least something like directly embedding images and using new
Lines.
Hosting a chat room meant you had to self host or trust someone else’s server.
There is no concept of groups. So you had to create several channels with some kind of naming scheme. There is no way to see them in a group. You just need to know about them as a chatter.
History is not saved by default. Most used a 3rd party server to host a history log, which is more work.
There is no audio, video, screen sharing.
You can’t reply to a chat with an emoji. You can’t edit your previous chats.
You can’t reply to a specific chat unless you get specific like copying the original chat.
Don’t get me wrong. I hated that discord owns most of the communication online.
I wish there was a simple and easy to use open source tool that did all of that in a single package.
I don’t mind self-hosting but if I have to self-host several interacting services that I need to update manually, it becomes a pain.
Hosting matrix really isn’t too bad, you basically just jam everything in a docker-compose and you’re pretty much good to go
I’ll have to look into matrix. Thank you
And then enable federation on your homeserver and end up with CSAM materializing and caching everywhere.
I think when you entered a channel you didn’t get any of its history.
Dalnet fucked up
I refuse to believe someone has that SA emote hasn’t heard of irc
I’ve seen kids with Nirvana t-shirts who knew nothing about the band. This might be similar.
You’re probably right on there, I can’t imagine how kids perceive this world now, and yet still, I do see the odd nirvana shirt among them.
