Guess I'm an internet boomer...

It's like ICQ

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

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
- Something like Movim.eu?
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
- 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)
- So instead of keeping a record yourself, you pay someone else/use someone else’s computer to do it for you.
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?
- How did you get image preview to work?
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.
::: spoiler 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.
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:
  https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php

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
- 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 not
- 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!

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 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.

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.

cherish it. the internet is gonna get progressively worse.

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.
- 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

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.

I downloaded my first 3 songs from IRC with MIRC. Took all night to download but man was I happy the next morning.

IRC - I Recall Correctly. Yup. I'm sure that's what it was. No relation to ICQ.

This video about the history of IRC has been shared a bunch in the past few days: https://youtu.be/6UbKenFipjo

Worth a watch if you're into this kinda thing.

I did see this pop up in my FYP the other day. I guess I'm riding the right wavelength.
I'm subscribed and watched it the other day. What a trip down memory lane. I wasn't quite old enough to witness it all (DALnet was already established when I joined), but IRC brings back lots of fond memories.

I remember playing Uplink some years ago and buying the in-game IRC client for fun. MOTD said the server is long dead and I wasted that run's money.

Why did IRC even fail. It had it all.

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.
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
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.
I think when you entered a channel you didn't get any of its history.
Dalnet fucked up

This sent me down a rabbit hole. Pretty cool! Do people still use IRC?

From https://xkcd.com/1782/
- Brilliant, thank you
- After playing SOMA, that singularity scenario in 2051 might not be too unrealistic. And there is something to be said about the KISS principle.
Apparently the answer is yes as people in this thread are saying. That’s pretty cool.
Yes
Yes, every day.

Who's Gandalf, precious?

What exactly makes discord more like irc?

IRC was basically a persistent online text chat. You could have a community and because everyone accessed the internet via computers, people would leave their IRC client open and just have this chat server with different rooms running in the background.
You could jump in and see what was happening. Today, discord serves the same function, but instead of having a client always connected, it uses an app that can push notifications to the user.
The other big difference was that IRC was open, so you had many clients that could connect to servers, and they were available for many different platforms. Hell for a while I had an irc Client on my T-Mobile sidekick that used the old 2g pager network for data.
Discord added a lot of quality of life features like easy attachments , images etc , but that comes at the cost of a closed network run by 1 company.
- Discord is so ideal for having a federalized decentralized platform, with a main customizable client to connect to servers, but it seems no one has built a good enough clone yet that fills the server swapping role and being open source well enough yet
- That's not what I meant, and probably also not what the OP meant. Something is suddenly different for discord to feel like irc, but it's not articulated.
  Besides, irc is anything but persistent. If you disconnect, your chats are gone, unless you logged the chat. If you reconnect, you don't catch up on what was said when you were offline, unless you use a bouncer like znc with history (which is also limited to the last x number of lines). John Doe sure as heck doesn't even know what a bouncer is.
my guess is they mean the caliber of user / conversation, not the features of the platforms themselves
- Seconded, it's not even remotely similar
- Yeah, obviously, maybe they mean its a bunch of idle users saying nothing nowadays because there's so many "servers" now.