> The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC ultimately also means that there are a number of fancy modern features that Discord has that IRC lacks, a big one being the inability to view backlogs of conversations that transpired while one was not connected to an IRC server. Although IRC does not itself provide this functionality, the extremely simple nature of IRC allows for a couple of lightweight options for reliably remaining on IRC around the clock and not missing out on a word that anyone says.
The article brushes over this, but IMO the lack of built-in backlog support is the main reason why IRC is essentially doomed. Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just run an always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it.
Especially when there are open, federated chat protocols that don't have this problem.
Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities.
Discord's logging is shitty because:
1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever.
2 - Unlike the logs of some IRC channels, Discord's logs aren't available on the web anywhere, so they can't be indexed or searched outside of Discord.
3 - Paging through hours or days of Discord logs is so incredibly painful, because every few screenfuls or so Discord has to load the previous/next logs and that is super slow compared to paging through text logs offline. If you have a lot of logs to page through, this experience is absolutely atrocious.
4 - There's no easy way to export the logs to be processed with standard/powerful text manipulation tools, like text editors, sed, etc..
Discord's search is painful because:
1 - There's no regex search.
2 - No ability to search via web search engines, because the logs aren't available on any website (see above).
3 - No way to search through the logs of multiple servers at once.
I have IRC logs going back decades, from servers I haven't been on in decades, but they're all instantly searchable, and the text in them is easily manipulable.
My Discord logs are trapped in Discord and I'm forced to use Discord's pretty but otherwise horrible UI to search them.
No, the reason Discord is popular has nothing to do with logging, but everything to do with how easy it is to sign up, join, and get a server running. Inline images and not having to learn obscure IRC commands or figure out obtuse IRC clients are also huge plusses for your average user. Discord's client is also visually pleasing -- something that most IRC client developers still haven't figured out. Aesthetics matter to users, as Apple has proved.
But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die.
>But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die.
I'm really saddened and angry that projects end up using Discord as their main forum interface.
Not everything is worth keeping around forever, but Discord is as closed a closed garden as can be.
That's great for private servers between friends, but it's contrary to the ethos of Open Source, as nothing is really in the open.
History is basically unsearchable and everyone lives in a perpetual present where topics need to be discussed over and over again instead of being easily available to newcomers. Once they disappear from the current page, they become really hard to reach.
And discord will happily close your account or prevent you from logging if your activity is deemed suspicious, i.e. if you're travelling and using VPNs, getting in can be a nightmare. The feeling of also being constantly watched, a step away from having your account blocked, is jarring.
I wish there was a good open source alternative that would also allow data to be easily made public and allowed users to just join and participate with whatever existing accounts they have (google, GitHub, any Fediverse account, etc).
Servers could be self-hosted or hosted for free or a minimal fee based on the server size, with some paying additional features (like flair, large audio rooms, automated backups, branding, more customization, etc).
But is discord too big to be taken on by an Open Source project?
Let’s not suggest IRC logs are much better. Individual clients may be able to log but say you just join a project channel with years of discussion — you’d have literally nothing to start with.
Discord gives you a chance at searching old history with zero additional setup if the permissions allow.
For both IRC and Discord you’d need to run a bot to have truly open logs online.
IRC is an information black hole where data that crosses the event horizon (scrolls off screen) will never return.
Sure, you can write your own logs, but does your business want you creating even more information to have to submit as evidence if you’re sued? What a nightmare.
Anything based on endless scrolling is already inherently shitful for meaningful persistent content. It makes anything into a black hole where information goes to die. But before that, it gives you a sense of anxiety because everything is moving around and you have no fixed reference points, and encourages random idle chatter....
As far as I'm concerned it is not a technology that should exist aside from realtime viewing of feeds, and things meant from random idle chatter.
People are using Discord like as if it's a forum and a wiki in one. Which isn't the worst thing, because it's better than nothing, but I think it would be better with an integrated real forum that auto-posts new topics in the chat.
If you have something you think is worthy of preserving, say it in a paginated forum where people can find it, if you have an ephemeral shitpost, say it in the chat. If you want to scroll through history of ephemeral shitposts and see what's happening, even that should have a calendar based pagination UI.
Old forums used to have shoutboxes. Proboards and phpbb and the like were basically already perfect.
If I was going to do a community platform, I'd just build a forum. The only thing I think I'd change is I'd make it so you could download archives, and I'd consider having a wikipedia style policy of everything being Creative Commons.
The thing that's driven me crazy about Discord since its launch is how bad its read position logging is compared to the service they copied (Slack). I don't know how you catch up on any conversation regularly, especially in a work environment.
Discord's search can't even find many specific words because it conflates them with other words and the results are flooded.
It's also very bad at URLs.
And sometimes it just breaks and loses results. If I remember right I even hit a situation where searching one word found a chat line, and another word found that same line, but both words didn't find it.
Actually I find it ugly, but thats firmly in personal preference territory. A decenct client would be skinnable or css-able to meet users diverse aesthetics.
I recorded logs back in my IRC days but I never used them for anything or searched through them. That is a complete red herring. Nobody who uses IRC cares about persistent chat. What most people want is to see the last X hours of chat history while they were offline, so if they open their chat client they don't have to stare at an empty window, not the last X months.
Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web and the various desktop clients like Skype were a crapshot or were obscure and required you to host your own server like Mumble.
Urbit's current chat implementation solves a lot of these issues and there's a clear path to things like search getting way better since all your chat data is stored on your local urbit.
I would put logging as a bottom tier feature for most chats. The characteristic of chats is in the moment and not some archival function. I am a heavy discord and telegram user but overall I would value the benefit of everything getting deleted after 72hours higher than the few times I actually search for something older than that.
"1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's." is the absolute best selling point. you are at serious risk if you say anything a censor would deem bad if the logs were ever surfaced and your anonymity were compromised.
people in the west have a lot of freedom in this and don't really need to care at the moment, but imagine living in the CCP or Thailand and bad mouthing the supreme leader?
Beyond the backlog support, it's the addressing of the backlog.
Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially unusable so having the backlog is often useless, however the ability to "pin" a useful message or discussion by getting a link is very relevant.
