IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
As a routine user of IRC: This scares – nay, terrifies – me.<p>London Trust Media is colossal. They seem to have control over freenode and Snoonet, two networks basically unchallenged in their niche. Snoonet hasn&#x27;t been doing so well since Discord, but that&#x27;s another story. They also seem to own Private Internet Access. If a player becomes too big, they&#x27;ll change the rules of the game. Just look at the state of Internet advertising: A few corporations probably know a lot more about most  better than you wish they did.<p>Re &quot;IRC University&quot;: Practically every non-trivial network has its own software stack of some sort. Trying to teach people every kind of IRCd&#x2F;services combination is more or less doomed to fail. Mainly because people usually just <i>don&#x27;t want to know</i>.<p>Re &quot;IRC Ventures&quot;: There&#x27;s no money to be made on IRC, at least in its current form. Slack, Discord, etc. gained traction because IRC is fundamentally inaccessible. It does not meet any of the common needs of today: server-side storage of history, mobile-friendly data usage and session management, built-in uploading, profiles and profile pictures, first class support for emoji. Though whether addressing them is correct is another story. However, these would all need to be addressed to try and make IRC competitive on any kind of market. The IRCv3 team, which does have a decently broad amount of adoption, has had issues pushing through much more trivial issues. Hell, we don&#x27;t even have everybody on the same page about <i>TLS</i> – QuakeNet and UnderNet are still plaintext only. QuakeNet undeniably intentionally so[1].<p>Mark me highly skeptical of this undertaking.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quakenet.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;99-trust-is-not-transitive-or-why-irc-over-ssl-is-pointless" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quakenet.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;99-trust-is-not-transitive...</a><p><i>EDIT</i>: Seems I misunderstood some points, see also neatnosleep&#x27;s response to this comment.