IRC Is the Only Viable Chat Protocol

1

The Lounge

> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android. In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then we had the same problem again in the mobile world, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support. The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market. If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously required you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone. The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2]. [1] https://quassel-irc.org/ [2] https://thelounge.chat/.

#Group Chat & Notifications #Messaging #Communication 38 social mentions

2

Quassel IRC

> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android. In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then we had the same problem again in the mobile world, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support. The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market. If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously required you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone. The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2]. [1] https://quassel-irc.org/ [2] https://thelounge.chat/.

#Group Chat & Notifications #Messaging #Communication 4 social mentions

3

Conduit Chat Server

Many who have causally read about Matrix and looked into running a homeserver have run across the reference implementation Synapse, which is (IMO only, pls no flame) a bloated python monstrosity. This turned me off for years. A second-gen (?) alternative written in Go called Dendrite is much lighter weight, but is lacking in some features last I looked. A couple of years ago, I found Conduit (https://conduit.rs/) an ultra lightweight homeserver implementation written in Rust with an engaged and responsive community. I've been running this for 18-24 months now and use it for family communications, as well as small business and my group at my $DAYJOB. I highly recommend anyone who hasn't already to check out Conduit :).

#Group Chat & Notifications #Communication #Instant Messaging 11 social mentions