Baseline IRC doesn't have message addressing, regardless of backlogging.
"Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially unusable"
Discord's search function is 1,000x better than what's built into Windows 10 and 11. I've found pictures I posted from years ago in discord, Windows 10 can't even find half the files I downloaded and transferred to another drive the other day.
Not having a backlog is actually the thing I like about it. Discord (and Slack) have this thing where because there’s a backlog, people expect other people to have read everything. I prefer the experience where the assumption is that the people not in the room are assumed to have not seen a message. It makes it more unambiguously a synchronous experience, whereas Discord and Slack chat is pretty ambiguous as to whether it is synchronous or asynchronous.
IRC was bigger while I was growing up. But due to living with an internet connection that'd drop multiple times a day, I was never able to really use IRC because I'd ask a question and then get dropped. Getting dropped does not immediately log you out, the server has a timeout period. So when I'd get back in, I'd have to ask people to repeat whatever they said since the last timestamp I'd seen.
Not to mention some IRC channels are really high latency, you leave a message and someone else replies ten hours later. If you miss the reply because you were offline, you couldn't expect anyone to be around to repeat missed conversations back to you.
Due to this I've never really liked IRC, its not good for mobile devices or people who live with DSL or dial-up. Sure you can "just get an account on a bouncer" but that's pretty esoteric knowledge that I never encountered until after university.
Chat without history is such a waste. I used IRC recreationally back in the day, then at work for 10 years. What a total garbage communication format IRC is. People changing nicks to indicate being away was my biggest complaint.
It is unnecessary, AWAY indicates status, however people prefer changing their nick. of course, on mobile era, AWAY is unnecessary given you have a good mobile irc client.
I like that IRC has no backlog support. When you join a channel it's like you actually joined a room. You don't know what they were talking about when you weren't there.
That's nice as an optional feature but as a baseline it just seems like sentimental skeumorphism/metaphorism.
Chat being real-time is certainly "approaching real life" much moreso than fully asynchronous email, but most people don't want either to be real life: chat still needs an element of asynchronicity to distinguish it as a technologically useful medium improving over actually walking into a real room.
To put it another way: if I'm in a real life room where being present for the full conversation is necessary, it's easy to excuse being late or going to the bathroom as unfortunate parts of life when people are repeating themselves. When there's simple technological solutions that can easily prevent me from missing anything important, and someone's telling me they don't want it because they like the inconvenience, that's harder to justify.
It's a very interesting topic. Feature will alter the sociological / human aspect of the tool. I could feel it on discord, you join a room like on IRC, you join a realm, a group with lots of idiosyncrasies.
When I join an IRC chat there's a lot less baggage.. it's just a label / topic, it's very freeing.
logging, message fixing, embedded replies .. all great but not important in the end. These things are blending professional complexity with normal human moments. Not the right optimization (if optimizations are required at all)
The system, probably by design but also to limit capacity requirements for the server, is ephemeral, everything only exists in the moment and once everyone leaves the channel it ceases to exist, once your connection breaks your nick ceases to exist. There is no storage at all.
You need the irc services to keep specified information (like ownership of channels and nicknames) and they probably could also collect logs, with some limitations in case of netsplits of course.
How about partial backlogs? Like say I could "subscribe" to certain keywords (upto a max limit if that's necessary, say 10) and the server will store all messages containing those words or my username.
If I need more context about those messages when I return, I can just ask those users (or a bot).
Depends on the server. Many servers give you a reasonable amount of backlog before joining. A lot of regular users use something nice like Quassel or ZNC.
The IRC3 chathistory extension is less than 5 years old and still an unstable "work in progress" spec.
Absolutely fantastic that it was finally added but IRC is 34 years old, and this has been an essential feature of chat services for at least 20 of those years.
I'd love to see it's introduction now save IRC but given the seeming resistance to adding it, one wonders how long any other improvements will take.
There are good reasons to not have a backlog in a chat system.
For one it stops you from being lazy and not maintaining FAQs and documentation.
It also forces you to stop treating the chat as something you need to keep up to date with. At work I see people commonly scrolling back for pages and pages to find the last read marker and continue reading from there. This seems unhealthy to me.
I use a bouncer but I very rarely use the logs. For all the purposes for which I would use logs, there are normally bots in the channel which can compensate.
It's one of those things like "building an X server that isolates the graphics and events of untrusted clients from evert other client". It could be done, but people won't do it. They'll just whinge about its lack being inherent to the technology because there's more excitement in sweeping away the old tech and starting afresh than there is in building on what's there.
If you're storing data, someone somewhere has to pay for housing it. One of the reasons IRC is lightweight is because a network and its constituent servers only facilitates exchanging data between users.
Consider how Discord is begging you and everyone to sign up for Nitro because they're housing and serving all of their data. Most IRC networks on the other hand operate perfectly fine off of donated volunteer time and hardware for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users.
No data to store means cheaper and easier logistics. IRC is just a simple bridge, whereas Discord is a Costco.
> Consider how Discord is begging you and everyone to sign up for Nitro because they're housing and serving all of their data. Most IRC networks on the other hand operate perfectly fine off of donated volunteer time and hardware for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users.
As of around a year ago Discord claimed to be passing around 4 billion messages a day.
I don't know how their average message size compares to Slack, but I just took a look at an export of messages from my company's Slack server and our busiest day in six years was just over 1MB in uncompressed JSON format, around 1.4KB per message. Compressed it was around 104 bytes per message. If we assume that the average message size is similar and similar amounts of metadata are stored per message, that means we're talking about somewhere between 400GB and 5.6TB per day for the entirety of Discord.
That's a lot of space on an individual basis, but nothing for a global-scale service. Obviously that's just for text and not any uploaded files, inline previews, thumbnails, etc. but still the point remains. Archiving text is not really a hard problem to solve. It's tiny by modern standards.
Tinkerers really don't seem to understand how much average people want stuff to just work.
It's almost like how math educators sometimes don't understand that we mostly don't have checkbooks to balance. Math is important, but that doesn't mean I have ever sat down with paper and made a budget by hand.
