this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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I can understand people being use to unavailability of such features. When we were trying to figure out a solution for our development team which is mostly working form home, IRC was one of the options. We tried using IRC, Matrix, and bunch of others. While IRC was really fast and reliable its main issues were poor mobile support, where client would get disconnected when switching networks and multimedia support. Matrix and Tox supported these but there were so many problems with them at the time. So everyone pushed towards Slack. Luckily I had enough influence to not allow it and we finally settled with Signal, which is far from perfect, but it works for what we need it.
Sending files in this day and age shouldn't be a question of having public IP and routed ports and messing around with settings.
Hey, context made a boatload of difference! I use Signal but grow restive with it ; I can see using it in your circumstances and yes, irc with photo/code support would’ve been a better choice. Thanks for a window to see beyond my limited perspective.
No problem. Like I said, everyone has different needs, but it's better to have features and not use them than the other way around. When we used IRC, it was a real pain. I insisted we give it a shot for about a month and we couldn't pull out a week. The moment I realized I had to explain to people where to click and what to expect that's the moment we dropped it. Which is a shame, I really like the protocol. Not to mention ease of implementation with various scripts and git hooks.
If you arn't using a IRC server with build it bouncer (like ergo.chat) you really need an additional bouncer (linke ZNC or Soju) with an IRC network. As you say this is not an optional feature, but a must have. Most traditional IRC users run their own bouncers, so they feel no need for large networks to implement this vital feature and thus hold back IRC as a whole.
That said, if you had provided a nice client with built in bouncer and multimedia functionality, like The Lounge or Convos, or used an external service like IRCcloud, I doubt you would have had much issues with IRC adoption in your team. The Lounge especially also works really well on mobile.
I had ZNC set up for myself and few other people, but all of that is additional steps and additional things that require maintenance. But client with built-in things like these would be great. Ideally protocol should implement those, especially considering how easy it would be for server to do deduplication on messages for multiple users.
Bouncer like functionality is available in IRCv3 compliant IRC servers like Ergo, so yes it is available on protocol level, just the popular IRC networks don't implement it and workarounds like bouncers are sadly needed.