CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@d The one true federated chat platform. It has history and everything.

@evey @erincandescent You used the word "just" there

@erincandescent Part of the problem is server-side chat history storage being so controversial within the IRC community.

"Just run a bouncer", they say, like that is actually something most people are ever going to do.

Can't wait for someone to reply to this with "just use Matrix" because I have this whole bottle of rage I've been saving up

@tom EXACTLY

And to be clear, it's not like people haven't tried. They really, really, really have.

But have you ever tried convincing people to modify a protocol that is mostly unchanged since 1993, across a massive set of servers that are largely derived from the same codebase but warped in interesting ways, and run entirely by volunteers who go to war with each other every decade.

That said, I wish it was true. I want IRC to win.

But without people actually wanting the protocol to move forward, servers changing, and new clients being written to handle it, it ain't gonna happen.

Everyone going "Just move to IRC!!!" clearly has no understanding of *why* other things have been more popular than IRC for the last ~12 years, and why this won't happen.

Before you reply with "lol IRC is great you don't get it": I say this as a die-hard IRC user who worked for an IRC client company and also ran a large organisation on IRC for the last decade (until we finally gave up and moved to Mattermost this year).