Well, all the stuff you listed is pretty much why it's great. It's almost the simplest thing that could possibly work, and so, it does work, pretty reliably and without fuckups. If you try to turn IRC into Matrix, it just becomes Matrix and you should use Matrix instead - it exists. IRC occupies a particular niche of being simple, but not so simple it doesn't work.
The lack of server-side history is a severely underrated feature, actually. Lack of history means you aren't legally obligated to moderate history (because there is no history) and you aren't legally obligated to have someone on-call to moderate the history. Spam has a lower impact because the spam is not saved.
IRC's severe flaw is not the lack of server-side history, or images or emoji reactions - it's the reliance on constant connection between the client and server. This makes a very bad experience on mobile devices. It works badly on the other side of the equation, too - the online/away/offline social protocol is designed for an era where you log into your computer at the start of the day and shut it down at the end. And in general, the social protocol is from the era where you messages targeted at you are few and mostly interesting, and you may also subscribe to a small number of small social groups or topic subscriptions - none of that is true in the modern social era.
If you want to solve at least the non-social part of that, you end up designing servers that buffer messages on behalf of clients, which is the same as server-side history and creates a legal obligation to moderate it. Bouncers don't have this problem because the bouncer is under the control of the end user, so they can do what they like with it. But bouncers have to run on devices with stable power and internet access.
> Well, all the stuff you listed is pretty much why it's great. It's almost the simplest thing that could possibly work
And that's all well and good, did recognize that, but then isn't it a bit disingenuous to present it as some sort of "real" solution in a thread about a communications technology that aims to cover much more? It's like arguing that Prometheus is the be-all end-all of monitoring, even though the remaining concerns still remain, and are just shoved aside to be some adjacent solution's problem.
> Lack of history means you aren't legally obligated to moderate history (because there is no history)
Is that actually right? Feels pretty suspect to me, you have to hold onto the data at least a little bit to transmit it to all connected clients, being a client-server protocol. I don't think this passes by the courts, not any more than holding onto a few dozen or a few minutes of logs in a non-persistent fashion (i.e. in-memory only) would.
It's not right, there's so many legal contradictions in their statement it's hilarious. And the cherry on the top is that they were recently banned from libera IRC.
"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding."
> Is that actually right? Feels pretty suspect to me, you have to hold onto the data at least a little bit to transmit it to all connected clients, being a client-server protocol. I don't think this passes by the courts, not any more than holding onto a few dozen or a few minutes of logs in a non-persistent fashion (i.e. in-memory only) would.
It doesn't excuse failure to moderate the service at all, but if there is no chat history, you cannot be excepted to moderate it specifically. Basically, in any even remotely fair legal system, one cannot be excepted to delete something that doesn't exist in the first place.
The lack of server-side history is a severely underrated feature, actually. Lack of history means you aren't legally obligated to moderate history (because there is no history) and you aren't legally obligated to have someone on-call to moderate the history. Spam has a lower impact because the spam is not saved.
IRC's severe flaw is not the lack of server-side history, or images or emoji reactions - it's the reliance on constant connection between the client and server. This makes a very bad experience on mobile devices. It works badly on the other side of the equation, too - the online/away/offline social protocol is designed for an era where you log into your computer at the start of the day and shut it down at the end. And in general, the social protocol is from the era where you messages targeted at you are few and mostly interesting, and you may also subscribe to a small number of small social groups or topic subscriptions - none of that is true in the modern social era.
If you want to solve at least the non-social part of that, you end up designing servers that buffer messages on behalf of clients, which is the same as server-side history and creates a legal obligation to moderate it. Bouncers don't have this problem because the bouncer is under the control of the end user, so they can do what they like with it. But bouncers have to run on devices with stable power and internet access.