Everyone always talks about flexibility and modularity and control, but what people want is stuff you just install and it works and has all the features already there.
Maintaining even trivial software can be hard, and people are very good at using what they have even if it's not explicitly meant to do the use case, like the story where the old lady was annoyed at her family for not telling her about the knitting program, which was Excel, that she found and figured out herself.
I prefer no built-in logging (which is and has been easily achieved with bots that loiter in the channel and store messages) in place of orders of magnitude more resources required to run the server. Looking at Matrix btw. XMPP does not have the resource issue, and has XEPs for message archives.
You can look at Matrix, but it won't help you, since Matrix additionally has a DAG datastructure for decentralized chatrooms, which allows to recognize and deal with bad servers in an open federation.
Maybe my memory has decayed a little too much on this, but I thought this is was a solved problem in IRC a long time ago, with the Op running one of the numerous journaling bots available at the time that posted logs to a web page associated with the channel. I realize that bolting on a web server is going outside the IRC protocol itself, but does that matter in context?
The "standard" config of a leet IRC user is an always on "bouncer", that's then connected to by the user's IRC client.
This provides a really reliable chat framework in a totally open-standards compliant way.
Of course, most people don't care. This is why the corps business model of profit via surveilance is so successful. So, to jump straight to Godwin's Law: this is the same lack of concern, and passive cooperation, that led to the rise of hitler...
Logging chat is really really expensive in terms of hardware and CPU.
I don't really understand why people would need to log chat, it doesn't really make sense to me. Chat is meant to be ephemeral, short lived, and not leave trace. Chat is spontaneous.
If users want to leave a trace, they use a database or email.
Discord added threads and forums, and those should be logged, but not channels.
It's very interesting how different people's definition of "chat" is. The comment above yours (at the time of reading this) says "Chat without history is such a waste", so the opposite of what you are saying.
I think when I was a teenager, I did a lot of chatting online in the sense you are talking about, and I didn't really care about the backlog. But nowadays, there's no room for "chat without log" because it's way too involved. I don't do synchronous chatting anymore at all, basically. After reading your comment, it seems like "chat" in general is just not for me anymore. Asynchronous messaging, however, still has a big part in my life.
> Logging chat is really really expensive in terms of hardware and CPU.
I don't know what expense you're imagining, but my IRC logs took almost zero CPU to acquire and they add up to well under a gigabyte per year before I apply transparent 4x compression.
> Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just run an always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it.
If you want a full conversation history then use something like email/listservs. IRC is for real-time chat. We already have a plethora of async options.
I've been using those for like 10 years almost everyday
They had voice chat, some had viable text chat, etc, etc.
And then Discord appeared which had:
Voice Chat,
Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc)
Streaming Video (!!)
File share
Robust bot integration
Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.
This one is important in gaming communities in e.g MMORPG games cuz there's nothing better than being DDoSd cuz you left team or because you talked to somebody on wrong TeamSpeak server 5 months ago :)
Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit.
Imagine you're working on remote with kids in the background - having an ability to push button and talk is really useful! So you don't have constantly mute/unmute yourself! Gamers have been doing it for over 2 decades but with the parents in the background instead of kids
One account between all servers with ability to customize your identity
All of that in one solution. That won its market.
Provide something as innovative and robust as Discord and people may consider switching.
__________________
I know that IRC's simplicity may be beautiful for hacker's mind, but it doesn't solve my problems nor make my life easier, so I'm not going to use it over Discord.
> Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.
This is a major issue. Back in the day TeamSpeak was the primary mode of communication for game servers of a certain kind. Every game server had an associated TS for offering support and many/most of the teams had their own. This was a disaster with people's IP addresses being leaked all over the place, if you joined a server and associated yourself with your in game name there was a high chance that you'd get DDoS'd offline at an important moment. Switching to discord makes this much less likely.
I love and use discord daily. I totally understand why it is "winning".
I just wished it used an open protocol, and allowed its content to be indexed. I dislike proprietary as a principal, and I get that discord isn't going to open it's secret sauce, but at least allow the discord moderators to click a box that will index text channels for search engines and future people trying to solve the problem that's pinned on you faq I. your discord channel without having to join your discord channel. (mostly for when that discord channel goes away in the future, lal that knowledge isn't completely lost"
Except it will never exist for discord because discord is a proprietary communication service instead of an open protocol. At best it can provide an API, but that can be broken or shut down on a whim. This is why it's a much better use of time for developers to make things like Matrix clients match feature parity to discord rather than attempt to give discord the client diversity of Matrix/IRC.
Unfortunately, this only works unless you have a textfield focused or something similar that "consumes" your keyboard input. At least in my experience, it's quite unreliable.
I have so many discord accounts because they won't let you change your avatar based on the server.
Yeah there is a way to register accounts without phone number verification. I did it four times. The trick is that they block you if you do anything suspicious and any account created under this 'suspicious' state demands phone verification. I don't know how they identify you, but you must succeed with your first try. So your best bet is to find an email provider that is trusted by discord that does not need a phone number.
Since you are a Push To Talk user, I'm honestly curious: how is it different from temporarily un-muting yourself? Like, how does it work better for you, or cause fewer problems, or something.
It's so popular in so many places that I assume I'm missing something obvious. I've always just hit a key to toggle mute though.
Integrating a Jitsi bot into the channel solves this.
> Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc)
All possible with good old web linking. Link to an image host, a pastebin, or a file host of your choice. Many IRC clients support inline display of image/media URLs.
All major IRC clients and servers support UTF-8 as well, so emoji away.
> Streaming Video (!!)
Jitsi (with a bot) or web linking.
> File share
Web linking.
> Robust bot integration
Quite possibly one of the strongest arguments for IRC. The protocol is well-documented, and it's very easy to write an IRC bot.
> Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.
Also lack of transparency. The self-hosted open alternatives are auditable and can be inspected. Nobody knows what Discord does with user data or what security issues exist.
> Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit.
Your (possibly self-hosted) Jitsi instance already has this.
> One account between all servers with ability to customize your identity
Until you get banned/blocked for some arbitrary reason, at which point you might as well start over, since everything is gone.
tl;dr: Web linking + some bot integration and client affordances solve all these. This is how the web is supposed to work.
