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.
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.
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.
IRC’s been around for ages and got a huge foothold in tech circles. There’s a lot to hack around it and the process of setting it up and managing is very simple, not to mention the protocol is lightweight.
It fills its own role very well where persistent message history isn’t required, joining is easy, and to be incredibly robust.
The problem is not “IRC”, IRC supports history and all that just fine. The problem is that the largest networks like libera.chat do not support it because they use extremely outdated IRC server software :(
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.
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.
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.
Really the only advantage IRC has that I can think of is excellent terminal clients. It’s old and does not serve the vast majority well enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ
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.
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.
it’s FOSS
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.
IRC’s been around for ages and got a huge foothold in tech circles. There’s a lot to hack around it and the process of setting it up and managing is very simple, not to mention the protocol is lightweight.
It fills its own role very well where persistent message history isn’t required, joining is easy, and to be incredibly robust.
Why not?
The problem is not “IRC”, IRC supports history and all that just fine. The problem is that the largest networks like libera.chat do not support it because they use extremely outdated IRC server software :(
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.