I found myself loving what this guy writes about IRC, and I think a lot of his words will go straight to the heart of specially the older nerds here on Lemmy.
Hope you enjoy.
I used to love IRC and have a fair amount of nostalgia for it. That said, a post advocating for IRC that doesn’t even mention Matrix is failing to discuss the best replacement for IRC. Matrix is the IRC killer. After using Matrix, I don’t understand how anyone could want to go back to IRC with its net splits, non persistent chat history, lack of rich text, etc.
Okay, but does Matrix allow you to
/slappeople?I know this is a joke, but it does allow for /me commands, so this is certainly possible in a client. The macro does not appear to be available in Element, however.
Oww!
/me pat pat on head
I’m IRC old moderator on an italian server and i very miss IRC community
I’ve used matrix myself, it’s awesome. There is a good chance that it really takes off, the more people gets fed up with surveillance capitalism, which I guess is the best phrase to describe things right now.
would love to know some good matrix servers? do you have suggestions?
I’m on the matrix.org server, it works well. Install something like Element as a client if you like and join some rooms.
Some sample rooms:
The server you sign up with doesn’t matter all that much. Just pick one of the reputable ones and follow the rules. You can generally join rooms on any server.
Irc clients don’t need to be in a web browser, and personally I don’t want persistent chat saved forever. I also just want text much of the time.
That said, I do find some of the features in discord (and hence in matrix) nice. I just currently have only a support for lemmy in Matrix and haven’t seen groups use those servers yet. Discord hasn’t yet caused a migration.
There are a lot of Matrix clients to choose from; they’re not all electron web apps and there’s even a terminal app available. There could easily be a Matrix client that behaves the way you want, but I couldn’t tell you if one exists. You’d have to try a few and see if they have settings that work well for you.
I guess I’m a little curious about why you wouldn’t want persistent chat history. Major IRC networks log all chats anyway, so it’s only you who’s missing out on having that chat history available if you are ever offline.
For me IRC scores points on not having push notifications, rich text, custom emojis, embedded images/video, etc. It’s plain text communication — multiplayer notepad, if you will — and it’s great at what it does. I love that I don’t need anything but a terminal window for utilizing the full capabilities of IRC, and the lack of persistent chat history is a great counter to FOMO. (Yeah, you can stay online or have a bot that logs everything — the point is that most people don’t.)
Thats a nice point actually. Sometimes less is more.
Still use IRC but it gets really clunky / complicated when you want to have push notifications / persistent history etc… You end up setting up something like ZNC (IRC Bouncer) to act as an always online server and then hooking clients to it persist your online status.
I just asked about getting in to it in the current year if you have any tips: https://lemmy.world/post/2348478?scrollToComments=true
Bonus points for optimising IRC nostalgia post for rendering in Lynx.
