The biggest feature for me of Slack is newlines. The ability to break up a piece of text visually so that I can structure a complex question or explanation for more readability is incredibly valuable.
Chat history, ability to message people who are offline at the moment, sharing images/videos, no NickServ weird identification, no weird permission systems, no splits
A bouncer resolves many of these issues or you could use Matrix. It feels like dropping IRC entirely is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Then you have to pay for a server and you have to admin that.
> or you could use Matrix
Sure. I wish Matrix well, and I hope they one day reach the point where they can beat Slack or Discord on the polish front.
> It feels like dropping IRC entirely is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
What baby are you throwing out? I appreciate that these services are proprietary but there's so little lockin in practice that I struggle to care. My gang already switched from Axon to Skype to Mumble to Discord, if and when Discord becomes onerous then we'll move again. Perhaps even to IRC. But for the time being, UX matters and IRC's remains extremely poor.
Going through the list of nuances would take a while, but i think it's fairly easy to see just how different IRC is to Slack from the get go. For one, setup is stupid easy compared to IRC. Making a server? Click of a button. It comes with a bot. I can add people directly.
I get the feeling you or someone is going to use this to argue how all of this can be achieved on IRC in some way, but it's just too much work. If you're someone who is trying to make open source chatting cool again, please respect opinions like mine regardless of how stupid you think they are. If IRC isnt at least as easy to use as Slack, i'm not using it for the same things.
Yeah, we get it, you're lazy, can't be arsed, you want someone else to do the work. We like configurability, decentralization, freedom of choice. We are different people. We will never agree. I suspect your kind outnumbers my kind by about 99 to 1.
If another user asks a question, and you are apathetic or bored of the answers to that question, thats fine. You’re allowed to have different preferences and not obligated to care about others’ preferences.
But I implore you not to respond with an insult to an answerer as if they’d barged in with an unsolicited opinion.
Yup. This was the exact reaction I expected to see on HN. Somehow, you're never welcome if you ever take an easy approach. I'm sorry i don't force feed myself nails for breakfast to get an extra dose of iron like you do, but forgive me for thinking there must be some sort of way where you can have both open source AND modern features! Wow, what a new concept for you hackers who just can't help but do everything the hard way even if it's totally unnecessary.
For what it's worth, I do some things the hard way. I like digging into the nitty gritty. I'm not a different species. The fact that you think I am is the reason you'd never get any middle ground accomplished. Being "outnumbered 99 to 1" not only reveals how you think of yourself as some kind of victim, but also implies that you exist in some strange reality where being in the minority is the 'right' side to be on. Funny, usually it's the opposite.
I just don't get it. Why, why can't we have both? Why is decentralised, open source, configurable, modern and easy
impossible to achieve all at once?
How do you expect to be able to set up a server with a click of a button, without paying for it, without hosting it yourself, to work without SaaS? What you want is a predatorily priced VC funded SaaS that only offers this cheap service to get you into their ecosystem. It's not possible to do this in a self-sustaining way.
Ofc you can use IRCCloud Teams, create servers with one click, but also pay for that.
And what other modern features ate you looking for? This is IRC today: https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png and emoji reactions, typing notifiers as well as threads are already supported in some clients and being standardized.
I can’t quite tell from that screenshot: is there an IRC client that supports newlines and where you have some indication of whether the other clients support newlines?
The inability to structure text visually is my biggest reason for avoiding IRC.
It isn't impossible. It just isn't Slack. Slack is a service offered by a private company. You want to have it easy by consuming a service; I want to slog through the mess of setting up things. One of these things is on the path to "decentralised, open source, configurable, modern and easy". The other is not. I leave it to you to ponder which is which.
> I just don't get it. Why, why can't we have both? Why is decentralised, open source, configurable, modern and easy impossible to achieve all at once?
Because you don't do it. If anyone who wants a different user experience than IRC chooses to use a proprietary system, then how do you expect that user experience to come about as Free Software?
