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This whole problem wouldn't exist if we used distributed chat protocols which have been around for over 40 years (IRC). With the added benefit of having an open

by aaptel 2y ago

This whole problem wouldn't exist if we used distributed chat protocols which have been around for over 40 years (IRC). With the added benefit of having an open specification and multiple implementations. No walled gardens. And if you think IRC is too old for the modern world take a look at matrix or xmpp. How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy.

lofaszvanitt 2y ago
Discord wrapped irc in shiny paper.
Krasnol 2y ago
Usability did it. You download an exe, install it, make an account and it runs. Just like that. Everybody can do it. There are tons of useful and great software out there. Most of it is not easy for the public. Some (most?) of it doesn't even have an GUI. People rather sell their identity and even pay than suffer through too many hops.
- Intralexical 2y ago
  Not even a EXE. The web version is feature-complete, so you only need to click a link.
  - Krasnol 2y ago
    You're right. I forgot about that. I also forgot all those people who came from the TeamSpeak servers.
maccard 2y ago
If you want to know why, look at the App Store reviews for discord and tea speak and compare them. Discord just works.
dewey 2y ago
I’m a huge IRC fan and I dislike Discord, but all these other services are way too clunky and IRC is really only usable through IRCCloud that has a relatively okay mobile app these days. Recently a very technical group I’m part of migrated from Telegram to Matrix and the user experience is just not very good. The apps are buggy, don’t look good, then in the new “Element” app SSO isn’t supported so I can’t use my account with it. There’s lots of paper cuts that are okay for someone like me who likes to figure it out but I’d never try to convince my friends to use it.
- nunobrito 2y ago
  For telegram refugees then maybe SimpleX is an option, except it has no bots nor other options for clients at the moment. What I personally use is the nostr protocol through a client like Amethyst or OxChat. Messages and groups can be E2EE private, or you can just use the public groups. The biggest advantage is that you are joining a bigger community of apps and services built on top of the same protocol, rather than joining some isolated island (again).
  - dewey 2y ago
    I recently listed to a nostr podcast and even people working in it said it would not be reasonable to recommend it for a secure messaging app at this point. Just because very early things like metadata leaking are not addressed yet. So not really an alternative.
    - nunobrito 2y ago
      I don't know what podcast you are mentioning or the context. Anyone can say anything on youtube. We are talking about a transition from telegram, when comparing to that platform then NOSTR is undoubtely more secure when noticing that telegram doesn't even encrypt conversations by default and this isn't informed to users. Whereas in NOSTR you are made aware when a conversation is private between both parties. Metadata is fetchable for 99% of messaging apps out there. If you'd ask me about making a more secure app then this involves continuous streaming of data, padding of messages to avoid content guessing and avoid the usage of internet as data channel. So it really depends on what you consider secure and what it is compared against. Compared to Telegram it is more secure. Compared to a piece of paper encrypted with a custom algorithm and delivered by a trusted human transporter? Not really.
elcomet 2y ago
IRC and distributed protocols un general had a big issue : you loose history every time you disconnect
- menaerus 2y ago
  In the age we are living this starts to sound more like a feature to me.
  - rtpg 2y ago
    Is it really that much of a jump to say "I would like to see the chat that has happened between my friends between the time I got on a plane and then got back off"? Does that sound odd? Imagine if you couldn't receive e-mail while you were offline! This isn't to disparage IRC and friends too much, obviously there's huge value in it existing as a synchronous chat room. Just... async chat is a thing that totally happens for most people.
    - menaerus 2y ago
      Sure, the advantages of async communication are obvious but the crucial difference is that in that case vendor has to store your data somewhere in the data center. Reusing that data for unsolicited purposes is what many people will have a concern with.
      - cmiller1 2y ago
        How about a secure async chat where the vendor simply stores a list of message IDs, and then the client requests if anyone has a copy of any message you haven't received yet from the other users in chat when you log on
        menaerus 2y ago
        Such vendor would have a hard time finding a business model since plenty of chat-services are already existing on the market and all of them have access to the data of their users in one way or another. Thus I don't know what other type of leverage they would be able to pull off to sustain their business.
rollcat 2y ago
