Well, we are discussing chat for open source projects, rather than, say, what to use at a company. Some technical knowledge might be expected in this crowd.

That's effectively telling everyone that if they aren't comfortable a) researching the available programs, b) paying for a server to host it, and c) learning enough to support a running container, manage SSL certificates, install security updates promptly, they shouldn't be part of the community. That's bad for growing the community, particularly since there are many people who participate in OSS now who don't have all of those skills or the time to spend supporting a service even if they do.

And the price for convenience is, eventually, hassle migrating to a different service every time something doesn't work to your liking. Need to pay Slack for features? Jump another hoop. What for?

Microsoft has made billions locking people up in the name of convenience.

You can have these things if you care or you can use its simplest form. Don't want to use a bouncer? Use a web client.

People keep repeating OSS. But now OSS is more about having being recognized than really believing in it. Using closed source software is one point.

I'm no radical, I use a Mac and I shed a tear every time I have to use Lightroom because I haven't find the drive to move to Darktable or Sublime instead of Atom.

I've been using free software for a couple decades. I get why it's valuable but having watched what is and is not adopted really underscores if we want people to use OSS we need to offer a competitive experience. Years of cajoling people did not get them to use Linux because the desktop experience sucked. Years of advocacy did not get them to adopt Mozilla in great numbers but people did respond when Phoenix/Firefox focused on UX and was actively improving during Internet Explorer's great stagnation.

Anyone who wants to avoid the possibility of lock-in using Slack should be laser-focused on making IRC competitive rather than trying to convince people that poor UX is just the price of freedom.

Exactly 0 of those things are required to interact on IRC.

Source: have been using IRC since late 1993.

> Exactly 0 of those things are required to interact on IRC.

This entire thread has been about whether IRC can offer a competitive experience to services like Slack, Gitter, etc. I don't think anyone is arguing that you cannot use IRC at all without tools but even you were just saying (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013780) that you need the money and skills to run a server to have a first-class experience.

> Source: have been using IRC since late 1993.

Ditto but the world has moved on quite a lot since then and many of us think that IRC needs to as well or it will continue declining into obscurity.

My points are not about the tech so much as:

* Proprietary protocols are generally a bad deal, and especially so for open source projects. Proprietary clients (gmail, for instance) don't matter as much unless you are RMS.

* Chat should not be a central component of an open source project, but an 'extra' for occasional real time communications. If important stuff happens there, it will alienate people who can't participate because of time zones or other reasons.

Someone else wrote the comment you linked.

Sorry, yes, I had the wrong tab open for that message and attributed it to you by mistake.

> * Chat should not be a central component of an open source project, but an 'extra' for occasional real time communications.

I generally agree that chat shouldn't matter enormously but the problem is that we don't really have a great free alternative. Slack has an interesting hybrid which is largely chat but with some elements which are closer to mailing list style (persistence, search, rich formatting, quasi-attachments) and the only other alternatives I see people regularly using are Google Groups or Git Hub issue tracker, neither of which are open.

The big problem is infrastructure: once we start talking about building a consistent experience with an open project, that means running servers, handling security and support work, etc. That's not a problem for well-staffed projects but it's an ongoing hassle for smaller projects. This would seem like a good place for a non-profit to provide infrastructure.

> If important stuff happens there, it will alienate people who can't participate because of time zones or other reasons.

Interestingly, this is a major reason I see cited in _favor_ of Slack. With IRC, you aren't involved if you weren't logged when a conversation started but with Slack you still receive notifications and can view or search the history.

I have all of the knowhow to be able to set up an irc client in screen or set up a bouncer, to use something like irccloud, to get xdcc working, etc. etc., to work around all of the usability problems of IRC, having done all these in the past.

I just can't possibly have the time.

Additionally, some of the problems are purely intractable, despite anyone saying any different. Further problems are social rather than technical.

I need a chat that works on all my devices, delivers messages to all my devices, keeps track of mentions (again, across all devices), has searchable history (yep, everywhere). Bouncers speak IRC in both directions when that makes absolutely no sense. It'd be like having a mail server speak SMTP instead of IMAP, no way to pull, only to get pushed at.

Even something like IRCCloud where they have their own protocol which is actually purpose-built, can't change fundamentals of how the protocol is and gets used in practice.

Presence is simply unsolved, and pretty valuable for obvious reasons -- so I can decide how and if to contact someone. To try to discern this on IRC I have to keep in mind, for every contact, do they use whois status, do they send away messages, do they use an away nick, or more probably none of the above.

Nicks being mutable but also used for addressing messages is beyond insanity. Sure, let someone decide to be "princess sparkles" for a day or whatever, but I NEVER want to have to figure out who is who in order to be able to open a query window, don't want an existing query window to stop working because they changed their nick for a joke in some channel I'm not in, I never want to split logs of messages with people based on whether they were john or john|break... etc.

Regardless of MY technical competency or capacity for burning time, I will still need non-technical project-helper person to be able to spend an afternoon to create a handful of Trello boards and channels, and make those boards' changes push to their respective channels.

And even though I myself can suck it up and jump those hurdles, I'll never get a majority of my friends or colleagues to do so. Never in a million years. And that alone matters more than any other complaint because as a chat platform, it's the network, stupid.

Chat in general, as per my earlier message, is for pretty ephemeral stuff. You should not be entrusting important decisions to it. Plenty of networks, like Freenode, solve the 'who is this person' thing in that, for instance, no one else can grab a nick for more than, say, 30 seconds.

I use IRC all the time to talk with people who are experts in some particular technology, and need absolutely none of this infrastructure.

Why? There are plenty of non-technical ways one can contribute to a project. Requiring a high level of technical ability is only going to encourage a monoculture, and cause FOSS solutions to ignore the needs of non-technical users.