Does IRCv3 need new leadership to continue to drive it forward? Over at Parley/Ahoy (https://git.mills.io/prologic/parley https://git.mills.io/fastidious/ahoy) we've managed to create a federated decentralized IRC chat experience with a Discord/Slack-esque feel but true to both IRC / IRCv3 (Ahoy being a fully featured IRCv3 client).
Rather than claim a Discord-esque feel, you should point out the features you're referring to explicitly. Discord is infamous for its absolutely awful UX and hostility to open source ecosystem. I'm sure you're referring to neither of those aspects, but consider that those reading your reference might be entirely unfamiliar with the (presumably) positive aspects that you're actually imitating.
Infamous for it's bad UX? This thread is genuinely the first time I've ever heard this, all of my extended circles were overjoyed when Discord came onto the scene and displaced the patchy, hodgepodge UI's of Mumble, Ventrilo, IRC, Skype simultaneously. Both from a feature and a visual perspective it was a breath of fresh air for the programmers, gamers, and casuals alike for everyone I know. Maybe the only thing that still survives alongside it for the folks I know as a preferred communication channel is sporadic Whatsapp among the EU guys and iOS group chats for the Americans locked into the Apple ecosystem.
What about it makes it terrible UX for you? Feature set seems to get better every year as far as I'm concerned, inclusion of ads aside.
my latest annoyance is the way they keep making the gift nitro button bigger and more likely to be where you tap when trying to send a message. I don't know what their PMs are smoking to think that gifting nitro is something people do so often that there needs to be a permanent flashing button on screen to do it.
> Discord is infamous for its absolutely awful UX
It's laden with ads and microtransactions, but if you remove those (shady scripts abound for those who don't want to do it themselves), the UX is one of the best on the market. There's a reason so many alternative chat clients are basically Discord clones without the microtransactions (for now).
Its open source hostility doesn't really change how well it works. You can copy the good parts without the awful parts, like so many people and companies are already doing.
The UX is pretty good. Significantly better than the older alternatives like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak.
But I am surprised there are no competitors in the space. It’s good but it’s not that good. I guess it comes down to adoption/network effects
You are right. To be perfectly honest, the only thing I took from Discord at all (it's UI is generally awful yes, I agree!) is the support for multiple servers. But now that I think about it some more, that's not really even a unique feature.
Anyway, you are right. But that's more about Ahoy and less about Parley. Parley was just answering the question of "What if IRC was federated, and what if it borrowed some ideas from Salty.im -- DNS discovery + WKID".
Wasn't IRC always federated? There were different networks, but each network was a federation of independent servers.owmed by independent operators as far as I understand...
I don't believe so, not in the strictness sense.
> A federated network is a system where independent networks, servers, or organizations agree to follow common standards so they can talk to each other without giving up control to a single central company.
In traditional IRC networks, you end up forming a spanning tree of servers that belong to a common name, "the network". However control remains in the hands of the operators of that network.
The "control" was basically permission to connect (and thus share messages/users/etc) between multiple servers. So I see your point, you couldn't just randomly connect your server to someone else's server in quite the same way email worked, but at the same time the servers could be easily owned by different people running different software.
but you could change networks, you could run your own.
Protocol was documented but each server is a silo.
> the only thing I took from Discord at all (it's UI is generally awful yes, I agree!) is the support for multiple servers.
To be sure, Discord "servers" are not servers in the sense the word is used in virtually every other context. They are more like group chats that share a hosting location. If anything the hard part for Discord is making them seem disparate enough that someone might rent their "own server".
Discord killer chat features are:
Message History
Channel Discoverability
Attachments
Mobile
Anyone can start a server
You’re missing voice chat and video streaming
Add custom emojis and stickers to that.
Kind of baffles me that people still make chat apps without those.
Every chat product has these things?
IRC sure hasn't! Well, the IRC most people are using, anyway. You can work around these by using things like bouncers and third party HTTP hosts and assuming everyone else has a client that inlines media.
Multimedia transfer is still a practical impossibility, for better or for worse.
Mobile IRC works, sort of, if you don't mind spamming the channel every time you lose connectivity when you drive into a tunnel or when your phone goes to deep sleep. Again, you can set up a bouncer for that.
I welcome the new changes in IRCv3 and hope that one day soon all IRC users will be able to use the features everyone else has been using for fifteen years or so.
IRCCloud or a $5 VPS if you're willing to pay gets rid of the join/part spam
...But one of these things is not like the others.
"Anyone can start a server" is only true when you're lying about what a "server" is. (Or redefining it to the point of usefulness.)
A Discord "server" is just a defined chat namespace. All the Discord chat "servers" live together on the same actual load-balanced VMs or whatever on the physical servers they run.
It's honestly the thing that's annoyed me most about Discord from the very beginning, long before they introduced the ads and the microtransactions and the mandatory doxxing.
Quick, lets restart the argument about "self-hosted"!
IRCv3 isn't a corporate body, its a semi-formal group of IRC developers. There's nothing prohibiting you from proposing protocol extensions if they are within the scope of the working group.
What would "new IRCv3 leadership" do to get all the different independent IRC client and server software developers to support IRCv3?
parley and ahoy both look quite interesting! Retrofitting irc into a real federated protocol is cool. Also like the idea of picking up discords ui/ux. How did you manage to get avatars for ahoy? Is there a ircv3 protocol i missed?
It's part of the IRCv3 Metadata spec: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/metadata -- It just isn't very well documented or prominently displayed on the spec's page(s) I think. Took me a while to find it too.