So supplement IRC with a bunch of other services? Realising people didn't want to deal with this shit is why discord is so popular.
(Seriously, this response and others like it demonstrate that IRC will continue to remain a niche. I won't fault you if this kind of setup works for you but suggesting this kind of thing is acceptable for the average user is really, truly, genuinely out of touch. I'm among the demographic who can and has done this kind of thing, and I don't want to do it!)
>Also lack of transparency. The self-hosted open alternatives are auditable and can be inspected. Nobody knows what Discord does with user data or what security issues exist.
This doesnt solve (or doesnt even tries to solve) my issue AT ALL.
I'd rather have Discord have some user data that I'm consciously putting there instead of my enemies from the game DDoSing/Stalking me
I've played hardcore MMORPGs and this is serious concern.
>tl;dr: Web linking + some bot integration and client affordances solve all these. This is how the web is supposed to work.
I've been on IRC since the 90's and was an Op for Undernet #Linux & #Japan for many years, used to run an IRC server for a small IRC network back in my London days, and also ran a server for the same little network in my Japan days...
The article was excellent, however, it made no mention of Matrix.
Matrix, like IRC, is decentralised.
You can run your own homeserver - just like running an ircd.
Connecting to a Matrix homeserver with a suitable client - I use Element - you get all the equivalent benefits of IRC (chat) but with the additional Discord-like benefits of being able to post images in-chat, text formatting.
Another benefit is chat history (if configured for a room). Also, fully encrypted rooms. You can have voice and video rooms too.
What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that I'm a full convert now to Matrix. It's better than Discord in that Discord is a walled garden, whereas Matrix - like IRC - is completely decentralised, and I highly recommend using Matrix over IRC these days.
Many who have causally read about Matrix and looked into running a homeserver have run across the reference implementation Synapse, which is (IMO only, pls no flame) a bloated python monstrosity. This turned me off for years.
A second-gen (?) alternative written in Go called Dendrite is much lighter weight, but is lacking in some features last I looked.
A couple of years ago, I found Conduit (https://conduit.rs/) an ultra lightweight homeserver implementation written in Rust with an engaged and responsive community. I've been running this for 18-24 months now and use it for family communications, as well as small business and my group at my $DAYJOB. I highly recommend anyone who hasn't already to check out Conduit :)
Its still somewhat slow with loading existing chats but Matrix has serious potential. It is already doing much better than the fediverse in terms of discovering niche communities.
Matrix 2.0 will put an end to that trait plaguing the protocol's viability. With the new "sliding" sync, clients will be able to fetch stuff much more efficiently (and more akin to Discord's API, for example) than before. Syncing an freshly logged-in account takes seconds instead of minutes and syncing messages when returning to the app is instant. They presented this at FOSDEM this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUPJ9zFV5IE
Some rooms have so many user and so much chat history, that my own puny homeserver struggles to join them. I've tried all sorts of tweaks - from tweaking the PostgreSQL service, to using things like noatime etc. on the ext4 filesystem. This has helped immensely, but some rooms, like the Python room on matrix.org, brings my homeserver to its knees :)
Perhaps in the future the Synapse devs will improve the code so that mammoth rooms don't bring more resource-starved homeservers down. Alternatively I could throw more resources at the homeserver, but for my use-case, the 6GB ram and 6 cores I assign to the VM running the Synapse instance and the PostgreSQL service - and the IRC bridge heheh - is the bare-minimum I can get away with.
On saying all that, I like Matrix more than I like IRC, nowadays, and more folks should IMO get on Matrix.
(p.s. custom emoji's would be lovely on Matrix ;) )
The slow loading and tracking of who has read what are the two biggest gripes I have about the protocol.
If I'm joining a huge channel with thousands of people I _really_ don't care whether astroboy8756 has read my message or not. I don't want that traffic to enter my client at all.
XMPP is a monstrosity, just let it die…
The X is why it failed, depending on the client used by participants, some features wouldn’t work as expected. I remember someone shitting me because the messages I sent were ugly in his client, maybe because of a bad font on one side or the other or something, don’t know, don’t care.
> Even if you have full-on Stockholm syndrome in regard to advertisers data-mining your life to sell you garbage, who knows where else your data could be going? Considering the horrific epidemic of sexual abuse being abetted and covered up in the workplace, is it really too difficult to imagine malicious actors at Discord (or any other technology company) illegitimately accessing the data of their business' users and using it for stalking or other nefarious purposes?
Maybe the author could write something based in fact, rather than their dogmatic authoritarian fan fiction?
IRC isn't viable for the pretty simple and obvious reason - it lacks features users expect. It's telling that things like Signal and Telegram have built IRC-like services (large chat rooms) not on top of IRC.
The only threat to message data on Discord is third party bots like mee6 who are gateway connected to tons of public, private, and "small friend-group" servers, vacuuming up every message data to some data lake for later use. This is why Discord pushed Application Commands[0], which only receive data from Discord when the application is initialized by the user, and made Message Contents a privileged intent[1] that requires identity verification if your bot is in 100 or more servers.
I don't think the idea of rogue Discord employees accessing uploaded images for nudes or searching logs for personal information is far fetched.
Consider that a Ring employee was doing exactly that, with customer security cameras, and the only reason they were caught is another employee reported them (and Ring has no idea how many other employees were doing the same thing). [1]
I don’t have anything against IRC, but to suggest it as an alternative to Discord shows such a fundamental lack of understanding of what Discord is good for that I’m kind of baffled. If you’re looking for self hosted alternatives then Matrix (especially with the latest video/voice chat rooms)is much closer to what Discord offers, but even that isn’t really a viable replacement for the core use case of Discord: voice chat while gaming + seamless video streaming of captured game footage with a UI so smooth that my 8 year old nephews figured it out on their own.
Yeah, I think there's just a disconnect in culture. Making IRC more viable towards those who like Discord etc. would fundamentally change and ruin it for many who like IRC. And vice versa. So IRC will never resurrect and be used by the masses again.
