I think all the people who use IRC daily would disagree with you on that.
I do agree that IRC is stuck in the dark ages when it comes to feature support, and even just features in the spec. I dislike Slack, but whenever I use Slack for a while, and then switch to IRC for something else, I miss seemingly-simple things like being able to easily share images, react to messages with emoji, start subthreads in messages (a feature of Slack's I initially hated, but eventually came to appreciate).
I get that it's difficult to add these sorts of things to IRC in a reasonable way, especially when we're talking about degrading gracefully for clients that don't support newer features. But IRC is pretty much the definition of an open, federated protocol failing to avoid ossification.
> I do agree that IRC is stuck in the dark ages when it comes to feature support, and even just features in the spec. I dislike Slack, but whenever I use Slack for a while, and then switch to IRC for something else, I miss seemingly-simple things like being able to easily share images, react to messages with emoji, start subthreads in messages (a feature of Slack's I initially hated, but eventually came to appreciate).
I like that IRC doesn't have those things. IRC is great because most clients have very high information density. Look at this screenshot [0], look how many messages fit on the screen.
Compare that to something like slack. Every message has a bunch of upper and lower padding, an avatar, space for reactions etc. If someone links an image, it can use up half your screen to render it. If someone links something, suddenly there is a preview wasting space.
> Compare that to something like slack. Every message has a bunch of upper and lower padding, an avatar, space for reactions etc. If someone links an image, it can use up half your screen to render it. If someone links something, suddenly there is a preview wasting space.
FWIW, slack and discord have 'compact' modes where information density is about the same as the screenshot you posted.
> I think all the people who use IRC daily would disagree with you on that.
What people? I've used IRC for the past 15 years. It is dead. I was the generation to make it alive. You have stale, and chaos. It's old, musky and old.
I have no issue with IRC its a robust, reliable protocol. But it's just stale. Its old. "We will invent this" where is it?
Who recently has made an attempt at a half-good browser?
Actually I used Matrix for 2 years and went back to IRC recently when I realised that the really cool channels I cared about where on IRC. A few are on Discord (which I really don't like). To me, Matrix seems to be in the middle, and I don't find anyone there.
> easily share images, react to messages with emoji, start subthreads in messages
You can do all this on IRCCloud (which is currently the only IRC client to support them, sadly). However, like you mentioned, other clients won't see reactions or threading.
I think all the people who use IRC daily would disagree with you on that.
I do agree that IRC is stuck in the dark ages when it comes to feature support, and even just features in the spec. I dislike Slack, but whenever I use Slack for a while, and then switch to IRC for something else, I miss seemingly-simple things like being able to easily share images, react to messages with emoji, start subthreads in messages (a feature of Slack's I initially hated, but eventually came to appreciate).
I get that it's difficult to add these sorts of things to IRC in a reasonable way, especially when we're talking about degrading gracefully for clients that don't support newer features. But IRC is pretty much the definition of an open, federated protocol failing to avoid ossification.