points by solyin 4 days ago | 0 comments
No it wasn't. If you didn't have an irc bouncer there was no scrollback, mod abuse was rampant, netsplits were just a thing we accepted. It didn't work on mobile because they didn't exist back then. I'm not saying what we have today is any better, but let's not look at IRC with rose-tinted glasses and think it didn't have room to improve.
[–] hmokiguess 4 days ago
[–] Jeep_ 4 days ago
Yes, but the average worker nowadays doesn't seem tech literate enough to understand decentralized concepts. If you just look at how the (failed) migration from Twitter/X to Mastodon happened, it gave a great insight into the average person's understanding.
[–] cik 4 days ago
Whilst it's technically interesting, I'd argue that users don't have to care. Technical, or advanced users can twist whatever dials we nat want to twist. But grandma, my father, my buddy the data scientist they don't care.
Single company control, spofs, none of this means anything to them. Click the button ans itnworls, and quickly does. Returning to simple while maintaining usability, usefulness, speed, turnkey.. that has value to the majority of users.
[–] hmokiguess 4 days ago
That's a fair point, though I think this is a different problem to solve
[–] trog 4 days ago
We just ran our own company server, which got rid of the mod abuse and netsplit problems completely. Every client we used had logs so scrollback wasn't an issue, though a few people used bouncers for the scrollback feature if they didn't like to look at logs - but having a plaintext log was invaluable to simply grep for old conversations, instead of having to use a slow painful UI to search.
I'd go back to IRC in a heartbeat. The one thing I'd miss is inline image viewing but I could survive without that!
Everything nowadays is a walled garden behind a PaaS