Yeah, the thing is, this needs some kind of IRC bridge, with auth. If you're an HN user, IRC is probably your usual mechanism for realtime textual communication, and I gather many would rather use their very rich tooling built on IRC than check another website.
I don't. I see a lot of IRC users on HN and other forums. Slack seems semi-common internal to orgs, but IRC seems to be by far the most active realtime communication medium used by devs externally.
People liking IRC is a reasonable conclusion to draw.
...huh. FBM appears to be a centralized two-way textual communcation system with a strong identity system: It's essentially the anti-IRC. What do you use for multi-way textual communication, or textual communication with weak identity (these often go hand-in-hand)? Or do you just not use either?
I should mention here that I work for Facebook. (Though I would also like to make clear that this post and anything else I do on HN is my personal opinion and does not represent Facebook in any way)
You are mistaken: FBM supports multi-way communication. For work, I use Messenger almost exclusively. For personal stuff, some combination of Messenger, Google Chat, and SMS/MMS. I do log on to IRC once in a while, mainly Freenode, but it's far from "primary".
Why does the "average" person ever need weak identity communication? I mean, I'm glad it exists and it has a niche, but why would you expect that to be someone's main way of interacting with people?
Anyways, there is an issue with FBM's multi-way: It's designed as an invite only system: you have a list of people you want to talk to multi-way, and you talk to them. This is fine in certain contexts, but in other contexts, the "room" abstraction used by IRC is more effective, as it allows you to have conversations with a strictly defined topic, but not strictly defined participants, the opposite of FBM. FBM's system is fine for small-scale multi-way communication between known parties, but that's not what people use IRC for.
IRC isn't everywhere. Even a large channel like freenode's #node.js has maybe 15 regulars, myself included.
Meanwhile, Elm's Slack channel has more regulars than #node.js.
IRC is kept alive by a small holdout. I'm one of those people, but it's no mystery to me why nobody else uses it when I'm paying irccloud.com or running weechat-ncurses on a VPS just for basic features everyone expects from a communication tool.
#python and #ubuntu are heavily filled on freenode with over a thousand users though? As well as #debian and #go-nuts (for Go) I think IRC is plenty popular, now if the vast majority idle is another story, people are from all around the globe.
Like #node.js, they have 1000-2000 users connected with probably the same level of engagement, so probably 98% idle which means it's effectively a chat room for about 15 people.
And each person needs to care enough about IRC (e.g. run a VPS) to receive pings or messages while they are away and to see the message history when they return.
Maybe IRC is "plenty popular" which apparently means popular enough to find someone willing to shoot the shit with you if you're in one of its largest channels. But that's a far cry from "IRC is everywhere".
I use IRC every day. I'm just not left scratching my head when I find out that yet another ecosystem chose Slack/Discord over IRC. It blew me away when I saw how active Elm's Slack was while #elm is dead. But that's pretty much how it is with every community I'm part of with a Slack channel.
Sometimes people here suggest "maybe IRC is just for developers", but you can't even format a code block on IRC. :)
Over a thousand users; I wouldn't consider that popular. There are 6 times more people dying every hour than total number of users in those channels. And many of those probably overlap.
From the reply to my sibling post and yours, I stand corrected. It seems IRC is big with older languages like C and related (as in, a similar domain) ones like Rust[1]. JavaScript and new, web related languages like Elm are more likely to use Slack.
[1] I'm curious as to whether that IRC channel is the only "blessed" Rust chat out there. The problem with other languages is that the community makes a Slack for them even though there's an IRC channel for them already and most new users start only going to the Slack.
With Rust, I've only heard of some people making Slacks. I don't use Slack, but at least one person mentioned on IRC that the Rust slack they were in was pretty much dead, so I'm not aware of this happening to Rust yet. We'll see as time goes on. There are something like 50 #rust- channels on Mozilla's IRC and ##rust on Freenode, though.
I've also heard of quite a few very active JavaScript Freenode channels, though Slack does have a lot of inroads there depending on which particular segment of the community you're into.
There are a bunch of substantially less trafficked, though definitely regularly active, channels for Rust: #rust-offtopic, #rust-internals, #rust-beginners (this one is recommended in the official documentation and is well-traficked), #rust-osdev, several others too.
Everywhere as in...? IRC isn't going anywhere for sure, I use it (prefer it to Slack), but its usage has diminished greatly to very niche groups such as anime subtitling communities and programming languages/techs. Of the latter, many are either moving to Slack or also have a Slack with more people on it. I also hear less and less developers using or talking about IRC in general.
Elixir (language), Ember (JavaScript framework), Elm (language) all have more active Slacks than IRCs. Facebook's React moved from Slack to Discord, and the community has never cared for or used their IRC channel.
There's still fairly active IRCs like the JavaScript, Go, Clojure (I think), and the Node ones, but they're becoming the exception.
I think IRC is popular in your group of developers and interests, but for many people it's somehow considered ancient. On an interview I once mentioned IRC and the interviewer (in his 40s) was surprised it was still a thing.
Then again, look at the stacks you're looking at: they're all relatively new, and most of them are frontend, and thus more likely to jump on the new shiny. ##c on freenode has >1k users as I write this. Although that's probably also an outlier.
Personally, I'm hoping that Matrix becomes the new standard, if we ever get one beyond IRC. IRC is showing its age, and Matrix seems to be the most practical and levelheaded group doing work on the problem.
As for Slack, I'm pretty lukewarm on it, and kinda prefer IRC.
