this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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IRC was so much better than Discord. People are stupid.
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.
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
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).
Sure, 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.
I've never seen someone host a wiki on Discord.. that's just stupid.
Having to join a server before you see its content is a good thing though. It's a privacy feature and also anti-spam / anti-bots (Before you see anything you often have to agree to the server rules).
Using Discord for information storage is obviously a bad idea. But for text chat including channels, voice chat and so on it's fantastic. Most games usually have an extra website with a wiki for information.
Joining to browse is in no way a good thing. Join to speak, yes. Join to read, no.
I think your view of servers here is wrong. They are literally named communities, as in private spaces. You get access if you're part of that community, otherwise you don't.
Discord servers are not public websites or a wiki anyone can access, they are not supposed to be.
IRC is a tiny bit more open, but even there you need to join a channel to read it and you can get kicked out. For reading the logs a bot saved away you might need an account too (but that's up to the server admin or whoever is hosting that content).
Issue with what you are saying is that I have seen a crap ton of software ( Foss software too ) using discord forums / discord I'm general as their "knowledge base" making it quite hard to find solutions for problems or ask questions, where in the past you'd be using a forum for.
CashewNut slaps Vlyn around a bit with a large troutI'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.
How is Discord a privacy nightmare?
Closed source software without end to end encryption and has access to all chats, voice and video calls. How can it not be a privacy nightmare. You have no idea what they collect and what they don't.
Don't they claim that they can't access your chat logs unless they get like reports and stuff?
Edit: This question needs an answer, not a downvote
I doubt that. If you do a gdpr request for your data, you'll see how much they log about your activities. Obviously chats and VC activity, but also all the timestamps of what you play, session data over all time, etc.
Or maybe… How is discord any worse of a privacy nightmare than IRC? I love me some IRC, but it ain’t exactly a bastion of secrecy.
IRC clients don't have loads of telemetry like Discord does. And IRC is a protocol instead of a platform, so there isn't a single set of servers hosting and logging ALL conversations.
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