IRC for the 21st Century: Introducing Riot

Quoting:IRC's best strengths are as a decentralized and open communication method, making it easy for anyone to participate by running a network of their own

if you run your own IRC network, you will NOT be able to connect to other IRC networks. in other words, you will not be able to participate in an existing network that way.

IRC is distributed, but not decentralized. IRC networks are closed. to join the network you need to give access to your server to the existing IRC network administrators. and those administrators define which software you must run in order to be allowed in.

this is very different from eg. jabber/xmpp where you can run your own server and communicate with other servers without opening access to anyone else. you are free to run whatever server you want that speaks the xmpp protocol. at one point even google talk supported xmpp and you were able to talk to google talk users without joinng google yourself.

compare that to the requirements to join the Freenode IRC Network: http://freenode.net/support they even require root access on your server. and forget joining if your server is not located in a high bandwidth datacenter.

greetings, eMBee.

we tested it, and found that it can loose track of connections. we had one user who according to riot and according to the channel was online. he could see channel messages, but his own messages never made it to the channel.

even tested with a new user. messages go one way. looks like the riot-freenode bridge is broken.

at one point a backlog of messages appeared, and then it stopped functioning again.

also, even for those messages that do get through in the other direction there is quite a lag

sadly, that means it is not useful for production.

greetings, eMBee.

on second thought, it might be a network congestion problem. i have seen this with irssi too. when the network is congested, i can receive messages by others, but my own messages don't make it to the server.

greetings, eMBee.

at least they implement the bridge in a more user friendly way, in that each riot user gets their own connection to the irc server as if they connected directly from a client on their own machine, in difference to traditional irc bridges, where a bridge-user appears in the channel and all messages from people behind the bridge appear as that user.

greetings, eMBee.