Retirement of IRC Services and KDETalk.net (Jabber)

[Carl Schwan]

On Monday, 22 May 2023 00:26:09 CEST argonel wrote:
Hi,

> I would argue that the low usage is in part due to lack of awareness.
> It has a one-line mention on the "Internet Relay Chat" community wiki
> page (which wasn't added until 2019) that doesn't even explain the
> benefits of using it.
> 
> IRC in combination with the BNC is much more suited to intermittent
> usage than Matrix is, which currently obligates the user to "be
> active" every 30 days, or risk (permanently!) losing access to the
> entirety of the history of all of their joined channels (even the
> parts for which they were present). The BNC happily buffers the text
> until your client is able to reconnect. As an example, this allowed me
> to read discussions that happened while I endured an extended power
> outage, even when Matrix had decided that I was idle for "too long".

The requirement of not being inactive for 30 days is not due to Matrix. Matrix  
doesn't care about your inactivity, but his is actually a Libera.chat policy, 
which was a requirement for libera.chat authorizing the bridging. This is the 
same issue with the fact that when you join a room, you can't see the chat 
history from before you joined the room.

I understand that this requirement is due to some technical issues, as IRC 
doesn't support having so many connections open at the same time but it's a 
bit wrong to blame Matrix for that. I do wonder why BNC is not affected by this 
policy, but I suppose it's because there are way less users using IRC.

Cheers,
Carl