I'm really bummed about the negativity in the comments. I for one have high hopes for this as the current generation of web powered chats are huge pain for me. Maybe open protocols can take the lead again, at least for a while. It has happened before. Let other people work for our benefit with a bit of encouragement, it costs very little and an eventual failure will do you no harm.
The cost is that it is fragmenting the already fragmented scene of open protocols with an inferior solution. Now I will have to install a 5th chat client in order to talk with the few people that will move to it.
Note that IRCv3 is backward-compatible, so you don't need a new client. Any existing IRC client can connect to it just fine; including multi-protocol clients like Pidgin. And if you do want a client with all the new IRCv3 features, that client can still connect to old IRC servers.
The beauty of an open protocol is that you probably won't need a new client -- all the existing clients will just add it as another network to connect to.
Remember back in the day when everything was an open protocol? We didn't use five chat clients -- we used Trillian to connect to all the different networks.
All of the chat protocols that I use are open actually, yet neither I nor you use a client that supports matrix, irc, xmpp, etc at the same time. Clients that supported multiple protocols died for a reason. These were "jack of all traded but madter of none", extremely buggy and lacking in features.
I do. It's called Beeper. Also, I didn't care that they were "master of none". I just wanted to talk to all my friends on all the networks without having to use a ton of memory running multiple apps, which was more important back then, when the cost of multiple apps was higher.
> Clients that supported multiple protocols died for a reason.
"Master of none" includes crashing every few minutes, dropping messages, lacking critical features, etc.
As for beeper it seems to lack xmpp support (despite some of the services that they support using it internally). Although I will say that it looks cool.
"Yeah, because everyone moved to closed networks."
This is not how I remember it but let's agree to disagree :p
The main question remains though, what does irc3 offers over xmpp and matrix?
I don't remember Trillian having any of those problems. I remember loving it and using it constantly, but having to stop using it when my friends started moving to closed networks so I had to run a bunch of other clients.
irc3 brings irc up to modern standards so that when are using a combo client, the features you have on the other networks work on IRC too.
> I remember loving it and using it constantly, but having to stop using it when my friends started moving to closed networks so I had to run a bunch of other clients.
This seems backwards, didn't you use Trillian _because_ your friends were using closed networks and you didn't want to run a bunch of clients? I don't really remember anyone rushing to Trillian because it was the best XMPP client it was because it could speak to multiple closed networks. It died because trying to keep up with reliably doing so was a pain, particularly when the normal user moved past only needing plain text IM to work reliably.
I'm defining closed networks as ones like Facebook Messenger and iMessage and such. The "closed" networks that Trillian accessed still used open protocols. But my progression was AIM, then ICQ at the same time, then Trillian which could do both plus the few people on Yahoo messenger and GTalk and IRC, and then I had to drop it when too many people moved off of those networks onto the really closed networks.
> I'm defining closed networks as ones like Facebook Messenger and iMessage and such.
It's odd you put Facebook Messenger in the protocol group that killed off Trillian as it has always supported that. When Facebook Messenger launched it was XMPP compatible and nowadays when it has moved to be fully proprietary it has remained supported through reverse engineering (just like most protocols Trillian supports).
That example aside your further examples of "open protocols" Trillian supported are even less open and more hostile to 3rd party clients than Facebook Messenger:
> The "closed" networks that Trillian accessed still used open protocols. But my progression was AIM, then ICQ at the same time, then Trillian which could do both plus the few people on Yahoo messenger and GTalk and IRC
AIM used their proprietary OSCAR protocol, which ironically the "O" stood for "Open" but they never actually distributed a spec/standard and actually went through great effort to prevent other reverse engineered 3rd party clients from being compatible over time. OSCAR had to be reverse engineered no different than (newer) Facebook Messenger or Discord or so on today.
ICQ was where OSCAR was developed (under ownership of AOL). All of the above applies and it intentionally broke unauthorized 3rd party clients many times.
Yahoo Messenger used their proprietary YMSG, had to be reverse engineered, and was often hostilely changed to shake 3rd party clients.
GTalk was better but that's because it was intentionally XMPP compatible. Like I said though "I don't really remember anyone rushing to Trillian because it was the best XMPP client it was because it could speak to multiple closed networks.".
I guess you could throw IRC in as a non XMPP open protocol but, ignoring that these were normally just gatewayed, it doesn't explain either the success or decline of Trillian. All of the supported 3rd party chat clients do.
.
Since the internet became consumer towards the end of the 90s there hasn't been a time the majority of people were on open protocol chat networks or a multiprotocol client got popular without support for popular closed protocols of the day. Many clients and bridges have come but they have all eventually run out of steam trying to catch up to the latest hostile changes or the latest proprietary protocol that is taking off while none have ever supported more than the basic feature set like plain text and maybe images across multiple platforms reliably. Not saying it's impossible or people should be using closed protocols just that's how it's been.
To say closed protocols and clients are a new thing that killed the old multiprotocol apps is false, they started to solve exactly that probably but just ran out of steam. Now Matrix has some of us nerdy folks exited about an easy way to glue such networks together via an open federated protocol (which XMPP folks never really liked doing for some reason) and 3rd party integrations are being maintained again. They are still going to run into hostility and lack of feature parity but as we know from the ~2000-~2010 era it can work okay for plain text if you're fine with the occasional missed message or temporary protocol outages from upstream changes.
Yikes, Pidgin was nothing like this in my experience. Rock solid for months at a time. Maybe you pushed the wrong button? What are the details of the platform you were trying to run it on?
Ideally ALL protocol (by the definition of it) ought to be openly defined. The authentication to use the protocol is another thing. Of course, security by obscurity is how the banks talk to each other.
There's no reason that a web-based chat cannot also have a "thick" client which works as IRC currently does.
We can do both with a single service...
the true problem here is that IRC is long-forgotten by many, completely unknown by most, and those that remain remain because they have a strong attachment to IRC. That strong attachment will make driving a standard forward very difficult, because no two true IRC fans are going to have the same opinions on what a new version should look like.
It's the true fans of open source stuff that hold open source stuff back the most.