> The fundamental fact that Discord users refuse to see is that the platform isn't run on magic dust and fairy incantations, but actual human beings. Using Discord is no different from having a group of strangers sitting in your room with you, noting down every word you say to your friends and everything you run on your computer, and doing the devil knows what with it.
Anyone making this argument doesn't understand why people use Discord. These articles about why Discord is bad crop up over time and they ALL miss the boat. If your argument is that "Discord isn't private" then you've already lost because no one who uses Discord cares about that and you've shown that you don't actually understand Discord.
My main issue about Discord is not what it is, but what it replaced. A lot of websites or forums have been replaced by Discord. It sucks, because it's fundamentally a messaging app, but people will use it for reasons where a website would male sense ("link is in my Discord").
That's on the things (vbulletin forums, etc) that Discord and Reddit have replaced for being so bad that people would prefer using Discord over them. It's hard to blame Discord for making a good product. As to users, a UX principle is that users aren't wrong, the UX is wrong. There's a reason people use Discord for these purposes, and you need to resolve that reason, not make punitive actions towards users.
Well, in fairness, I believe the guy that got caught posting classified docs in a small private discord server would appreciate privacy, even if I myself and a lot of people almost exclusively use public servers and would prefer if they were even less private so internet search would work.
His friends passed the documents along to their friends, and they eventually got the attention of the New York Times. At that point tracing the documents back to him would probably have happened regardless of whether he used IRC or anything else.
Do you have any evidence that him using a centralized platform like Discord played a role in him getting caught?
At its core, I agree that the bare-bones nature of IRC can be wonderful. But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. People leave their laptop, go to the bathroom, get their phone out and go on typing.
I used IRC for a brief period even after we began to have multiple devices. It was always through some kind of proxy, or basically an ssh connection through GNU screen, just so that basic functionality like asynchronous messaging worked, and so that my setup would carry over. The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself. To a point where any of the big players could introduce IRC-style channels as a fun retro feature. I'd bet more money on that feature becoming popular than on an IRC resurgence.
> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority.
Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android.
In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones, we had the same problem again in the mobile world: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support.
The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market.
If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and work with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously requires you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone.
The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2].
Also, tangentially related to your first point; I am personally exploring more ways to disconnect. Even if it’s just briefly, like not bringing my phone to the bathroom as you describe. I realize now that I hate being always connected. Vanilla irc sounds like a dream compared to the nightmare of constant connection.
> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority.
First? Slack takes ages to sync lately (sometimes you have to explicitly refresh) and has a ... random ... idea of how to move unread counts around.
Discord never notifies me of direct messages from my daughter but always notifies me of announcements in a gaming discord i've explicitly muted to hell and back.
> have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. People leave their laptop, go to the bathroom, get their phone out and go on typing.
On IRC, I leave my desktop (quasselclient), go to the bathroom, get out my phone and go on typing (quassel app) (*)
All functioning because I'm actually connected to Quassel.
> Anyone who has ever used IRC knows that there is nothing even remotely complicated about using it, but the terminology and the steps required to use one are ostensibly terrifying enough to reliably keep the technically illiterate at bay.
This remark, topped with the author's piece on "normiefication", is the kind of intellectual elitism that reliably keeps me away from IRC whenever I think of coming back to it.
This person’s view is so insular and so self-centered that they truly seem to believe that IRC is not complicated. This is an excellent illustration of how important it is to stay grounded and connected to your real-world user base.
This is a silly statement. The technology doesn't embody any 'elitism', back in the day there were many channels/networks with non-technical users. Back when Shoutcast was a thing, servers often had an associated IRC channel where people would make requests, or just talk music, just as one example. This also makes the "keep technically illiterate users away" statement silly, I've seen middle school age kids connect to IRC channels without any apparent difficulty.
I stopped being engaged when the author uses "normalcattle" in a unironic, disdainful tone. Then later on there's praise of RMS. I like the overall message, as a long time daily IRC user, but the contempt seeping from the whole article is a turn off.
Readit News
The article brushes over this, but IMO the lack of built-in backlog support is the main reason why IRC is essentially doomed. Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just run an always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it.
Especially when there are open, federated chat protocols that don't have this problem.
Discord's logging is shitty because:
1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever.
2 - Unlike the logs of some IRC channels, Discord's logs aren't available on the web anywhere, so they can't be indexed or searched outside of Discord.
3 - Paging through hours or days of Discord logs is so incredibly painful, because every few screenfuls or so Discord has to load the previous/next logs and that is super slow compared to paging through text logs offline. If you have a lot of logs to page through, this experience is absolutely atrocious.
4 - There's no easy way to export the logs to be processed with standard/powerful text manipulation tools, like text editors, sed, etc..
Discord's search is painful because:
1 - There's no regex search.
2 - No ability to search via web search engines, because the logs aren't available on any website (see above).
3 - No way to search through the logs of multiple servers at once.
I have IRC logs going back decades, from servers I haven't been on in decades, but they're all instantly searchable, and the text in them is easily manipulable.
My Discord logs are trapped in Discord and I'm forced to use Discord's pretty but otherwise horrible UI to search them.
No, the reason Discord is popular has nothing to do with logging, but everything to do with how easy it is to sign up, join, and get a server running. Inline images and not having to learn obscure IRC commands or figure out obtuse IRC clients are also huge plusses for your average user. Discord's client is also visually pleasing -- something that most IRC client developers still haven't figured out. Aesthetics matter to users, as Apple has proved.
But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die.
I'm really saddened and angry that projects end up using Discord as their main forum interface.
Not everything is worth keeping around forever, but Discord is as closed a closed garden as can be.
That's great for private servers between friends, but it's contrary to the ethos of Open Source, as nothing is really in the open.
History is basically unsearchable and everyone lives in a perpetual present where topics need to be discussed over and over again instead of being easily available to newcomers. Once they disappear from the current page, they become really hard to reach.
And discord will happily close your account or prevent you from logging if your activity is deemed suspicious, i.e. if you're travelling and using VPNs, getting in can be a nightmare. The feeling of also being constantly watched, a step away from having your account blocked, is jarring.
