Hello,

IRC is ideal for chat. "Chat room" is a name for an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel. IRC chat takes place on a network of servers; the network that hosts the Wikimedia channels is known as Libera Chat. To participate in the chat, you need a type of program or plug-in called an IRC client.

IRC is essentially stateless. The server doesn't remember what messages people have sent; so it can't tell you what was said last night when you come online in the morning, or what was just said in some channel you weren't previously listening to. That work gets pushed out to clients, and to add-on services.



The IRC server also doesn't store images or any other kind of file people want to show each other. There are lots of good practical reasons to want to share images in a conversation (e.g., screenshots), plus of course silly GIFs. That work also gets pushed out to add-on services.

When people say here that Slack or Zulip etc. are a much better user experience than IRC, I think those two things -- message history, and images -- are major reasons for that.

Message history means a database that gets big, and images mean a lot of data too. There's a large working set of both of those that you want fast access to. That means providing adequate RAM.

Do you know if there are for Linux better software for having more advanced IRC service, with pictures, remembering messages, chat (when offline),...?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp...y_Chat_clients
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lis...ns#IRC_clients

People have been sending gifs over IRC? Okay, I've clearly been behind the times.

Hello, it seems you contradict yourself and IRC is not ideal for chat. And yes, using IRC for chat is about as useful as pissing out a message on snow on last day of winter.

Yea, you just write "dancing_baby.gif" and people immediately think about this - https://gifs.com/gif/the-dancing-bab...s-1080p-4QDwV1

IRC is truly the thinking man's Slack, not for feeble minded who do not watched Richard and Mortimer.