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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 9:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum f74008f7cf1e47ae7c5263f0c19cad82
http://techrights.org/videos/kiwi-irc.webm
> Image: Kiwi IRC logo
Summary: The entry barrier of IRC is extremely low thanks in part to Web-based clients; in this spontaneous video I explain some of the work I did last night, some of the work our sysadmin has been doing lately, and how anybody can leverage IRC to create online communities (or “chatrooms”) that are based entirely around Free software and will hopefully (some time soon) be more decentralised, which means less/lowered risk of getting cut off for business reasons, unpopular opinions and so on
IRC is widely misunderstood because of its age. One journalist mocked us some months ago for using IRC — a shallow ad hominem attack relying on a shallow “appeal to novelty” (like all this “smart” and “clown” stuff). IRC is IRC. It’s still evolving (e.g. IRCv3). It’s a protocol, not a company or an application. There are many IRC implementations (same for Gemini) and they generally are compatible owing to the protocols, both at the server side and the client side. Think of E-mail for an analogy! IRC has been around for so long because it is robust to disruption (no single point of failure) and geeks can appreciate that. They have a better understanding of why IRC is better. One needn’t be a geek to know how to use it. We think that lots of people out there are missing out if they don’t adopt IRC; a lot of IRC’s rejection boils down to misconception or a lack of awareness. So we intend to do a lot more videos on the subject and emphasise the strengths of IRC. Not just strengths on a technical level but also freedom aspects of IRC. There’s nobody controlling the thing! No masters, no slaves. Sure, within a given network there can be a hierarchy, but there are lots of independent networks and many projects/implementations, so no single developer can act like a dictator (in Mastodon they have been having issues to that effect, but Fediverse has other compatible implementations, such as Pleroma).
“…a lot of IRC’s rejection boils down to misconception or a lack of awareness.”The video above focuses on Kiwi IRC, which unfortunately outsourced the code to Microsoft’s prison (GitHub). Kiwi IRC can be installed locally or accessed through a third party (including Kiwi IRC itself) and it can be turned into a widget, accessible in a variety of ways. The level of control over the Web end and the back end is up to the configurator. It’s always possible to change as one goes along. I like Kiwi IRC for reasons explained in the video and it is still improving every day (daily commits and bugfixes). I tried several of its counterparts and they’re nowhere near as good. Mibbit isn’t too bad, but the licence isn’t on par (Apache-2.0 licensed for Kiwi IRC and KiwiChat NextClient is licensed GPLv3 or later; it’s still active, last commit 28 days ago). I tried a number of alternatives, even at code level, but nothing comes even close to Kiwi IRC. In terms of features and looks (themes are nice, but the functionality is a lot more important than just gloss).
> Image: The governments told me to take down that user; The governments told me to take down that channel; The governments told me to take down the whole network; But I control the whole network, so I told them where to go...
Suffice to say, many who watch the video already know IRC and many people have already used native (locally installed) IRC clients, so the video does not cover any of that. If the goal is to make IRC more widely accessible to a lot more people, Kiwi IRC isn’t a bad way. It can be embedded in one’s site, even hosted in one’s own server.
When it comes to IRC, so far one main barrier to entry was laziness, e.g. being too lazy to install something (Slack has a Web client). An obstacle being the client/user-end application having to be installed, configured, and generally understood (for the settings to be put in place correctly) can be gradually removed with Web-based interfaces; the client is the browser itself. Yes, widgets make access a lot easier as one needs to supply nothing but a Web address.
To set up channels, no technical knowledge is required either. There are already many open networks — networks that welcome additional channels. Here’s a list of the top 100 IRC networks (by number of online/simultaneous users). Imagine a world where we have millions of channels, spread across thousands/millions of servers with billions of users (who can communicate across networks). It would certainly liberate communications and communities from thought-policing oligopolies. It’s definitely something to strive for. It’s a technical problem as much as it is a political/policy problem. █
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