"Slack for everyone".

(After paying some registrar and ICANN gets its 13 cents or whatever.)

Pay to play DNS aside, this is really what the "web 2.0" should have been.

IMHO, an IRC channel has always been more functional than a "website".

It makes peer to peer easy.

If only the big networks weren't so change averse, we could have had a new RFC for IRC that included mobile/roaming-friendly protocols, which IMHO is the #1 thing holding IRC back in the current age.

Does my client really have to burn battery by sending a PONG back every half second or so? Can't we have seamless roaming without disconnects?

XMPP works so well on mobile connections that I have been using IRC over XMPP almost exclusively for quite some time using a transport that maps any IRC channel to an XMPP MUC (#maemo on freenode is “maemo%irc.freenode.net@irc.netlab.cz”) and any IRC user to an XMPP user (nickserv on freenode is “nickserv!irc.freenode.net@irc.netlab.cz”). Even when the connection is gone for several minutes (like when using UMTS on a train), XMPP usually transmits all pending messages as soon as I am back online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP

Wow, that reminds me of UUCP.

How so? Please elaborate.

http://ircv3.net/ - not sure if it fixes the PONG issue, though.

Wouldn't the XMPP web client Kaiwa [1] be “Slack for everyone” ? I am using Slack at work and at least from the screenshots, it looks that Kaiwa is really similar.

[1] http://getkaiwa.com/

To clear that up a bit, you can register a channel like #domain.tld only if you control the DNS zone of the said domain, and you can't get op in a primary channel without registering it first.

Well, that is definitely one way of approaching the lack of federation in IRC

Yeah. In fact, there is a lot of networks but they are made because people want to experiment and operate a server then they wonder what they could use it for. Here, well, we had a goal and IRC was a solution, as once you have your channel you just have to add an iframe on your website and tadam, a fully functioning live webchat with permissions! ;)

Slightly off-topic, but IRC discussions don't come up too regularly.

What channels / networks are people hanging out in?

I mainly lurk on ##re and ##security on Freenode.

#proglangdesign and #osdev are some of my favorites on Freenode, otherwise it's mostly language-related ones.

#dragonflybsd on efnet is probably my favorite technology-specific channel. Lots of interesting stuff happens there (and sage wisdom from Matt Dillon).

Mostly on https://www.hackint.org/, it hosts a lot of ccc and freifunk related channels.

Obviously I'm on DomIRC, but also on freenode like probably a lot of us.

I mainly hang in ##france, #bfnt, #botters, #codebottle and #freenode related channels, among a lot of others channels but the list is way too long ;)

#emacs on Freenode is great, if one can handle the traffic. Great convos and greatest (IT/CS related) memes.

Freenode #startups and #dn

irc.darkscience.net (6697/SSL):

#darkscience

#sysadmin

Freenode:

##infra-talk

I keep verrrrry clear of #reddit-sysadmin on freenode though.

Why do you stay clear?

It is a corrosive and toxic environment. Devoid of technical discussion and very hostile to "devops", CI and automation.

If you go on the actual subreddit, you get bombarded with illusory superiority, google knowledge, and advertisers. I saw someone trash Apache server because it includes a test suite in the source package. I love the constant astroturfing for certain products. The best part is their "articles" where they try to make their job sound like a popular HBO TV show.

It's just not a great place to go for anything. The people there seem deeply flawed. They are trying way too hard to be the "intelligent ass hole" without the research.

Most of freenode is this way. You'll notice that freenode admins/ops will ban for any off-topic discussion and most chans are deafeningly silent because of this. It's a terrible environment for natural discussions.

I remember I used to chat in the WordPress chat. I was one of the few people who actually answered questions. For some reason there was an off topic chat. One of the regulars was ll "that's off topic - stop" I pointed out there was off topic there all the time. He then proceeded to make a point of that he chatted there more often. I pointed out that I had previous just changed the nickname I was using and to use my previous my nick for his wc -l command. 6 hours laters I was kicked and banned by ops. Fun fact, off topic wasn't against the rules. Telling people you're more important than them because the amount of time you've been there was. I was told I could go back in a few hours. I stopped going there and answering questions after that. That was the final straw for me and WordPress. I haven't used it since. Their bug trac was full of bugfixes that never got applied, got repatched and then still never got applied.

In other words, traditional old-school SAs who feel threatened by the general model of agile/"move fast, break things." The kind used to receiving code from over the wall, yelling only that it's shit, and throwing it back.

In other other words, people who care more about UX and uptime than breaking things because they updated to the newest node.js

#startups on freenode is great.

Freenode:

#web

#startups (although not been in there for ages)

#go-nuts

#techendo

Freenode is HEAVILY moderated and censored to the point of restricting basic free speech. Find a different place.

To the downvoters: you are doing exactly what I'm talking about

Lack of evidence is probably the reason you're getting downvoted.

Freenode is used by geeks to setup a channel in the same way old people still use AOL.

There are far better, less restrictive, more secure networks out there.

After using FreeNode for years, this is the first I've heard of censorship.

Can you cite some examples? (Downvotes are not censorship, btw.)

I think this is rather a novel way of approaching verification.

If someone has ops in a channel he or she must either be a webmaster or someone trusted by a webmaster.

Whether this is useful or not is sort of irrelevant, it's a fun exercise.

If it only were controlled by a formal entity like the root zone owner it would be somewhat awesome, as this project or company may die out if not successfully enough...

Still an upvote

Well, it is controlled by a non-profit organization already funded by something else.

There are no profits created by this network, so even if it does not work well, we will not lose money.

About the organization itself, it has others activities maintaining it alive.

As the President of Blackfields Network, the parent organization of DomIRC, I swear we will maintain this network as long as we exist.

That's the problem with federated systems: we (users) have to rely on the promises and whims of our system operators to have access.

I don't trust or distrust you, I wish I didn't have to decide.

Yeah, I have experienced that as well and I get your point, that's mainly why we have created a whole structure and registered an organization, even if we can never predict what will happen next we can always do our best to get the odds in our favour.

Unfortunately, the best alternative would probably be the P2P way, with something like https://matrix.org/ which also seems to be nice.

You can host your own XMPP server today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP

##frontend on freenode, we are off-topic almost all the time.

I haven't used IRC aggressively in over 15 years. What's with the double hashes I now see on the front of channel names? Is one hash no longer enough?

double hash means non official channel. Single hash means that the channel is administered by "official" staff member.

Example #debian would have operators that are really member of the debian project while ##debian is your old normal IRC channel on first serve basis