IRC does not store messages, it only relays them to clients. You need an add-on solution to store chat history, something we've been taking for granted for ~30 years. IRC all but requires using a bouncer to follow a conversation from more than a single device. IRC does not encrypt messages, only (optionally) the client<->server connection. Without E2EE, you have no privacy against the server/operator, which is an easily targeted SPOF. Matrix (the protocol) is still in flux, and the implementations are lagging behind the spec. If you're not using Element, you're behind on features and security. XMPP is (similarly to IRC) relying on optional protocol add-ons for basic things, like E2EE, which clients may or may not support fully or correctly. I recommend reading these breakdowns by soatok: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol... 2013/Snowden happened 11 years ago. E2EE should by now be considered a basic feature, a commodity, something we should be calling for as relentlessly as we did for HTTPS. (Discord of course does not implement E2EE.)
- voidnap 2y ago
  > IRC does not store messages, it only relays them to clients. Some people consider this a feature and prefer using IRC bouncers to discord. OMEMO solved encryption for XMPP a decade ago. I haven't seen it on IRC yet though.
  - brysonreece 2y ago
    Some (most) people want to easily talk to their friends or interest groups without having to worry about it.
    - voidnap 2y ago
      I get that, I wasn't passing judgement. You guys must be super sensitive to be downvoting me for just sharing another point of view. Personally, I find xmpp and IRC to be easier ways to talk to friends and interest groups when they use those networks. The software is simpler, faster, and a better experience for me. Matrix is a bit of an exception where it's slow and buggy and barely hanging on. But me and my friends don't care about discord stickers or nitro or giphy links or the discord store or any of that kinda stuff that you go to discord to use. And thats fine if you do. People can want and enjoy different things and also "want to easily talk to their friends or interest groups without having to worry about it."
tannhaeuser 2y ago
There’s no lack of open chat protocols and federated services but those have mostly torpedoed themselves: by usability and discoverability problems, holier–than–you attitudes, and plain nerd attention wars. Such as XMPP (used a lot until around 2010 but easily dragged into the mud because XML and overengineering), Mastodon (saw a surge as twitter was faltering but then seemingly stopped to be everyone‘s darling as its limitations became obvious, among them Mastodon admins taking their audience hostage; also ActivityPub fans going around advertising it for each and everything when RSS is just fine for web sites, damaging news feeds alltogether in the process). Where spamming, or the systematic exploitation of digital communication by the „ad industry“, was killing it in the past (Usenet, and arguably the web), today there‘s also the problem of being consumed by LLMs to push non-public messaging. Though I‘m not sure the latter is really a concern for many, as developers not only are giving away their code, but their entire activity log/issues and their solutions on github such that they can easily be digested and replaced by coding assistant LLMs, git being a distributed system in the first place.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > among them Mastodon admins taking their audience hostage I was excited first hearing all the "fediverse" stuff, but having to hand over control of your online identity to a particular node forever felt a little bit like "old boss, same as the new boss." (Yes, I know some folks are working on the identity issue.)
  - nunobrito 2y ago
    Reminds when I joined the largest mastodon server for my country. Advertised by the owner as a bastion for free speech, democracy and fair treatment. Then in 2020 started mass banning everyone "that went against science" on the covid fraudemia at our country. Twitter on those days was bad, but that mastodon server sure became even worser. Nowadays found a fresh air of innovation with Nostr. No more servers with your data and followers locked inside. You can silence the people you don't want to hear, you won't hostage them into forced silence any longer.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
high_na_euv 2y ago
>How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy. Orders of magnitude better product than anything competition had at the time?
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  > Orders of magnitude better product than anything competition had at the time? Nah, it just comes down to non-techy folk wanting to play/chat with their friends in a just-work configuration. Mumble, TeamSpeak were always janky, needed a hosted server. IRC is multiplayer notepad. Geeks care about E2E, and all that glory but these folks don't. And that's what Discord dishes; as did Y!M, MSN, ICQ, AIM back in the day. All discord has done is replaced those above as GitHub has replaced SourceForge. We didn't care if the message were encrypted or not back then. Why do we now?
  - StableAlkyne 2y ago
    > Geeks care about E2E *Some* geeks. Specifically those who are into encryption. There is nothing wrong with wanting an application to just work, especially when it's significantly better than what came before (contemporary competitors were Skype and IRC)
  - pphysch 2y ago
    You're just describing why Discord was a much better product.
  - high_na_euv 2y ago
    I used all Ventrilo mumble ts3 skype Discord was way better and had more features and was more safe than self hosted alternatives
EGreg 2y ago
