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IRC Turns 30 (www.oulu.fi)
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was born at the Department of Information Processing Science of the University of Oulu 30 years ago. Taking some time out of his summer job, Jarkko Oikarinen developed the internet chat system. For the last several years, Oikarinen has been working at Google, overseeing the development of several communication services. Though several mainstream services have ended support for IRC over the years, the system is still in existence and used by many.
The latest re-incarnation is Slack. Before that was HipChat, etc.
Note: If you can't stand the amount of spam images in a channel and want to minimize the stupid GIF animations you can use the Slack command: /collapse
It is almost comical how every modern utility has been re-invented multiple times.
IRC for "instant" communications among individuals and groups, and Usenet for public forums is why there is no need for Facebook, Twitter and other centrally-controlled systems so prone to censorship and similar abuses both by the commercial interests controlling them, and the governments able to twist the former's arms.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
For some use cases, tne big advantage of Skype, Slack, HipChat, Discord, and other web-based functional clones of IRC over IRC itself is that they store chat history on the server side. This lets a user see messages that were sent to a channel while the user was offline. It's as if an IRC server had built-in functionality equivalent to that of a bouncer, except that each user doesn't have to lease a VPS on which to run ZNC. The major IRC networks couid offer a built-in bouncer to compete with proprietary web-based chat, but they don't.
Another is that web-based chat allows uploading attachments. IRC has traditionally used pastebins and filedrops for this. The major IRC networks couid operate pastebin and filedrop services for their users to use, but they don't.
It should have been. There's no reason it couldn't have been. It even used to support it with an optional gateway. But no. Slack decided to fill our Intertubes with yet another worthless proprietary clone of IRC.
IRC did a lot of things right, that more "modern" IMs do totally wrong. IRC is decentralized, and anyone can run a server. It's lightweight, and easy to use. It is an open protocol. It lets you use any client you want, not just some single Facebook-blessed one. It wasn't made to monetize your communication.
However the core protocol needs end to end encryption. Not encryption where a multinational manages your private key "for" you, but true, E2E encryption. Not as some weird add-on that most people will never use, but by default. This is to keep Zuckbook style snooping away. It needs better protection against malicious actions. It needs some more modern features like presence.
At the core, it is what the internet should be: decentralized and put power in the hands of users, not advertisers and data scrapers.
I just don't get it.
Unfortunately if you work on outgoing business you end up using a lot of different communication utilities. It isn't just Slack, but over the past several years I got involved with companies and standards-setting bodies that use it. So if you want to be plugged into the real-time communications of that company or group, you have to use it.
But that isn't really different from other software -- on this Mac I am typing with I also have to have Skype, GoTo Meeting, WebEx, Zoom, and a few others I forget the names of until someone calls a meeting. If you ask any engineer on the call why they use it they just shrug and say "that's what our company uses."
To make matters worse many of the "your business in the cloud" type operations like Zoho try to get in the action as well. I think the Zimbra mail server (VMWare) also offers "collaboration" features that host chatrooms and IP calls. The only time I pushed back on using something is there was one from Asia that had a bad reputation for installing malware. I forget the name. I got the client to switch to WebEx for that call but who knows what the condition of their own systems are at this point.
So to answer your question: there really isn't any big technical merit between them. Yeah some work better than others. Skype really fsked themselves up but since it is Microsoft you will still have to use it. What counts is marketing and market share. No real mystery.
It's not spam. It's relevant and funny.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
IRC as a protocol and software stack is generally crap. While it was functional, a huge swath of IRC would have to be completely rewritten - including the underlying foundations - to turn it into a modern Slack or similar service. Honestly, it would be far easier to start from scratch than to base it on IRC. While a few things could be learned from how IRC was built, I wouldn't use that code as a base for anything.
Source: Me. Maintainer of Bahamut IRCd from 2001-2018.
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