The account removal page didn't even work few months ago. I was getting some generic error messages and eventually gave up as it didn't seem to be temporary. Asking for more data when I clearly want the exact opposite is funny.
> The PHP community also prefers medium sized packages, so you don't get a thousand dependencies accidentally.
I think it was Laravel or Lumen? I tried that one once and was kinda amazed it pulled like 100 packages. In PHP ecosystem, I think that's considered a lot (to be fair, this is few years back). I've worked on fairly large projects (mostly Symfony + Doctrine and PHPUnit) and don't recall seeing so many dependencies.
Now compare this to initialization of any common JS framework starter.
checked for a fresh laravel install: 110 packages, 40 of those are development dependencies. Of the 70, only 38 are non (symfony/laravel) dependencies.
The PHP ecosystem tends to use packages-for-interfaces, so that ups the count somewhat.
I think a better measure really is lines of code. A comparison with react is _very unfair to laravel/rails_, with laravel being a full-featured framework, and yet react is still much worse:
laravel/framework:
no-dev-deps: 307,405 lines of PHP (36MB)
all-deps: 535,383 lines of PHP (58MB)
react (stock create-react-app)[1]
all-deps: 1,570,720 lines of Javascript + 96417 lines of typescript (348MB)
rails (rails new app):
(no-dev-deps): 264123 lines of Ruby + 23614 lines of C + 17009 lines of JS (55MB)
(all-deps): 332083 lines of Ruby + 23614 lines of C + 18055 lines of JS (54MB)
> Discord and Slack have the great advantage of being freemium proprietary software that don't have to inter-operate with any software not written by their own companies.
While that indeed is an advantage, it's not why they're dominant, and I'm not sure it's simply a question of funding either.
Let's be honest, compared to IRC, Discord and Slack are very easy to use. All it takes to join a server is clicking a link. IRC protocol is just as old as me, and I, to this day, remember the struggle as a kid of joining empty channels before finally understanding the concept of networks. Back in the day, you'd need a special friend with ZNC to be the cool kid. Since then, audience has changed dramatically and most people don't even know what "protocol" means.
IRC just doesn't offer what it takes to get everyone on board.
IRC's main barrier remains easy access to history, IMO.
There are a few easy 'just click a link' web clients I've used (via doing exactly that from a GitHub readme or similar) - but you connect and then you have no history, no idea (without waiting a bit) if there's an ongoing discussion, no idea what it's about if there is. Then you go afk and if you get disconnected only to reconnect later, you have no idea if someone answered your question during the time you were offline.
(I like & 'support' & want to use Matrix, but haven't yet.)
History is possible with current IRC tech & spec, but I think the cost (GDPR compliance etc.) will be a challenge for networks run by volunteers. Even before the spec work, IRCCloud has been an option for a long time. Now there is a chat service for paid users of Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-11-29-announcing-the-chat.sr...
You don't need everyone unless you're trying to IPO. For instance, it's not hard to slap mature GUI clients on company laptops to access a company IRCd. You can even use emoji!
>You don't need everyone unless you're trying to IPO
But if you are looking for people to talk to, but they don't use IRC (read: almost everyone) there is no reason to use IRC. If I wanted to talk about speedrunning a game I will go to Discord because that's where the community is, not on some IRC server.
Slack doesn't get money from casuals, so if your company says "hey we use IRC," you're going to plop a client on your laptop and be done with it (and there are web clients besides). It's not a learning curve you'd have to worry about.
Quassel? Mature and works on everything except iOS if you use the split client/bouncer mode.
iOS is only not properly supported because the devtools and hardware are far too expensive for me to finance.
If you wanna deploy an ircd, there's some modern ones like ergo. Deploying ergo and the quasselcore bouncer can be easily done with a helm chart on your k8s cluster, you can even get Prometheus metrics out.
Google is best for searching Russian sites automatically (and very poorly) translated to my language that hijack history.back(). I'm getting those a lot lately.
I'm very satisfied not working for software companies. My clients businesses revolve around real estate, transportation, manufacturing, etc. For them, software is a tool, not a product. Apart from stuff you mentioned, such as relaxed deadlines, it's also much more interesting for me.
When I was working for software companies, understanding the core business of our clients wasn't really that important, at least not at my position - just bunch of APIs around RDBMS, that sort of stuff.
Now I get to talk to end users and they get to talk to me, resulting in me learning a lot of stuff completely unrelated to software development (which is often exciting) and them getting something they actually want.
Also, for some reason, SCRUM was very stressful for me. No matter the actual deadlines, the everyday standups, all the organizational meetings and constant surveillance made me think that all the issues are urgent, which was rarely the case.
A colleague at the company I worked for was asked to explore available options regarding this matter. It simply didn't occur to him that this was supposed to be kept in secret, so pretty much everyone knew about this being planned, which turned out to stop this idea before it has been implemented.
Later, I was asked to implement some metrics in our in-house ERP, which would tell the management exactly at which time what employee was doing what - think of a same level of insight an Apache access log would give you. This was one of the few times I intentionally obstructed and eventually blocked this request. There were ways to measure performance anyway, I just refused the idea of live-monitoring.