I wish there was a good open source alternative that would also allow data to be easily made public and allowed users to just join and participate with whatever existing accounts they have (google, GitHub, any Fediverse account, etc).
Servers could be self-hosted or hosted for free or a minimal fee based on the server size, with some paying additional features (like flair, large audio rooms, automated backups, branding, more customization, etc).
But is discord too big to be taken on by an Open Source project?
Discord gives you a chance at searching old history with zero additional setup if the permissions allow.
For both IRC and Discord you’d need to run a bot to have truly open logs online.
https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
But beware -- it can result in account termination!
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002192352-A...
Sure, you can write your own logs, but does your business want you creating even more information to have to submit as evidence if you’re sued? What a nightmare.
As far as I'm concerned it is not a technology that should exist aside from realtime viewing of feeds, and things meant from random idle chatter.
People are using Discord like as if it's a forum and a wiki in one. Which isn't the worst thing, because it's better than nothing, but I think it would be better with an integrated real forum that auto-posts new topics in the chat.
If you have something you think is worthy of preserving, say it in a paginated forum where people can find it, if you have an ephemeral shitpost, say it in the chat. If you want to scroll through history of ephemeral shitposts and see what's happening, even that should have a calendar based pagination UI.
Old forums used to have shoutboxes. Proboards and phpbb and the like were basically already perfect.
If I was going to do a community platform, I'd just build a forum. The only thing I think I'd change is I'd make it so you could download archives, and I'd consider having a wikipedia style policy of everything being Creative Commons.
I’m beyond sick of the helplessness performative shtick around Discord. This is an ancient problem with obvious solutions. Do better.
It's also very bad at URLs.
And sometimes it just breaks and loses results. If I remember right I even hit a situation where searching one word found a chat line, and another word found that same line, but both words didn't find it.
Actually I find it ugly, but thats firmly in personal preference territory. A decenct client would be skinnable or css-able to meet users diverse aesthetics.
Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web and the various desktop clients like Skype were a crapshot or were obscure and required you to host your own server like Mumble.
Everything is painful. Clients tend to be terrible and I cannot search at all in IRC, or I get weird integrations between znc and and the chat client.
All in all, i'd rather use discord than IRC, even with the downsides. I do prefer forums or the "was" reddit for information.
It's shitty, but if you just have to beat "non existant" that will often work.
Dead Comment
people in the west have a lot of freedom in this and don't really need to care at the moment, but imagine living in the CCP or Thailand and bad mouthing the supreme leader?
Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially unusable so having the backlog is often useless, however the ability to "pin" a useful message or discussion by getting a link is very relevant.
Baseline IRC doesn't have message addressing, regardless of backlogging.
You need the "message-tags" extension (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/message-tags) and message-ids support (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/message-ids.html) for that to even be entertained, plus probably echo-message (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/echo-message). I've no idea how well those are supported in servers, to say nothing of clients (which would need a way to surface message ids, and possibly permalinks).
At that point, you probably also want the WIP chathistory extension (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory) which provides backlog support.
Discord's search function is 1,000x better than what's built into Windows 10 and 11. I've found pictures I posted from years ago in discord, Windows 10 can't even find half the files I downloaded and transferred to another drive the other day.
Not to mention some IRC channels are really high latency, you leave a message and someone else replies ten hours later. If you miss the reply because you were offline, you couldn't expect anyone to be around to repeat missed conversations back to you.
Due to this I've never really liked IRC, its not good for mobile devices or people who live with DSL or dial-up. Sure you can "just get an account on a bouncer" but that's pretty esoteric knowledge that I never encountered until after university.
Chat being real-time is certainly "approaching real life" much moreso than fully asynchronous email, but most people don't want either to be real life: chat still needs an element of asynchronicity to distinguish it as a technologically useful medium improving over actually walking into a real room.
To put it another way: if I'm in a real life room where being present for the full conversation is necessary, it's easy to excuse being late or going to the bathroom as unfortunate parts of life when people are repeating themselves. When there's simple technological solutions that can easily prevent me from missing anything important, and someone's telling me they don't want it because they like the inconvenience, that's harder to justify.
When I join an IRC chat there's a lot less baggage.. it's just a label / topic, it's very freeing.
logging, message fixing, embedded replies .. all great but not important in the end. These things are blending professional complexity with normal human moments. Not the right optimization (if optimizations are required at all)
You need the irc services to keep specified information (like ownership of channels and nicknames) and they probably could also collect logs, with some limitations in case of netsplits of course.
If I need more context about those messages when I return, I can just ask those users (or a bot).
Still maybe there could be a way to summarize those chats with some kind of a transforming generative text system that I hope exists one day.
Absolutely fantastic that it was finally added but IRC is 34 years old, and this has been an essential feature of chat services for at least 20 of those years.
I'd love to see it's introduction now save IRC but given the seeming resistance to adding it, one wonders how long any other improvements will take.
For one it stops you from being lazy and not maintaining FAQs and documentation.
It also forces you to stop treating the chat as something you need to keep up to date with. At work I see people commonly scrolling back for pages and pages to find the last read marker and continue reading from there. This seems unhealthy to me.
I use a bouncer but I very rarely use the logs. For all the purposes for which I would use logs, there are normally bots in the channel which can compensate.
Using chat as a source of truth is not a good idea
Over time it becomes more and more ridiculous to use it as your knowledge base.
That existing IRC implementations may be antiquated mammoth shit shouldn’t prevent anyone from building something new.
If you're storing data, someone somewhere has to pay for housing it. One of the reasons IRC is lightweight is because a network and its constituent servers only facilitates exchanging data between users.
Consider how Discord is begging you and everyone to sign up for Nitro because they're housing and serving all of their data. Most IRC networks on the other hand operate perfectly fine off of donated volunteer time and hardware for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users.
No data to store means cheaper and easier logistics. IRC is just a simple bridge, whereas Discord is a Costco.
As of around a year ago Discord claimed to be passing around 4 billion messages a day.
