this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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IRC was so much better than Discord. People are stupid.
Relevant xkcd
Oh that is so true!! Love it.
I hope you don't mind me linking https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1782:_Team_Chat
I've lost a lot of my rose tint for discord, right around the arbitration clause thing, but I can't deny that it's convenient. Chat, streaming to friends, popping up a new server for whatever project or group, VC for playing games together. There's platforms that do all of these things better, but few that do all of them decently well.
Of course, it's a privacy nightmare and I stick to IRC for anything I wouldn't feel comfortable having linked to my identity, but I wouldn't call people stupid for using it.
Mostly I think its fine for all that.
But there's a special circle of hell for projects that rely on it for "documentation".
I get the temptation, I really do. But once you're taking money or have more than a couple people involved and semi-organized you really need at least a small wiki/git-hub landing page with the basics.
I know documentation is a separate skillset and a lot of work in its own right but projects can also stagnate and die because there isn't any.
Oh 1000% agree, having a discord for support is nice and all, but using it as a crutch in place of good documentation is a sin worthy of eternal damnation.
Heck, even support is a bit of a pain since projects also like to use it as their issue tracker and want you to search for your issue before posting (which it's awful for). GitHub is free or at least cheap depending on what you need and is way more searchable, as well as giving a place for wiki and a basic website
Direct chat support, discord is fine, but beyond that, please use something actually designed for it
It's wild how a good deal of decentralization and FOSS focused communities insist on having Discord be their primary center for community. Worst one is privacy focused communities...
I can't say that bridging them to matrix was a foolproof endeavor though
Amen. Guess it's the curse of the unknowing youth. They grow up with this bullcrap. I hate discord so much. "oh buy nitro, have stupid stickers!" ugh.
I really really really miss IRC. What was wrong with it? Why did it die? Did we all die?
It is alive and well, never died. Many project still use it for communication, support...
I know, there're even gopher, Finger and BBSs still around. But being around isn't really the same as alive. Except technically.
IRC is only text chat, Discord does a ton of other things on top.
Personally I've been on the internet for the last.. 27 years or so? I've used ICQ, Teamspeak, Skype, IRC, Mumble, Discord, Teams, .. (Probably forgot a few).
I never really liked IRC, yes, it's private servers which is nice, yes you can be relatively anonymous, but the channels were always a mess. Either too many people spamming so you can't follow a single conversation, or for most channels you had 40 people idling and never responding, so it felt like a ghost town.
Just in my personal experience Discord works a lot better and is far more convenient. But yeah, not much privacy there obviously (though everything you said in IRC was often saved away by a bot, so either way whatever you said was out there).
CashewNut slaps Vlyn around a bit with a large troutSure, but when everybody's Discord content vanishes behind a paywall, or makes you watch a 2 minute advert to see a Wiki, what are you going to do?
Already I can't just browse the content on a Discord community without "joining" and all that bollocks.
Like I'm sure Discord is better than IRC, but it's not better than a collection of open standards so anyone can run a server.
How is this different to Discord? You have huge, medium and small channels in both.
Your personal experience is biased as fuck because having to go through phone verification or downloading a sketchy proprietary client is in no way far more convenient than firing up irc
/me slaps Vlym about with a large trout.
Except the lack of a decent mobile client that doesn't require you to self-host something to receive all messages
This is genuinely the only problem why we switched to Signal for work communication. My colleagues wanted us developers to use Slack and other proprietary stuff but IRC was enough. Only issue was that you couldn't get push notifications on mobile.
Better how? I can't message people when they're offline, everything is completely boring text, no images, it's not clear how I can easily setup my own server, everything feels archaic.
I tried using it before Discord was even a thing, and I already thought it quite sucked. If you think it's great, then good on you for knowing everything inside and out, but the discoverability with any IRC client tends to be in the negatives. It feels awful to use.
You literally just listed some of the reasons IRC is better. That said, I don't see any reason an IRC client couldn't be made to support images, with the understanding that it would have to be done in a way that falls back to posting it as a link for people using text-only clients, but that shouldn't be too difficult.
This functionality can be enabled on IRC servers or on a per-channel basis using bots.
Again an advantage of IRC. Not every group of 2 people need their own server. And a simple 2 second Google search (or learning your IRC client) will show you how to create your own channel in seconds.
That really depends on the client. There are (or at least used to be) plenty of user-friendly IRC clients. How many alternate clients can I use with Discord?
And heaven forbid someone should have to think for more than 3 seconds when learning something new to them.
I swear I sometimes think that once all of us Gen-Xers are gone, there won't be anyone left who actually understands how the Internet or the technology that runs on it actually works, as prophesied by Idiocracy.
Inb4 using an image to compliment no images
ICQ was nice. It had an IM, a user directory, and alternative clients without games etc, until its owners went crazy.
Old Skype was nice. It had fast file transfers, a good Linux client, network efficiency etc, until Microsoft.
I think everybody thought that just like from proprietary ICQ everybody went to proprietary Skype and it was nice, there's going to be an equally good alternative when Skype rots and people will move to it.
There are fscking none among the popular IMs.
ICQ ... when you haven't logged in for a bit and then when you do your computer emits a fast-paced streak of uh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-oh
https://youtu.be/f0iqM_AnSuo
How?
Not centralised for a start. Think of it like 'federated Discord'.
Also, IRC doesn't constantly try to throw "upgrades" (Nitro) in your face every single moment that it gets.
Matrix?
I discovered IRC only 1.5 years ago and now all my social life is there.
I find it difficult to get started. I have the client and everything but had trouble finding communities on irc.
Which communities do you find are worthwhile? Like others have mentioned everything I've pursued has definitely felt like a ghost town.
Any guides on how to get started on IRC? I gave it a try a couple months ago but couldn't find any good communities.