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I know what you mean. Although Discord is, in my opinion, WAY better than IRC, I do miss the interactions and friends I made there. I miss forums as well, which

by movedx 3y ago

I know what you mean. Although Discord is, in my opinion, WAY better than IRC, I do miss the interactions and friends I made there. I miss forums as well, which is kind of funny because they still exist - not sure why I don't use them more?

b3orn 3y ago
Classic forums aren't connected with each other, you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in, sometimes just to look at the content. On Reddit (or StackExchange) you can have one account to access "forums" for almost everything, call it low friction if you want.
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  There is some benefit in sharing the user account, however there are reasons for using different identities on different forums.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in That was true about ten years ago. Most forums that keep their software up to date support logging in with a number of SSO systems.
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    Do they commonly allow arbitrary OpenID hosts? There was a brief golden period around I think 2014 where I'd see that logo on sites, but now they all seem to implement it behind the scenes, yet whitelist it to only Google, Facebook, and Apple. None of whom I would like to use to authenticate with most forums
pmoriarty 3y ago
Discord is more featureful than IRC, and prettier than IRC clients, but there are no local archives or logging, and its searching capabilities are atrocious in comparison to having local logs searchable with ordinary text-processing tools. Not that it matters to most users, because they wouldn't know how to use such tools to begin with, and don't know what they're missing. Discord is an information black hole, and I pity future generations who'll have virtually no access to the petabytes of history lost in dark data vaults like Discord.
- _Donny 3y ago
  Interesting. Personally, I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations. I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server. Also, sometimes the server would not let go of my disconnected nickname, so I would get one with one of more `_` appended to it. Re-joining would not fetch the previous messages, and I would have anxiety that someone has replied to my message that I posted a few minutes prior, but I would never see... I know that IRC bouncers exist, and I have even tried using `tmux` on a server to keep my irssi connection alive, but that is in no way user-friendly, even for a fairly technical person. Last resort is to find the public channel logs somewhere, if they even exist. At that point, I would just give up and use Discord.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    "I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations. I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server." This far been a solved problem for 30 years. You just run an IRC bouncer on a host that's always up (like on a VPS) and have your IRC client connect to that. The bouncer will keep scrollback and logs for you. Of course if you use Discord you don't need to bother to do any of that, so the convenience it offers is real, but it's not like if you're an IRC user you can't have persistent history. On the other hand, with IRC you only log the channels you're in (unless you run your own IRC server), so you will miss out on history from other channels.
    - mentalpiracy 3y ago
      “solved problem” for 0.01% of use cases is not how I would normally define the phrase.
      - pmoriarty 3y ago

by movedx 3y ago

b3orn 3y ago

Classic forums aren't connected with each other, you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in, sometimes just to look at the content. On Reddit (or StackExchange) you can have one account to access "forums" for almost everything, call it low friction if you want.

johannes1234321 3y ago
There is some benefit in sharing the user account, however there are reasons for using different identities on different forums.
reaperducer 3y ago
you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in That was true about ten years ago. Most forums that keep their software up to date support logging in with a number of SSO systems.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Do they commonly allow arbitrary OpenID hosts? There was a brief golden period around I think 2014 where I'd see that logo on sites, but now they all seem to implement it behind the scenes, yet whitelist it to only Google, Facebook, and Apple. None of whom I would like to use to authenticate with most forums

pmoriarty 3y ago

Discord is more featureful than IRC, and prettier than IRC clients, but there are no local archives or logging, and its searching capabilities are atrocious in comparison to having local logs searchable with ordinary text-processing tools. Not that it matters to most users, because they wouldn't know how to use such tools to begin with, and don't know what they're missing. Discord is an information black hole, and I pity future generations who'll have virtually no access to the petabytes of history lost in dark data vaults like Discord.

_Donny 3y ago
Interesting. Personally, I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations. I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server. Also, sometimes the server would not let go of my disconnected nickname, so I would get one with one of more `_` appended to it. Re-joining would not fetch the previous messages, and I would have anxiety that someone has replied to my message that I posted a few minutes prior, but I would never see... I know that IRC bouncers exist, and I have even tried using `tmux` on a server to keep my irssi connection alive, but that is in no way user-friendly, even for a fairly technical person. Last resort is to find the public channel logs somewhere, if they even exist. At that point, I would just give up and use Discord.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  "I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations. I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server." This far been a solved problem for 30 years. You just run an IRC bouncer on a host that's always up (like on a VPS) and have your IRC client connect to that. The bouncer will keep scrollback and logs for you. Of course if you use Discord you don't need to bother to do any of that, so the convenience it offers is real, but it's not like if you're an IRC user you can't have persistent history. On the other hand, with IRC you only log the channels you're in (unless you run your own IRC server), so you will miss out on history from other channels.
  - mentalpiracy 3y ago
    “solved problem” for 0.01% of use cases is not how I would normally define the phrase.
    - pmoriarty 3y ago