I don't know how their average message size compares to Slack, but I just took a look at an export of messages from my company's Slack server and our busiest day in six years was just over 1MB in uncompressed JSON format, around 1.4KB per message. Compressed it was around 104 bytes per message. If we assume that the average message size is similar and similar amounts of metadata are stored per message, that means we're talking about somewhere between 400GB and 5.6TB per day for the entirety of Discord.
That's a lot of space on an individual basis, but nothing for a global-scale service. Obviously that's just for text and not any uploaded files, inline previews, thumbnails, etc. but still the point remains. Archiving text is not really a hard problem to solve. It's tiny by modern standards.
And for that matter, for "pretty much everything?"
Seems to me the simplicity of the bot is the biggest feature?
It's almost like how math educators sometimes don't understand that we mostly don't have checkbooks to balance. Math is important, but that doesn't mean I have ever sat down with paper and made a budget by hand.
Everyone always talks about flexibility and modularity and control, but what people want is stuff you just install and it works and has all the features already there.
Maintaining even trivial software can be hard, and people are very good at using what they have even if it's not explicitly meant to do the use case, like the story where the old lady was annoyed at her family for not telling her about the knitting program, which was Excel, that she found and figured out herself.
Additionally, it's richer in features
This provides a really reliable chat framework in a totally open-standards compliant way.
Of course, most people don't care. This is why the corps business model of profit via surveilance is so successful. So, to jump straight to Godwin's Law: this is the same lack of concern, and passive cooperation, that led to the rise of hitler...
Deleted Comment
I don't really understand why people would need to log chat, it doesn't really make sense to me. Chat is meant to be ephemeral, short lived, and not leave trace. Chat is spontaneous.
If users want to leave a trace, they use a database or email.
Discord added threads and forums, and those should be logged, but not channels.
I think when I was a teenager, I did a lot of chatting online in the sense you are talking about, and I didn't really care about the backlog. But nowadays, there's no room for "chat without log" because it's way too involved. I don't do synchronous chatting anymore at all, basically. After reading your comment, it seems like "chat" in general is just not for me anymore. Asynchronous messaging, however, still has a big part in my life.
I don't know what expense you're imagining, but my IRC logs took almost zero CPU to acquire and they add up to well under a gigabyte per year before I apply transparent 4x compression.
If you want a full conversation history then use something like email/listservs. IRC is for real-time chat. We already have a plethora of async options.
chat history is critical even for realtime chat.
Deleted Comment
I understand if what you mean is it’s an extra step the technically challenged don’t want to do but the ability to do so has existed forever.
Of course, this was over 20+ years ago now.
I had an IRCCloud account for the same exact reason until freenode "blew up"
(ripgrep is a very nice log searching tool, only top tier users will be told about it!)
Server Up 1375 days, 10:05:01
*.XXX.net[xx.x.x.xx] 0 9696 10570 56550590
Its server to server link, online 56M secs. Now do the math, how much days this link is up (no netsplit).
Chat is not just for business. Its use-case existed even before notion of business came to be.
Until Discord appeared we had
Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc
I've been using those for like 10 years almost everyday
They had voice chat, some had viable text chat, etc, etc.
And then Discord appeared which had:
Voice Chat,
Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc)
Streaming Video (!!)
File share
Robust bot integration
Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.
This one is important in gaming communities in e.g MMORPG games cuz there's nothing better than being DDoSd cuz you left team or because you talked to somebody on wrong TeamSpeak server 5 months ago :)
Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit.
Imagine you're working on remote with kids in the background - having an ability to push button and talk is really useful! So you don't have constantly mute/unmute yourself! Gamers have been doing it for over 2 decades but with the parents in the background instead of kids
One account between all servers with ability to customize your identity
All of that in one solution. That won its market.
Provide something as innovative and robust as Discord and people may consider switching.
__________________
I know that IRC's simplicity may be beautiful for hacker's mind, but it doesn't solve my problems nor make my life easier, so I'm not going to use it over Discord.
This is a major issue. Back in the day TeamSpeak was the primary mode of communication for game servers of a certain kind. Every game server had an associated TS for offering support and many/most of the teams had their own. This was a disaster with people's IP addresses being leaked all over the place, if you joined a server and associated yourself with your in game name there was a high chance that you'd get DDoS'd offline at an important moment. Switching to discord makes this much less likely.
I just wished it used an open protocol, and allowed its content to be indexed. I dislike proprietary as a principal, and I get that discord isn't going to open it's secret sauce, but at least allow the discord moderators to click a box that will index text channels for search engines and future people trying to solve the problem that's pinned on you faq I. your discord channel without having to join your discord channel. (mostly for when that discord channel goes away in the future, lal that knowledge isn't completely lost"
I don’t get its appeal at all.
MS Teams does support this feature, though you have to activate it first: see
> https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/teams-... (concise answer)
> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/muting-and-unmuti... (documentation)
> Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc
And now we have Discord, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, Slack, Teams, etc etc
[ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/muting-and-unmuti... ]
And one censoring authority.
Nope, not a good idea.
Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing prevents you.
I've actually been doing it for some time - school (1 server) & private discord account (like 10 servers).
>And one censoring authority.
Sure, that's valid concern, I respect it.
For me it's a trade off.
Yeah there is a way to register accounts without phone number verification. I did it four times. The trick is that they block you if you do anything suspicious and any account created under this 'suspicious' state demands phone verification. I don't know how they identify you, but you must succeed with your first try. So your best bet is to find an email provider that is trusted by discord that does not need a phone number.
It's so popular in so many places that I assume I'm missing something obvious. I've always just hit a key to toggle mute though.
You're playing video game / sharing your IDE / whatever
with discord/ventrilo/whatever being in the background
you push e.g MOUSE3 (scroll) button - talk, and stop holding it.
And you were unmuted just for the moment of holding scroll button.
Then it was the voice chat for any video game play.
Being a Swiss Army knife of chat can be handy to get users together from different chat platforms
How am I doing
Integrating a Jitsi bot into the channel solves this.
> Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc)
All possible with good old web linking. Link to an image host, a pastebin, or a file host of your choice. Many IRC clients support inline display of image/media URLs.
All major IRC clients and servers support UTF-8 as well, so emoji away.
> Streaming Video (!!)
Jitsi (with a bot) or web linking.
