You can’t even see the history in many channels.
Because it’s stable and reliable. Other protocols come and go every 10 years.
A lot of the reason is /because/ it’s hard to use. Discussion on Libera Chat (formerly Freenode) is usually higher quality than on your average discord channel for example, no doubt because people who go to the trouble to properly set up an IRC bouncer and learn the other idiosyncrasies of IRC are more interested in having serious conversation.
On the technical side, IRC is a very simple protocol compared to all serious alternatives. There are clients to satisfy anyone’s needs, no matter how niche. There are less distractions for those of us who only want text.
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Not sure, it seems relyable like SMS and has the same security, but just like SMS there are better options available. And most people don’t use IRC or SMS and use WhatsApp or Signal instead, because they have more and better features and security.
Signal became a nonstarter for me when it turned out the person running the project is actively hostile to third party clients and bullied one out of existence.
That and, at least historically, it was pretty heavily wedded to mobile phones in a way that disqualifies it for anything I want to have long conversations with.
Assuming that the history is not stored anywhere, that’s a pretty big advantage for security. A hacker can’t breach what doesn’t exist anymore.
Why is seeing the history so important?
If you mean backlog from when you were away then you can solve that with a bouncer.
Anyone can host an IRC server. Discord is not a charity, you don’t get all that cotton candy for free.
There is matrix
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it’s FOSS
Utter simplicity, and it does what it does very well. It’s not for photo sharing, selling stuff, etc. Quite a few tech support groups still use it, and I blog my tech posts in a channel run.
Because there are a multitude of clients that work with it. it’s open. It’s not a walled garden. You aren’t stuck in yet another horrid browser app.
Also for some purposes the lack of history can be an advantage. For a channel that’s real-time social interaction, people coming and going and only having access to the things that happened when they were there can be a positive.
Why not?
IRC’s been around for ages and got a huge foothold in tech circles. There’s a lot to hack around it and the process of setting it up and managing is very simple, not to mention the protocol is lightweight.
It fills its own role very well where persistent message history isn’t required, joining is easy, and to be incredibly robust.
Really the only advantage IRC has is excellent terminal clients. It’s old and does not serve the vast majority well enough.
The same answer applies to all outdated and insecure protocols: because is convenient.