this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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I don’t know why people don’t use irc, I’m in it daily and it’s busier than Matrix, and even busier than some Discord servers I’m in. And there’s mobile clients. There’s even way less bots and spam
I think IRC wins by being around the longest, but also being dead simple to set up and use.
I tried using Matrix and it just honestly frazzled my head a little. I know it's just a few extra steps to get registered, but it honestly feels like a few extra bits of friction to what amounts to trying to join a big social circle.
I had such a pain trying to get a consistent client working on mobile.
I think the barrier to entry is kind of high, you need to use a bouncer to see what happened while you were offline.
I don’t really worry about that. I treat it like natural conversation, or traditional chat rooms. I mean I don’t need a recap when I show up at a party. I just jump in. I’ve never heard of a bouncer, but I think it would turn it into more of a feed than a conversation, which is the opposite of what I want.
I’m tired of feeds and timelines. AOL chat rooms were my formative internet years, and I liked that. I think the old style of internet communication is better than the feed silos we have now. Besides, I hardly ever go back and look at older convos in other spaces. I usually hit mark all as read when I open the app.
Problem is then you miss important info, for example if friends are talking about a game server they're running and post the connection details, or if they plan an event with a location and time to meet, if you don't have a bouncer and were offline then you can't see those messages.
The bouncer is just the name for the technology that maintains your connection when your client disconnects.
I'm kind of socially awkward, so I really value being able to "read the room" and see what people were talking about before I joined. I have IRC set up so that when I open it up, I see the previous 40 lines or so of dialog from before I connected. (This is a setting you can adjust on the bouncer).
I could achieve something similar by joining a room and then waiting a few minutes, but sometimes the room is very slow and no one posts, etc., it's nice to just always be able to look at the scroll back when you log on.
Yeah this is exactly what turned me off from it when I looked into it. I kind of like that it would lend a more physical-space quality to it, but ultimately I'm hardly ever online, so it would just be me being totally out of the loop all the time without a bouncer. I know I could figure out how to do it, but it's a lot of effort for something where I'm not even sure I'll like what it gives me.
yup I went back to IRC. got tired of discord and matrix just wasn't for me. IRC is where it's add. still remember all the stuff from the 90s so it was just like riding a bike. plus I can have it in my Terminal which is a plus.