irc

Posted Jun 17, 2025 14:32 UTC (Tue) by jzb (editor, #7867)
In reply to: irc by intelfx
Parent article: Changes to Kubernetes Slack (Kubernetes Contributors blog)

Slack certainly has a lot of whiz-bang features that IRC does not. One wonders, though, if instead of adopting Slack and other proprietary alternatives the community and companies behind things like Kubernetes had put their resources into improving IRC or an IRC-NG, where we might be today...

I will admit, I'd prefer to be using plain IRC rather than Slack any day, myself. I never really thought IRC was bad, and I've spent quite a bit of time using it. However, I am generally happy with text-based interfaces and I concede my tastes are hardly representative of mainstream users.

irc

Posted Jun 17, 2025 14:41 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

The ability to move a topic to its own thread is a killer feature IMO. Slack was early to that, but Google Chat, Discord, Mattermost, etc. all have it now (and Zulip is built around it; not sure if Slack got its inspiration for the feature from there). Reactions, images, etc. can all be emulated with some encoding of the messages sent around (cf. iMessage reactions becoming their own SMS messages when rendered on Android devices), but the threading is a distinct jump in usefulness to me.

irc

Posted Jun 18, 2025 14:59 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Yeah, a lot of people like its threading. I am not a big fan -- but that might be more of an implementation thing than disliking threading, per se.

irc

Posted Jun 18, 2025 10:48 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Slack is searchable. In large companies, it tends to become a sort of "knowledge base" with solutions for typical internal problems. My friend is working on a plugin (of course, AI based, sigh) that extracts this information into a wiki.

IRC's main flaw has always been the inability to look at the previous messages.

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Posted Jun 18, 2025 12:41 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Lack of threading is also an issue with IRC.

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Posted Jun 20, 2025 7:20 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Message length is also pretty severely limited in IRC on the protocol level.

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Posted Jun 18, 2025 12:28 UTC (Wed) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not about desire of whiz-bang or aversion to text-based interfaces (neither of which are my traits). It's about persistence, threading, forwarding, side-channel metadata (receipts, typing notifications) and other ways in which it is possible to make *human* interaction more pleasant than what is afforded by a bidirectional sequence of delimited UTF-8 messages.

If that's considered "whiz-bang", then I'll have to respectfully but firmly disagree.

irc

Posted Jun 18, 2025 14:58 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (1 responses)

Heh. A lot of the features you list here (e.g. typing notifications) are things that I immediately turn off if possible or don't care for Slack's implementation (threading). I could go on at great length over beverages about some of the bad communications habits I think Slack encourages (not all of which, to be fair, are absent or mitigated by IRC), but I (again) acknowledge I'm probably in the minority on those opinions...

But my larger point still stands: I think it's a shame that a lot of communities coalesced around the idea that it was better and easier to embrace Slack than work together on an IRC upgrade or replacement that had all these features people want.

irc

Posted Jun 20, 2025 14:59 UTC (Fri) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

+1. I wish in the ~25 years since the last IRC RFC was published (https://www.irchelp.org/protocol/rfc/) we'd seen collaboration and participation in improving on the previous work on the protocol. Perhaps a new community will spring up to do this, as well as continue in the interesting process of RFC-based evolution of the Internet.

I mean, if IRC was started today and had these stats (https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php), it would be a significant event, no? ;)