I keep writing about this tragedy, but few people care. Even on HN: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c... and https://community.qbix.com/t/the-debate-about-end-to-end-encryption-and-governments/351 https://community.qbix.com/t/the-debate-about-end-to-end-enc...
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  > Own this piece of crypto history I would argue that the web lost it's way as much with "web3" as with the platforms of web 2.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    I didn’t write that. You must be quoting an ad, and dismissing everything else
Intralexical 2y ago
> How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy. I think I'm reasonably technically competent, and I also dislike Discord's issues with privacy, data sovereignty, siloing information away from the open web, etc. But you know what I think whenever I click a Matrix link, or IRC? I just don't want to deal with it. You get a list of apps you've never heard of, some of which may not be feature-complete, some with more than one version, some which are advertised using words like "GNOME", "Rust", "Qt5", and "C++" that have no meaning or relation to actually using them as a chat app, and all of which I guess are different and would need to be tried and learned separately. Then picking and clicking one tries to open an outside program which probably isn't installed and I don't want to install because I don't really know/care what it is. And if at that point, out of the dozen or so app options it showed you, you happened to choose one with a web version like Element, and you figure out you can click the "Continue in your browser" button out of the four or five unexplained buttons that pop up as a result ("XDG-Open", "Cancel", "FlatHub", "Download", and "Continue in Browser")— You get a static screen that shows just enough message history to not be useful, with a confusing UI you can't seem to interact with, hidden behind a login wall that still hasn't really explained what in the Internet tubes you're actually looking at. E.G.: https://matrix.to/#/#invidious:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#invidious:matrix.org If you try to Google "What is Matrix"— You get pages about math. So then you Google "What is Matrix chat". And all the results harp on using words like "open network", "decentralised", "protocol", "real-time communication", "open standard", "federated"— Which, again, may be technically interesting if you're into that, but doesn't actually have anything to do with how it directly serves the user as a chat app and how you can use it or sign up for it. It takes way too many clicks, and you get bombarded with way too much information… To still not end up using the app, and in fact end up more confused than before about what a "Matrix" even is. Let's say you lose 15% of incoming users at each step. That rapidly scares off most of the mainstream, before they've even tried it. Maybe Matrix and Element are great. But it just seems like such an ordeal. Compare that with Discord. You click a link. And then either you're already in the server, or it has a single text box and a single button you click to funnel you through making an account and joining the server. It doesn't try to convince you to install a Desktop app until you're already fully using it in the web version. You get clear answers and reasons to use it if you search "What is Discord" or go to the website. It doesn't overwhelm you with options and then hound you with technical explainers that you didn't ask for. IRC goes the other way in usability. People want voice chat, message history, different channels in the same "server", PM channels, etc. /rant
Ecoste 2y ago
> How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy. The fact that you're baffled why discord took over is exactly why it took over. You can't even acknowledge that the user experience is 10x better and it's suitable for a general non-technical audience.
- mystified5016 2y ago
  New quest available! Buy nitro for stickers! Buy nitro as a gift! New quest available! New quest available! Restart to update. New quest available! Look at the new emojis you could use with nitro! New update available! New update available again! Third update today! New quest available! Look at these profile decorations you could use with nitro! Boost this server! *NEW QUEST AVAILABLE*
throw16180339 2y ago
> How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy. Anyone can set up or join a Discord server. If you give users the choice between a complex open platform and an easy proprietary solution, they will pick the latter every time.
RadiozRadioz 2y ago
There are loads of comments exactly like OP's, and they always make the mistake of mentioning IRC alongside XMPP and Matrix. Inevitably repliers can't help themselves and spend their replies discussing IRC's unsuitability for modern IM and how it's not federated. When IRC is mentioned, commenters ignore XMPP and Matrix and attack the point in terms of IRC. (Though this thread in particular is better than average). Matrix and XMPP are the far more appropriate competitors for Discord, we need to steer the conversation toward them. I deliberately never mention IRC when I make these types of comments so people don't latch onto it and ignore everything else I said.
weaksauce 2y ago
because the voice chat function is so leaps and bounds better than anything out there and it was primarily used for that to game in real time. the text was an afterthought for gamers.
urza 2y ago
100% !! It's so sad :(

