3 ms·

This is what centralized infrastructure does. No surprises there. In the mean time, my IRC-servers had 100% uptime. Just saying’.

OskarS 7y ago
Compared to Discord, how many users does your IRC servers have?
- Lammy 7y ago
  I think that's their point. It isn't a centralized service comparable to Discord that will be overwhelmed by the entire quarantined world bearing down on it at once.
Analemma_ 7y ago
Not to be snarky, but did your IRC servers have 100% uptime because no one was using them? These services are all going down because they're seeing huge surges in usage; your servers absolutely would collapse under the same load.
- swsieber 7y ago
  Do you honestly think their server would ever see the same load? That's part of centralization vs decentralization - different load topology.
  - anchpop 7y ago
    All the IRC servers in the world couldn't support all the traffic discord gets in a typical day no matter how the load was distributed. According to Wikipedia [0] Freenode has less than 100k users spread across 32 servers. The group of Discord channels (confusingly referred to as a server) for Roblox players has 300k [1]. The Chill Zone server, which doesn't have a topic and where people just chat, has 150k members and over 6 million messages in it's "#general" channel, and the discord server for the /r/teenagers subreddit has 21M in its "#general" channel. These constitute a tiny fraction of the number of text messages being sent over discord, which itself probably uses a tiny amount of bandwidth compared to the constant pictures and files being sent, not to mention the voice and video calls. It's easy to have 100% uptime when you have a product so user-hostile that nobody uses it. Yes, Discord is an electron app that probably spies on you, but users don't really care about that compared to being able to read messages sent when their computer was turned off or getting notifications on their phone, etc. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode [1]: https://top.gg/servers/150074202727251969 https://top.gg/servers/150074202727251969
    - swsieber 7y ago
      Low volume servers couldn't handle the traffic high traffic servers could. Got it. > but users don't really care about that compared to being able to read messages sent when their computer was turned off or getting notifications on their phone, etc. I bet the also don't care about that compared to being able to actually send messages. You are apparently arguing something incredibly different than me. You seem to be arguing that bad UX leads to low load, which makes 100% uptime hard. I'm arguing that it's the centralization that makes it hard. You aren't addressing that. If Discord were decentralized, not all servers would have gone down today. Maybe not any. Maybe. But also, there are a lot of alternatives that have better UX. Zulip and Matrix come to mind.
crummy 7y ago
Are we confusing centralized in terms of ownership vs centralized in terms of server load?
ecnahc515 7y ago
Are you running your own IRC servers or using something like freenode? If the prior, your comparison is moot because there's plenty of other centralized self-hosted options that would work the fine (eg mattermost/rocketchat). Otherwise, many public IRC servers would experience a netsplit in these cases making them basically useless.
- est31 7y ago
  A netsplit still allows you to moan about it in company. I consider that an advantage over discord's "oops sorry".
floatboth 7y ago
Freenode has netsplits relatively often :D

OskarS 7y ago

Compared to Discord, how many users does your IRC servers have?

Lammy 7y ago
I think that's their point. It isn't a centralized service comparable to Discord that will be overwhelmed by the entire quarantined world bearing down on it at once.

Analemma_ 7y ago

Not to be snarky, but did your IRC servers have 100% uptime because no one was using them? These services are all going down because they're seeing huge surges in usage; your servers absolutely would collapse under the same load.

swsieber 7y ago
Do you honestly think their server would ever see the same load? That's part of centralization vs decentralization - different load topology.
- anchpop 7y ago
  All the IRC servers in the world couldn't support all the traffic discord gets in a typical day no matter how the load was distributed. According to Wikipedia [0] Freenode has less than 100k users spread across 32 servers. The group of Discord channels (confusingly referred to as a server) for Roblox players has 300k [1]. The Chill Zone server, which doesn't have a topic and where people just chat, has 150k members and over 6 million messages in it's "#general" channel, and the discord server for the /r/teenagers subreddit has 21M in its "#general" channel. These constitute a tiny fraction of the number of text messages being sent over discord, which itself probably uses a tiny amount of bandwidth compared to the constant pictures and files being sent, not to mention the voice and video calls. It's easy to have 100% uptime when you have a product so user-hostile that nobody uses it. Yes, Discord is an electron app that probably spies on you, but users don't really care about that compared to being able to read messages sent when their computer was turned off or getting notifications on their phone, etc. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode [1]: https://top.gg/servers/150074202727251969 https://top.gg/servers/150074202727251969
  - swsieber 7y ago
    Low volume servers couldn't handle the traffic high traffic servers could. Got it. > but users don't really care about that compared to being able to read messages sent when their computer was turned off or getting notifications on their phone, etc. I bet the also don't care about that compared to being able to actually send messages. You are apparently arguing something incredibly different than me. You seem to be arguing that bad UX leads to low load, which makes 100% uptime hard. I'm arguing that it's the centralization that makes it hard. You aren't addressing that. If Discord were decentralized, not all servers would have gone down today. Maybe not any. Maybe. But also, there are a lot of alternatives that have better UX. Zulip and Matrix come to mind.

crummy 7y ago

Are we confusing centralized in terms of ownership vs centralized in terms of server load?

ecnahc515 7y ago

Are you running your own IRC servers or using something like freenode? If the prior, your comparison is moot because there's plenty of other centralized self-hosted options that would work the fine (eg mattermost/rocketchat). Otherwise, many public IRC servers would experience a netsplit in these cases making them basically useless.

est31 7y ago
A netsplit still allows you to moan about it in company. I consider that an advantage over discord's "oops sorry".

floatboth 7y ago

Freenode has netsplits relatively often :D