linux mint comes with a program coincidentally called Hexchat for connecting to IRC networks. Are these obsolete at this point, or are there still places to hang out with people so i dont have to use discord?
IRCs are good backup news channels. The news broke about Desert Storm on IRCs way before any news outlet got a hold of any information. With how the commonly traveled internet is increasingly based on AWS/Cloudflare, having an IRC is a nice just-in-case
Yeah, I remember the first live news event that happened on IRC was when the Olympic park in Atlanta was bombed. It was crazy, a couple hundred people all putting new details into chat.
And then the media blamed that hero security guard who found the device and prevented it from killing more people. He was everything they hated, spoke with a southern accent, lived with his mother. They lied and lied and said he did it. Turned out, it was a white supremacist who spent the next couple of years hiding out in the woods and was caught raiding a dumpster for food. Good job, media.
Yeah, Eric Robert Rudolph was the real bomber. He had also bombed abortion clinics.
I can't remember if that was the real reason or that was the disinformation the media spread about the hero. That's the problem with these lies: they stick. Most people today still think the security guard was the terrorist.
I dunno, there was a Richard Jewell movie a few years ago. Eastwood directed it so it was probably chuddier than it needed to be, but Paul Walter Hauser's a good actor and looked perfect for the part. I didn't see it but I do know that there are plenty of people in Atlanta who very much remember the way the Atlanta Journal-Constitution fucked his life up.
That movie was a flop and nobody watched it. Jewell is still widely regarded as a skeezy loser weirdo.
Yes, I use it for collaborating on open source code that I use for work and keeping in touch with my friends from those open source project s. Yes I know I am old. :chomsky-yes-honey:
yeah the only one ive ever used was one called like bookz or something like that but i ended up just using libgen instead
i occasionally still use it for obscure weeb cartoons when torrents fail me
I'd say IRC is obsolete, but it is far from dead. Kinda like Doom, or e-mail. It is still one of the best places to get tech support (probably why it's included out of the box).
Hexchat is a good client. I've used it since it was called X-chat.
I’ve used it since it was called X-chat.
Ah, the good old days, when people could name things like that, naively believing it would never be an issue.
In open source land, there are a lot of applications named X-something, after the X Window System which has been around in one form or another for 40 years. Nowadays, X isn't as ubiquitous as it used to be and new applications don't tend to be named after it unless they are designed specifically for it.
With X-Chat, the original maintainer stopped working on it at some point and the project was carried on by a new group of people, who renamed it to avoid confusion / misrepresentation.
Usenet had a huge revival for piracy to the point it's arguably replaced a lot of private torrent trackers.
why do I hear people saying that IRC is obsolete because of things like discord? Isn't discord just a fancy IRC client that is privately owned by techbros who are more than happy to forward everything to the feds or whatever? I seems like IRC should be more popular than Discord in a community like this... what is the disconnect here?
IRC by itself has no persistence. There's no sync of messages across devices without a bouncer that you have to set up and configure yourself.
Last thing i used IRC for was a My Little Pony RPG group like six years ago. It has some advantages over voice chat that make it good for playing RPGs while at work and stuff like that - also not having to use your actual voice makes it less awkward to play a character of the opposite sex if that's appealing to you.
not having to use your actual voice makes it less awkward to play a character of the opposite sex if that’s appealing to you
simply do months of youtube voice training tutorials smdh
at least those exist now. two decades ago you had to pay a speech therapist to tell you to say "mmm" over and over again.
IRChighway and undernet both had good book serving channels last I was on. I think just #books. #ebooks too but they served audio books as well.
The only communities I know are still active on IRC are tied to private torrent sites. When what.cd went down it was a pretty useful place to keep track of the projects put together to replace it. I'm sure there are plenty of other communities, I just don't frequent them anymore.
That would be incredibly bad opsec.
You can host your own IRC server. IRC is relatively limited in terms of what information the IRC client exposes. People also use irc bots to automatically download new torrents.
Discord is privately owned and will send all your info to the feds. The client is proprietary, so you can't change it. The complexity of the discord client also makes it more vulnerable to exploits.
None to my knowledge but I only frequent three of those sites these days.
I remember when I started college (mid-2000s) the university I attended did a thing where they blocked torrents by timing out the download of torrent files. I think this was pre magnet links. A friend of mine from high school had the same issue, so we both jumped on IRC as a way to get our pirate fix. It was really useful and I remember finding a ton of good music.
