[SWLUG] #swlug IRC channel location - reasons to move

[Dave Cridland]

On Mon Aug 15 15:18:46 2005, steve at nexusuk.org wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Dave Cridland wrote:
> 
>> Ah, yeah, I did raise both XMPP and SILC on the channel, actually. 
>> As Telsa pointed out, the difficulty with both is that they're not 
>> always installed by default on a distribution (although with 
>> XMPP's success, this is changing).
> 
> I can't speak for other distributions, but Fedora has shipped with 
> Gaim for quite some time - do other distributions not do the same?
> 
> 
Ubuntu certainly does.


>> New users are more likely to find IRC than XMPP conferences.
> 
> I'm not wholly convinced there - instant messaging seems to be way 
> more popular than IRC these days.  Besides, don't most people find 
> out about #swlug through the web site? (which would obviously tell 
> people where to go to connect to an XMPP conference).
> 
> 
Yes, but it also requires finding a jid for yourself, doesn't it? To 
put it another way, it requires infrastructure that IRC doesn't.

Having had a chat with Lilo quite recently, he's aiming to have XMPP 
support in Freenode at some point, so this point may well become moot 
anyway.

Freenode does have the advantage that it's geared toward IRC newbies, 
of course - again, it's not a traditional IRC network. And I 
personally think that IRC clients are significantly better than XMPP 
conferencing clients, at the moment.

Dave.