> People not being able to instantly insert 20 lines of text is a _good_ thing.
Element (Matrix) and Slack will render something like this as 3-5 lines with the expansion option to see all of it. I'm sure discord will eventually do the same too.
This is clearly preferable to using a different application entirely to view the snippet.
It's only IRC where some naive clients expand this out into 20 something messages where this is a problem. And since it's not part of the protocol, you're at the whims of the sender's client for how it's handled, so it's not like you can install a sufficiently smart client to render it how you like in all cases.
I'd also suggest your perspective of how much a problem even that 20 lines of text is is distorted by being in fast moving public chatrooms, like your typical Linux distro channel. In my small team or friends chat, it's perfectly fine
The same also applies to the gif. If this one bothers you, most clients even have the options to disable inline images, so the sender gets to choose. Also it means you just get the image file, and not whatever cruft the popular image host of this 5 year period is doing to monetise.
Image hosts and pastebins also seem more fragile than chat services. I've occasionally gone through old messages that link to pastie or similar and the context is gone.
> Image hosts and pastebins also seem more fragile than chat services.
Sadly true. While I don't use IRC much, looking at older posts from fora without on-forum file storage and I just see photos roughly like this Imgur example (https://imgur.com/NOnf.jpg). Heck, even older HN posts suffer from the same problem.
For me it's not really about fast moving rooms or not, but that I want to see a bit of context to what was said.
In IRC it's easy to see more than 60 lines back without having to scroll, but all modern alternatives don't have that as a concern at all. Have a few people paste code, liberal use of quoting for messages that are less than 10 lines up (so you are seeing the same message 3 times repeated on the screen), people posting images and you'll be lucky to even have a tiny fraction visible compared to the IRC view.
I can of course see the appeal of all those features, but at least for me it translates into a much worse UX in the end.
The users still on IRC have their heads stuck in the sand and insist every feature irc is missing is actually a good thing and that the users are wrong.
The users then use other services which have these features and the irc users claim some grand conspiracy to kill open protocols.
I think your expectations can easily be alleviated with the right IRC client. Most pastebins and image hosts use some form of markup so that if your IRC client was set to preview those links then it could, or even potentially cache those resources as well.
So what is this magical sufficiently smart client that can embed images from all major image hosts, code snippets from all major pastebins and also configures a bouncer for me and also lets me see messages on my phone without missing some as the phone OS killed it's network socket as it put the app to sleep?
I'm no stranger to the IRC protocol (in fact one of my first submissions to this site 12 years ago in 2010 was an introduction to the protocol written as part of building an Android client that was my side project at the time), but I have no interest in putting in the time to make an IRC client with the experience I'd like in 2022, which is clearly a much lower bar on matrix when Element, nheko, Cinny, FluffyChat and Fractal have all managed it.
To be fair IRCCloud is not free nor open source. I believe there are other clients that offer similar functionality but it would be good to have something easy that does this readily available within open source
Element (Matrix) and Slack will render something like this as 3-5 lines with the expansion option to see all of it. I'm sure discord will eventually do the same too.
This is clearly preferable to using a different application entirely to view the snippet.
It's only IRC where some naive clients expand this out into 20 something messages where this is a problem. And since it's not part of the protocol, you're at the whims of the sender's client for how it's handled, so it's not like you can install a sufficiently smart client to render it how you like in all cases.
I'd also suggest your perspective of how much a problem even that 20 lines of text is is distorted by being in fast moving public chatrooms, like your typical Linux distro channel. In my small team or friends chat, it's perfectly fine
The same also applies to the gif. If this one bothers you, most clients even have the options to disable inline images, so the sender gets to choose. Also it means you just get the image file, and not whatever cruft the popular image host of this 5 year period is doing to monetise.
Image hosts and pastebins also seem more fragile than chat services. I've occasionally gone through old messages that link to pastie or similar and the context is gone.