by aaptel 2y ago

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

Discord wrapped irc in shiny paper.

Krasnol 2y ago

Usability did it. You download an exe, install it, make an account and it runs. Just like that. Everybody can do it. There are tons of useful and great software out there. Most of it is not easy for the public. Some (most?) of it doesn't even have an GUI. People rather sell their identity and even pay than suffer through too many hops.

Intralexical 2y ago
Not even a EXE. The web version is feature-complete, so you only need to click a link.
- Krasnol 2y ago
  You're right. I forgot about that. I also forgot all those people who came from the TeamSpeak servers.

maccard 2y ago

If you want to know why, look at the App Store reviews for discord and tea speak and compare them. Discord just works.

dewey 2y ago

I’m a huge IRC fan and I dislike Discord, but all these other services are way too clunky and IRC is really only usable through IRCCloud that has a relatively okay mobile app these days. Recently a very technical group I’m part of migrated from Telegram to Matrix and the user experience is just not very good. The apps are buggy, don’t look good, then in the new “Element” app SSO isn’t supported so I can’t use my account with it. There’s lots of paper cuts that are okay for someone like me who likes to figure it out but I’d never try to convince my friends to use it.

nunobrito 2y ago
For telegram refugees then maybe SimpleX is an option, except it has no bots nor other options for clients at the moment. What I personally use is the nostr protocol through a client like Amethyst or OxChat. Messages and groups can be E2EE private, or you can just use the public groups. The biggest advantage is that you are joining a bigger community of apps and services built on top of the same protocol, rather than joining some isolated island (again).
- dewey 2y ago
  I recently listed to a nostr podcast and even people working in it said it would not be reasonable to recommend it for a secure messaging app at this point. Just because very early things like metadata leaking are not addressed yet. So not really an alternative.
  - nunobrito 2y ago
    I don't know what podcast you are mentioning or the context. Anyone can say anything on youtube. We are talking about a transition from telegram, when comparing to that platform then NOSTR is undoubtely more secure when noticing that telegram doesn't even encrypt conversations by default and this isn't informed to users. Whereas in NOSTR you are made aware when a conversation is private between both parties. Metadata is fetchable for 99% of messaging apps out there. If you'd ask me about making a more secure app then this involves continuous streaming of data, padding of messages to avoid content guessing and avoid the usage of internet as data channel. So it really depends on what you consider secure and what it is compared against. Compared to Telegram it is more secure. Compared to a piece of paper encrypted with a custom algorithm and delivered by a trusted human transporter? Not really.

elcomet 2y ago

IRC and distributed protocols un general had a big issue : you loose history every time you disconnect

menaerus 2y ago
In the age we are living this starts to sound more like a feature to me.
- rtpg 2y ago
  Is it really that much of a jump to say "I would like to see the chat that has happened between my friends between the time I got on a plane and then got back off"? Does that sound odd? Imagine if you couldn't receive e-mail while you were offline! This isn't to disparage IRC and friends too much, obviously there's huge value in it existing as a synchronous chat room. Just... async chat is a thing that totally happens for most people.
  - menaerus 2y ago
    Sure, the advantages of async communication are obvious but the crucial difference is that in that case vendor has to store your data somewhere in the data center. Reusing that data for unsolicited purposes is what many people will have a concern with.
    - cmiller1 2y ago
      How about a secure async chat where the vendor simply stores a list of message IDs, and then the client requests if anyone has a copy of any message you haven't received yet from the other users in chat when you log on
      - menaerus 2y ago
        Such vendor would have a hard time finding a business model since plenty of chat-services are already existing on the market and all of them have access to the data of their users in one way or another. Thus I don't know what other type of leverage they would be able to pull off to sustain their business.

