Now you may be thinking; “That chat program is still around?” or “What the heck is a eye-arr-see?”
Well let me tell you my friend. It stands for Internet Relay Chat and it’s been around for 34 years. It’s pretty much perfected at this point and quite easy to use if you have even the slightest technical knowledge.
So IRC servers are separate from one another with each server having it’s own admins. Each server you connect to has it’s own bots ran by individuals to messages and ask for things.
IRC servers work by sending slash commands much like discord does. To message another user you might type /msg coolboot2000 hello world! Piracy on IRC works by sending a bot a pm with the pack number you want.
“Where do I find servers and bots and pack numbers?” It’s as easy as using a xdcc search engine. http://sunxdcc.com/ has both a search and a list of networks. (DCC is Direct Client to Client meaning no files pass thru the server and XDCC is a version of DCC that allows large files to be transferred.)
“How do I connect?” You use an IRC client with SSL support. mIRC for windows and Hexchat with a patch for Linux. Once installed you can use the slash command /connect or use the clients GUI buttons to make a connection to the server.
“How do I make my own IRC client?” Follow the specifications here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_Relay_Chat_commands There are a ton of pre-made IRC libraries for pretty much every programming language.
Best luck friends!
To expand on this Have you considered Matrix? It’s like IRC but encrypted AND includes a bridge to IRC so you can have the best of both worlds. https://matrix.org/ The most popular client here https://element.io/ though there are many others.
@Tekchip @AndrewZen And the protocol is a million times more complicated and doesn’t always work reliably and requires a lot more server resources.
I have to agree. I love the idea of Matrix, but as someone who pushed his family to use it for the last two years, it is not reliable. Messages not going through, or going through but delayed, or having decryption errors. We moved away from it about two weeks ago due to important messages not making it through on many occasions and the confusion and frustration it’s caused.
I want to move over to it (in the medium-long term) but yes, there are a few deal breakers.
First, the clients are horribly resource hungry. If I open Element on my phone, it will keep synchonizing my messages for minutes until I can see any new messages, all the while CPU usage is through the roof.
Then, push notifications on my phone are not working even in the official client, Element.
But I’m aware of the pitfalls of how encryption work there, so I would just not bother using that feature for now. Like, if 2 if you start exchanging messages, and a 3rd family member joins, they will not see previous messages, even if you have set history visibility that way, and there is no solution whatsoever. This is because encryption keys that were used in the past are not sent to new participants.
Currently we use Telegram, and there are disturbing changes lately, but that is at least performant, it works, and still much more trustable then facebook or google.
Speaking about notifications, did you check out your phone’s battery conserving settings? My friends having a Samsung or Xiaomi also have this issue due to aggressive restrictions on less-used apps. You can find more info and workarounds here: https://dontkillmyapp.com
Yes, but because of the resource usage of that app, I’m kind of reluctant to allow it to run more.
Also, I forgot to mention that I’m trying to use UnifiedPush (with ntfy) instead of google’s infrastructure. Sorry for that.
I’ve got similar experience. And I brought way more people to matriy than just my family. People are slowly mirgrating away from matriy to signal. The shitty part is that right now there’s a huge rewrite of element (element x) and it’s much more reliable in my experience. Right now when people move away, it becomes actually usable. We moved too early to matrix with the normies.
Also, while Matrix offers E2EE, the amount of metadata the protocol generates by design is something you should be aware of.
There is also this issue with portalled rooms regarding the libera IRC bridge.
Server resources are not that high because of the protocol, but because it’s done in fucking Python, which is inherently inefficient.
Yes in any other language it will still need more resources than IRC, but not that amount as now, and I think the tradeoffs are worth it.
An other thing is the resource usage of the clients.
Well yes if nearly all of the clients are made in web garbage then it’s no surprise they’ll be resource hungry.
But an other point that worsens the situation is that currently synchronization is done in a way that practically requires clients to keep all your joined rooms in memory. Change is on the way, fortunately, though.
That’s why I’m glad Lemmy is written in Rust. I know that the instance admins are getting the most bang for their buck when they aren’t wasting CPU cycles on running an interpreter.
Sounds like a hard pass until these are resolved.
Okay, but I’ve been using it for my chat rooms for a year now and it works just as well as IRC. I don’t host the server so I don’t know how much more resources it takes, though
I hadn’t even heard of it. nice. How would I find a server to join? How can you search with it?
https://joinmatrix.org should have answers to most of your questions.
If you read the site carefully it will make you set up key backup, but please for the love of god, do set up key backup asap after registration! Without it, it is so easy to lose access to all your former encrypted messages, and you will be very disappointed when that happens.
It’s what lemmy recommends for private messages since admins can see lemmy DMs. A lot of instances have matrix rooms too.
There is the default matrix.org server you can join.
There are others out there as well. https://joinmatrix.org/servers
You can also create your own server if you’d like. Servers are federated, so you’ll be able to communicate with any/all of them (as long as you follow the rules of each one)
You can search for chat rooms in the app. You’ll easily find all the rooms hosted on your server, but you can also join chats on other servers.
How would you rate your experience pirating content with it?
Honestly, not sure how well the piracy experience is on Matrix. I’m not a pirate myself, but I imagine it would work fine if it was smaller files. You could make a separate thread per item.
There is probably an upload size limit on the server though. As far as I know, you can’t transfer files peer to peer.
do you know any matrix server related to piracy?
I can’t vouch for any since I have no skin in the game. I did a quick room search and found quite a few “piracy” rooms. No idea who or what is going on in each of them though.
joinmatrix.org/
Matrix is awful, sorry. I tried using it for like a year, but it kept randomly encrypting things and not letting ppl see messages, or worse, kicking them out of the chat
Pretty sure if you use a bridge its no longer E2E
Yes, that’s true. Does IRC have any support for encryption? Because of it doesn’t, then there is no way at all to keep it E2E even past the bridge, as IRC users wouldn’t be able to decode the messages
Matrix is not even close to IRC. What makes you think like that?
They are referring to using Matrix as a bridge to connect to IRC - not as a replacement - for the purpose of improving privacy.