Do any IRC clients support inline media upload/viewing, profile pictures, voice/video calls, or replies/threading? These are the things I would consider the core essentials of IM. Any serious platform has all of this plus a whole lot more.
The web front-ends multi-user clients I linked in this thread support file sharing, image uploading. For voice one could run either uMurmur or Murmur that also provides text and voice chat. People can be given permissions to create channels on Murmur whereas uMurmur you static define the channels as it is meant to run on home routers. There is a phone client for Murmur called Mumla. Murmur also supports file sharing but it was not really optimized for that to be used by a large number of people at once in my opinion. The voice quality of the OPUS codec is incredible. Open source video chat would likely be Jitsi and is a bit more complex.
These are not all-in-one solutions yet and certainly not as low-friction as most would prefer. I expect development to improve in all of these platforms as the centralized platforms go through growing pains and buy-outs.
Even then I would not expect everyone to migrate to these self hosted platforms and in a way I actually hope they do not or those platforms may get the unwanted attention from the powers that aim to protect us from our speech.
I think I would leave any platform that added most of these and that it is better for IRC to stay as-is so people like me have places to chat. People like you already have Discord/etc.
So to get all or some of those features you can use IRCCloud. Is it the same as IRC having those features?
I could (and do) access IRC over Matrix and then I also have access to those features. But in this case also users not using the same client or same server as I am get to see those things.
> Do any IRC clients support inline media upload/viewing, profile pictures, voice/video calls, or replies/threading? These are the things I would consider the core essentials of IM. Any serious platform has all of this plus a whole lot more.
Media upload is purely on the client side. If IRCCloud lets you to drag-and-drop an image, uploads it to some server, and then sends the URL, then that's still entirely IRC (I will receive the URL), but IRCCloud is making it easier for you.
Same for viewing content: I send a URL, and your IRCCloud will show a preview (image/video), while my client won't. That's purely on the client side.
For voice and video calls, IMO I don't want it in my messaging app. I can use my browser for that, or a dedicated app. And again, share a link to my videoconference over IRC.
Replies/threading are a tricky one. I hate the replies in Discord, and I don't really get threads. I see Slack channels where the rule is "answer only in threads", which to me says that they want a forum (like Discourse), not an instant messaging app.
> But in this case also users not using the same client or same server as I am get to see those things.
Pretty sure that if you use replies or threads in Matrix when talking in an IRC channel, then people on IRC won't see them as replies or threads.
> Pretty sure that if you use replies or threads in Matrix when talking in an IRC channel, then people on IRC won't see them as replies or threads.
Replies are rendered to IRC with a prefix indicating what they're responding to, but people from IRC cannot "reply" (though maybe some ad-hoc protocol could be devised for this). I don't know if threads are handled the same way, but I assume they are. Of course you can't really bring either of these features to a platform that doesn't support them without modifying the platform.
By "other servers" I meant other Matrix servers, as it is the system that natively supports the features.