rollcat 2y ago

IRC does not store messages, it only relays them to clients. You need an add-on solution to store chat history, something we've been taking for granted for ~30 years. IRC all but requires using a bouncer to follow a conversation from more than a single device. IRC does not encrypt messages, only (optionally) the client<->server connection. Without E2EE, you have no privacy against the server/operator, which is an easily targeted SPOF. Matrix (the protocol) is still in flux, and the implementations are lagging behind the spec. If you're not using Element, you're behind on features and security. XMPP is (similarly to IRC) relying on optional protocol add-ons for basic things, like E2EE, which clients may or may not support fully or correctly. I recommend reading these breakdowns by soatok: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/ https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol... 2013/Snowden happened 11 years ago. E2EE should by now be considered a basic feature, a commodity, something we should be calling for as relentlessly as we did for HTTPS. (Discord of course does not implement E2EE.)

voidnap 2y ago
> IRC does not store messages, it only relays them to clients. Some people consider this a feature and prefer using IRC bouncers to discord. OMEMO solved encryption for XMPP a decade ago. I haven't seen it on IRC yet though.
- brysonreece 2y ago
  Some (most) people want to easily talk to their friends or interest groups without having to worry about it.
  - voidnap 2y ago
    I get that, I wasn't passing judgement. You guys must be super sensitive to be downvoting me for just sharing another point of view. Personally, I find xmpp and IRC to be easier ways to talk to friends and interest groups when they use those networks. The software is simpler, faster, and a better experience for me. Matrix is a bit of an exception where it's slow and buggy and barely hanging on. But me and my friends don't care about discord stickers or nitro or giphy links or the discord store or any of that kinda stuff that you go to discord to use. And thats fine if you do. People can want and enjoy different things and also "want to easily talk to their friends or interest groups without having to worry about it."

tannhaeuser 2y ago

There’s no lack of open chat protocols and federated services but those have mostly torpedoed themselves: by usability and discoverability problems, holier–than–you attitudes, and plain nerd attention wars. Such as XMPP (used a lot until around 2010 but easily dragged into the mud because XML and overengineering), Mastodon (saw a surge as twitter was faltering but then seemingly stopped to be everyone‘s darling as its limitations became obvious, among them Mastodon admins taking their audience hostage; also ActivityPub fans going around advertising it for each and everything when RSS is just fine for web sites, damaging news feeds alltogether in the process). Where spamming, or the systematic exploitation of digital communication by the „ad industry“, was killing it in the past (Usenet, and arguably the web), today there‘s also the problem of being consumed by LLMs to push non-public messaging. Though I‘m not sure the latter is really a concern for many, as developers not only are giving away their code, but their entire activity log/issues and their solutions on github such that they can easily be digested and replaced by coding assistant LLMs, git being a distributed system in the first place.

Terr_ 2y ago
> among them Mastodon admins taking their audience hostage I was excited first hearing all the "fediverse" stuff, but having to hand over control of your online identity to a particular node forever felt a little bit like "old boss, same as the new boss." (Yes, I know some folks are working on the identity issue.)
- nunobrito 2y ago
  Reminds when I joined the largest mastodon server for my country. Advertised by the owner as a bastion for free speech, democracy and fair treatment. Then in 2020 started mass banning everyone "that went against science" on the covid fraudemia at our country. Twitter on those days was bad, but that mastodon server sure became even worser. Nowadays found a fresh air of innovation with Nostr. No more servers with your data and followers locked inside. You can silence the people you don't want to hear, you won't hostage them into forced silence any longer.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago

high_na_euv 2y ago

>How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy. Orders of magnitude better product than anything competition had at the time?

doublerabbit 2y ago
> Orders of magnitude better product than anything competition had at the time? Nah, it just comes down to non-techy folk wanting to play/chat with their friends in a just-work configuration. Mumble, TeamSpeak were always janky, needed a hosted server. IRC is multiplayer notepad. Geeks care about E2E, and all that glory but these folks don't. And that's what Discord dishes; as did Y!M, MSN, ICQ, AIM back in the day. All discord has done is replaced those above as GitHub has replaced SourceForge. We didn't care if the message were encrypted or not back then. Why do we now?
- StableAlkyne 2y ago
  > Geeks care about E2E *Some* geeks. Specifically those who are into encryption. There is nothing wrong with wanting an application to just work, especially when it's significantly better than what came before (contemporary competitors were Skype and IRC)
- pphysch 2y ago
  You're just describing why Discord was a much better product.
- high_na_euv 2y ago
  I used all Ventrilo mumble ts3 skype Discord was way better and had more features and was more safe than self hosted alternatives

