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> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority.
Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android.
In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then we had the same problem again in the mobile world, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support.
The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market.
If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously required you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone.
The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2].
[1] https://quassel-irc.org/
[2] https://thelounge.chat/
> The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself.
You don't have to build a new protocol. The Ergo IRCd supports multiple clients connecting to the same account (and using the same nick) at the same time using the regular IRC protocol: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....
IRC is great! I access through the excellent biboumi gateway, which offers bouncer-like functionality and let me choose between various clients. There are open instances available for everyone to use, although I couldn't give a list of them since I self-host. I like that it's very lightweight, making it a reasonable permacomputing approach to group chats.
I wouldn't go as far as saying it's the only viable chat protocol, if you follow the link below you'll guess what I have in mind saying that. (it starts with an X and ends with two Ps)
https://biboumi.louiz.org/
> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority.
Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android.
In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then we had the same problem again in the mobile world, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support.
The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market.
If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously required you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone.
The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2].
[1] https://quassel-irc.org/
[2] https://thelounge.chat/
In case anyone is not aware, you can download Discord logs.
https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
why not using an end2end encrypted p2p only chat lioe https://cabal.chat instead?