IRC - A blessing in disguise

In this post, I’ll explain the misconceptions I had with IRC(Internet Relay Chat) and how I resolved them. This is not going to be a Slack vs IRC post and I won’t be talking about good things about either of them. Instead, I’ll just say how I got my misconceptions resolved.

I used to wonder why people use IRC for communication. I usually use Slack for communication and I love it. The downsides I felt on using IRC with Freenode were:

1. You can only see messages when you are online.
2. You’ll be kicked out of the channel because of inactivity(opening a tab in your browser but, you are never looking back).
3. No support for threads.

But, I realized that programmers are still all over IRC. It has helped to keep online communities around open-source programming active and productive for more than two decades. Let’s start talking about the downsides I felt. I’ll talk in detail about 1 later. 2 can be easily solved by setting up an IRC Client. I installed HexChat in my PC and it never kicked me out. But, I had to keep my laptop turned on for the whole day in order to see every message in the channel.

I heard about setting an IRC bouncer to resolve 1. This article explains how to install and use ZNC bouncer for IRC. This is community-recommended and you are good to go with your IRC Client. But, I had to buy a server for that. There are IRC Clients with bouncer support also. But, both of them costs money. A free alternative to resolve 1 is using a Matrix Client with Freenode support. I use riot.im with my Freenode nick. I’m not going to talk about that in detail. But, don’t be sad. I have two links[1][2] for you. You can easily set up your matrix account and use with Freenode. You won’t miss a single message from now.

What about 3? Unfortunately, 3 is a fact and cannot be resolved. But, believe me. I have seen many debates, discussions, etc. that went really well without threads. IRC is a good tool and it is easy to explain.