EGreg 2y ago

I keep writing about this tragedy, but few people care. Even on HN: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c... and https://community.qbix.com/t/the-debate-about-end-to-end-encryption-and-governments/351 https://community.qbix.com/t/the-debate-about-end-to-end-enc...

philipwhiuk 2y ago
> Own this piece of crypto history I would argue that the web lost it's way as much with "web3" as with the platforms of web 2.
- EGreg 2y ago
  I didn’t write that. You must be quoting an ad, and dismissing everything else

Intralexical 2y ago

> How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy. I think I'm reasonably technically competent, and I also dislike Discord's issues with privacy, data sovereignty, siloing information away from the open web, etc. But you know what I think whenever I click a Matrix link, or IRC? I just don't want to deal with it. You get a list of apps you've never heard of, some of which may not be feature-complete, some with more than one version, some which are advertised using words like "GNOME", "Rust", "Qt5", and "C++" that have no meaning or relation to actually using them as a chat app, and all of which I guess are different and would need to be tried and learned separately. Then picking and clicking one tries to open an outside program which probably isn't installed and I don't want to install because I don't really know/care what it is. And if at that point, out of the dozen or so app options it showed you, you happened to choose one with a web version like Element, and you figure out you can click the "Continue in your browser" button out of the four or five unexplained buttons that pop up as a result ("XDG-Open", "Cancel", "FlatHub", "Download", and "Continue in Browser")— You get a static screen that shows just enough message history to not be useful, with a confusing UI you can't seem to interact with, hidden behind a login wall that still hasn't really explained what in the Internet tubes you're actually looking at. E.G.: https://matrix.to/#/#invidious:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#invidious:matrix.org If you try to Google "What is Matrix"— You get pages about math. So then you Google "What is Matrix chat". And all the results harp on using words like "open network", "decentralised", "protocol", "real-time communication", "open standard", "federated"— Which, again, may be technically interesting if you're into that, but doesn't actually have anything to do with how it directly serves the user as a chat app and how you can use it or sign up for it. It takes way too many clicks, and you get bombarded with way too much information… To still not end up using the app, and in fact end up more confused than before about what a "Matrix" even is. Let's say you lose 15% of incoming users at each step. That rapidly scares off most of the mainstream, before they've even tried it. Maybe Matrix and Element are great. But it just seems like such an ordeal. Compare that with Discord. You click a link. And then either you're already in the server, or it has a single text box and a single button you click to funnel you through making an account and joining the server. It doesn't try to convince you to install a Desktop app until you're already fully using it in the web version. You get clear answers and reasons to use it if you search "What is Discord" or go to the website. It doesn't overwhelm you with options and then hound you with technical explainers that you didn't ask for. IRC goes the other way in usability. People want voice chat, message history, different channels in the same "server", PM channels, etc. /rant

Ecoste 2y ago

> How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy. The fact that you're baffled why discord took over is exactly why it took over. You can't even acknowledge that the user experience is 10x better and it's suitable for a general non-technical audience.

mystified5016 2y ago
New quest available! Buy nitro for stickers! Buy nitro as a gift! New quest available! New quest available! Restart to update. New quest available! Look at the new emojis you could use with nitro! New update available! New update available again! Third update today! New quest available! Look at these profile decorations you could use with nitro! Boost this server! *NEW QUEST AVAILABLE*

throw16180339 2y ago

> How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy. Anyone can set up or join a Discord server. If you give users the choice between a complex open platform and an easy proprietary solution, they will pick the latter every time.

RadiozRadioz 2y ago

There are loads of comments exactly like OP's, and they always make the mistake of mentioning IRC alongside XMPP and Matrix. Inevitably repliers can't help themselves and spend their replies discussing IRC's unsuitability for modern IM and how it's not federated. When IRC is mentioned, commenters ignore XMPP and Matrix and attack the point in terms of IRC. (Though this thread in particular is better than average). Matrix and XMPP are the far more appropriate competitors for Discord, we need to steer the conversation toward them. I deliberately never mention IRC when I make these types of comments so people don't latch onto it and ignore everything else I said.

weaksauce 2y ago

because the voice chat function is so leaps and bounds better than anything out there and it was primarily used for that to game in real time. the text was an afterthought for gamers.

urza 2y ago

100% !! It's so sad :(