> With IRC and Bitleebee, I can combine a lot of protocols in one client, keep it running in a screen, and access it via SSH.
At which point you're not really using IRC. You're using the Bittleebee-commands-over-SSH protocol.
This protocol has a number of issues: it requires having a server with a unix user account running on it (which is a massive attack surface, no-one can offer a server like that for free or it will be used to DDoS other people etc). Its phone apps are poorly integrated and drain battery. Its UI in general is very undiscoverable; the logging interface is still pretty awful (e.g. tracking of how far you've read is pretty poor). Sending files or voicechatting is even harder than it is in vanilla IRC.
> both those issues (among other issues) could be resolved with the IRC protocol, allowing people preferring other clients to continue to user their clients.
Slack offers an IRC gateway, which gives about as good an IRC experience as any extended-IRC protocol ever could.
I apologise, I wasn't clear. I primarily use IRC, but I also use Bitleebee, but it isn't my primarily protocol(s). I just meant that I could combine all these protocols in one client.
As for Slack's IRC gateway, I think it's pretty decent, yes. I personally prefer it to Slack's own client (again, that's just me). But this is what bothers me about Discord, because that doesn't offer an IRC gateway, and I am forced to use their client(s).
And if you're like me - which apparently few are - and you are in many different communities, that use different protocols to communicate, having a bunch of different clients just means more hassle.
Most of the communities I'm part of are onto Discord now, and that's a lot nicer experience in terms of having them all in once place than Biteebee ever was.
I'm all for federation and open protocols, I wish Discord had gateways and I'm hopeful for Matrix. But I don't think IRC is the answer: it's inherently without identity, inherently text-only, inherently historyless. These problems can't be solved well without protocol changes, but for whatever reason IRC has developed a community that is hostile to any protocol improvements and preferes to encourage ad-hoc hacks for these aspects, none of which works well and most of which don't work at all.
I definitely agree that IRC would do well to have improvements, like an IRC/2.0 protocol. But no one is willing to get involved, likely because A) they don't want to develop a standard no one will use, B) get bogged in draft committees for years and C) they just aren't motivated.
I only proposed intermediate solutions, because I thought that would be more likely to actually amount to something. Kind of like when Google did SPDY to push for HTTP/2.0, but you'd need a player the size and with the interest of Google to do IRC/2.0. Someone to make the decisions.
It's almost ridiculous that something as ubiquitous as instant communication doesn't get more serious attention.
I don't think building it as a tower of IRC extensions will ever work. You get stuck on "good enough", and the IRC userbase is aggressively anti-centralisation (far more so than the HTTP userbase), anti-change even, and text-oriented.
I've long since given up on any effort to make IRC good. I think energy is more productively spent on ground-up protocols that can include the good parts of IRC but also solve the problems I mentioned. Matrix is where most of my hope is going at the moment.
At which point you're not really using IRC. You're using the Bittleebee-commands-over-SSH protocol.
This protocol has a number of issues: it requires having a server with a unix user account running on it (which is a massive attack surface, no-one can offer a server like that for free or it will be used to DDoS other people etc). Its phone apps are poorly integrated and drain battery. Its UI in general is very undiscoverable; the logging interface is still pretty awful (e.g. tracking of how far you've read is pretty poor). Sending files or voicechatting is even harder than it is in vanilla IRC.
> both those issues (among other issues) could be resolved with the IRC protocol, allowing people preferring other clients to continue to user their clients.
Slack offers an IRC gateway, which gives about as good an IRC experience as any extended-IRC protocol ever could.