Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible.
As for sending files, IRC has no real capacity for this. XDCC exists, but is an extension to IRC and isn't guaranteed to be supported by your network/server. So yes in this situation you must look to an alternative protocol like FTP (hopefully SFTP or at least FTPS).
I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. The most that happens would be a netsplit, whereupon the two halves of the network continue to operate normally (though separately) before synchronizing. From your description, I would venture a guess that (at least some of) the reliability issues you experienced were also due to your IRC client.
Anecdotally, I have certainly experienced far more outages of the centralized Discord service than I have of the IRC networks I frequent.
> Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible.
We ... did try that. Of course. :(
A failure of IRC's ecosystem is a failure of IRC. Ultimately it doesn't matter what part of the big chain of interconnected pieces is actually the culprit, unless you're the rare individual in a position of leverage to fix it. A failure of implementors to correctly adhere to the protocol, or ISPs to send it, or anything - is still a consequence of decisions made by the designer who released it into the wild.
An analogy to draw is the web - the web isn't just browsers; it's webpages, it's servers, it's scripting languages, and all of these add up to an experience that can be judged as a whole. We've had many mistakes on the web - every time flash crashed on someone was a direct consequence of the quick-and-dirty netscape plugin api getting rushed to market. Decisions => consequences. But any time something's bad? It's "the web"'s fault as a whole.
And if it gets bad enough, people look for alternatives for particular tasks.
> I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime.
Fwiw, we weren't talking about downtime. These issues may have actually not been caused by network outages at all.
To explain this for your benefit:
Consider that this was invisible failure. It took quite a few years before I was able to realize that "awkward silences" in the conversation were actual failures-to-send-messages. Not netsplits. The messages never got through, rather than being delayed. Just, every day or two, chunks of conversations would completely fail to send - just a couple sentences here and there. No rhyme or reason. And so intermittently, we wouldn't notice it.
It just felt like the other person was rudely not replying, so I figured they were afk, but when they came back, it was genuinely like they hadn't seen it. And once you're friends with someone and you really know their personality, you can tell that this just ... isn't like them at all to forget things like that. Or not read the backscroll. Finally I started to wonder. What tipped me off was a bouncer I had coming in from a different ISP. The bouncer got the messages, and my local never did, even days later. After that, I compared logs between myself and friends, and ... they were mostly ... similar.
But not identical. There were holes. And this had been going on for a decade.
And maybe the same thing happens to you - because really: How can you even tell?
As for sending files, IRC has no real capacity for this. XDCC exists, but is an extension to IRC and isn't guaranteed to be supported by your network/server. So yes in this situation you must look to an alternative protocol like FTP (hopefully SFTP or at least FTPS).
I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. The most that happens would be a netsplit, whereupon the two halves of the network continue to operate normally (though separately) before synchronizing. From your description, I would venture a guess that (at least some of) the reliability issues you experienced were also due to your IRC client.
Anecdotally, I have certainly experienced far more outages of the centralized Discord service than I have of the IRC networks I frequent.