> File share
Web linking.
> Robust bot integration
Quite possibly one of the strongest arguments for IRC. The protocol is well-documented, and it's very easy to write an IRC bot.
> Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.
Also lack of transparency. The self-hosted open alternatives are auditable and can be inspected. Nobody knows what Discord does with user data or what security issues exist.
> Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit.
Your (possibly self-hosted) Jitsi instance already has this.
> One account between all servers with ability to customize your identity
Until you get banned/blocked for some arbitrary reason, at which point you might as well start over, since everything is gone.
tl;dr: Web linking + some bot integration and client affordances solve all these. This is how the web is supposed to work.
(Seriously, this response and others like it demonstrate that IRC will continue to remain a niche. I won't fault you if this kind of setup works for you but suggesting this kind of thing is acceptable for the average user is really, truly, genuinely out of touch. I'm among the demographic who can and has done this kind of thing, and I don't want to do it!)
This doesnt solve (or doesnt even tries to solve) my issue AT ALL.
I'd rather have Discord have some user data that I'm consciously putting there instead of my enemies from the game DDoSing/Stalking me
I've played hardcore MMORPGs and this is serious concern.
>tl;dr: Web linking + some bot integration and client affordances solve all these. This is how the web is supposed to work.
sounds like: go put effort and decrease your UX.
Can you even write multi-line messages with IRC now?
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Isn't that solveable on the OS level? I have a global mic mute toggle hotkey, this could be done on keydown/keyup too.
Looks to me that Discord went after those and not after IRC.
The article was excellent, however, it made no mention of Matrix.
Matrix, like IRC, is decentralised.
You can run your own homeserver - just like running an ircd.
Connecting to a Matrix homeserver with a suitable client - I use Element - you get all the equivalent benefits of IRC (chat) but with the additional Discord-like benefits of being able to post images in-chat, text formatting.
Another benefit is chat history (if configured for a room). Also, fully encrypted rooms. You can have voice and video rooms too.
What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that I'm a full convert now to Matrix. It's better than Discord in that Discord is a walled garden, whereas Matrix - like IRC - is completely decentralised, and I highly recommend using Matrix over IRC these days.
A second-gen (?) alternative written in Go called Dendrite is much lighter weight, but is lacking in some features last I looked.
A couple of years ago, I found Conduit (https://conduit.rs/) an ultra lightweight homeserver implementation written in Rust with an engaged and responsive community. I've been running this for 18-24 months now and use it for family communications, as well as small business and my group at my $DAYJOB. I highly recommend anyone who hasn't already to check out Conduit :)
>an ultra lightweight
370 crates in Cargo.lock
176 crates downloaded by cargo-tree
Look forward to trying out conduit.
Some rooms have so many user and so much chat history, that my own puny homeserver struggles to join them. I've tried all sorts of tweaks - from tweaking the PostgreSQL service, to using things like noatime etc. on the ext4 filesystem. This has helped immensely, but some rooms, like the Python room on matrix.org, brings my homeserver to its knees :)
Perhaps in the future the Synapse devs will improve the code so that mammoth rooms don't bring more resource-starved homeservers down. Alternatively I could throw more resources at the homeserver, but for my use-case, the 6GB ram and 6 cores I assign to the VM running the Synapse instance and the PostgreSQL service - and the IRC bridge heheh - is the bare-minimum I can get away with.
On saying all that, I like Matrix more than I like IRC, nowadays, and more folks should IMO get on Matrix.
(p.s. custom emoji's would be lovely on Matrix ;) )
If I'm joining a huge channel with thousands of people I _really_ don't care whether astroboy8756 has read my message or not. I don't want that traffic to enter my client at all.
Which is why I use self-hosted Gitlab ;)
Maybe the author could write something based in fact, rather than their dogmatic authoritarian fan fiction?
IRC isn't viable for the pretty simple and obvious reason - it lacks features users expect. It's telling that things like Signal and Telegram have built IRC-like services (large chat rooms) not on top of IRC.
0: https://discord.com/developers/docs/interactions/application...
1: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028...
Consider that a Ring employee was doing exactly that, with customer security cameras, and the only reason they were caught is another employee reported them (and Ring has no idea how many other employees were doing the same thing). [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146062
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36746154
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098
Anyone making this argument doesn't understand why people use Discord. These articles about why Discord is bad crop up over time and they ALL miss the boat. If your argument is that "Discord isn't private" then you've already lost because no one who uses Discord cares about that and you've shown that you don't actually understand Discord.
Do you have any evidence that him using a centralized platform like Discord played a role in him getting caught?
I used IRC for a brief period even after we began to have multiple devices. It was always through some kind of proxy, or basically an ssh connection through GNU screen, just so that basic functionality like asynchronous messaging worked, and so that my setup would carry over. The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself. To a point where any of the big players could introduce IRC-style channels as a fun retro feature. I'd bet more money on that feature becoming popular than on an IRC resurgence.
Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android.
In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones, we had the same problem again in the mobile world: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support.
The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market.
If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and work with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously requires you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone.
The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2].
[1] https://quassel-irc.org/
[2] https://thelounge.chat/
Also, tangentially related to your first point; I am personally exploring more ways to disconnect. Even if it’s just briefly, like not bringing my phone to the bathroom as you describe. I realize now that I hate being always connected. Vanilla irc sounds like a dream compared to the nightmare of constant connection.
First? Slack takes ages to sync lately (sometimes you have to explicitly refresh) and has a ... random ... idea of how to move unread counts around.
Discord never notifies me of direct messages from my daughter but always notifies me of announcements in a gaming discord i've explicitly muted to hell and back.
On IRC, I leave my desktop (quasselclient), go to the bathroom, get out my phone and go on typing (quassel app) (*)
All functioning because I'm actually connected to Quassel.
(*) actually I would never do this.
You don't have to build a new protocol. The Ergo IRCd supports multiple clients connecting to the same account (and using the same nick) at the same time using the regular IRC protocol: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....
This remark, topped with the author's piece on "normiefication", is the kind of intellectual elitism that reliably keeps me away from IRC whenever I think of coming back to it.