Discord vs. IRC Rough Notes

IRC is heavily session-oriented and works well with a persistent connection. However, when you start using multiple devices, such as PCs and mobiles, you encounter issues with fragmentation. It’s fine if you're only using a PC, but mixing multiple PCs and mobiles can quickly become chaotic. The lack of push notifications can also drain your mobile battery.

The biggest complaint I have with IRC is its assumption of synchronous communication. If you're not connected, you won't get a backlog. People suggest setting up a persistent proxy, but this feels like a quirky workaround that doesn't fully resolve the issue. Plus, for it to be effective, everyone needs to be configured that way, which isn't practical.

Additionally, any media other than text needs to be transferred off-band, through DCC or other file transfers.

While Discord isn't perfect, it eliminates many of the issues I experience with IRC. Ultimately, it depends on your use case, but IRC's assumptions don't work for me or my peers. That's my two cents.

Overall a very fair post. A few notes:

> mobile client sends a notification by default for any activity

This is a setting on a per-server basis, “Default Notification Settings” although it doesn’t effect “Highlight notifications” or poll notifications if the user has participated in a poll, so it leaves something to be desired.

> no active ruby bot library

I’ve used Discord.rb, and it may not meet the author’s definition of active, but it does exist.

> complicated subscription structure with unclear pricing (but probably <$20/m)

Discord is free. “Boosting” or paying at a server level is completely voluntary and unlocks mostly cosmetic features.

> mobile app is noticeably slower at everything

This one I don’t get. On my 5-year-old iPhone the Discord mobile app is pretty snappy. “slower” than what?

Funny that voice chat doesn’t even mentioned yet that’s what made Discord popular. All the other alternatives for group voice for gaming back then needed (still does) a dedicated server. Mumble, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo etc. Discord “bundled” the whole experience into one and that’s why it became a fortnight victory.

One feature that seems (to me) to be highly desirable, yet Discord and every other service like it (that I'm aware of) lacks: the ability for moderators to select several messages in a given channel, and shunt them into a new thread, leaving a link to said thread in their place.

As I've never seen a service provide this ability, it could be that I'm mistaken, and that this wouldn't be as useful in practice as it seems in theory. But, theoretically, this would provide a nice middle ground between forums (and the pseudo-forum-channels Discord supports on Community Servers) and open, IRC-style general discussion. With this feature, users could casually discuss things as usual, but then move to a separate thread once a tangent becomes sufficiently lengthy/heated/etc.

> a serious culture clash that prompts most of the UI problems

> Discord is oriented to mass-appeal to passive consumption of games, gossip, and memes

> Lobsters is about creating, learning, sharing experiences/expertise

This is not fair. There are plenty of learning oriented communities on Discord. I have run several, and they work very well.

I am not sure why the author didn't consider Matrix.

IRC leaking IP is the reason I never liked using IRC. The complaint about Discord being oriented towards games and memes is silly to me. I'm in Discord channels that have nothing to do with games.

Sometimes I think we need a new kind of organization for these kinds of things.

On the one hand, for people to work on it a lot, they need to be paid. Otherwise, they will be paid to do something else. So that would seem to indicate we need a corporation.

On the other hand, for it not to fall prey to the unfortunate expansion-stagnation-collapse life cycle of social products, it would seem it needs to be steered for the benefit of the world and the users. A corporation really cannot do that: a corporation is motivated by the interests of the people owning it and the people working there. While these interests frequently coincide with the interests of the people using whatever the corporation sells, there are also frequent failures to coincide which, when we consider something that is effectively infrastructure or a public good, is a problem.

Maybe a workable solution requires two organizations: a non-profit that supervises a corporation.

Jabber is what it should be. However the clients then lacked for the features Jabber boasted.

This then caused it to sink in to the puddle of mud forming a living fossil as like of IRC.

> the not-so-pleasant bridge to Libera Chat.

That's gotta be one of the understatements of the year. Very complex set up, almost no useful "how to use" documentation, and numerous outages made me give up on it.

As for why there is no good open source ones, it seems simple but is complex. What is often summarised as "text chat" becomes a long list of requirements when you probe deeper. People want history, power efficient notifications, be able share stuff like pictures and PDF's and when you press they always want to talk, video chat (with a funky background please), and broadcast their desktops and cameras too. And stickers. Who can function without a personalised sticker pack? They want e2e encryption, no unencrypted messages stored on servers, rooms lots of people that implement all those features, and hey don't forget infinite chat history. Oh and public rooms, with no central server, and provision for bot automation (with an AI plugin to reduce support questions of course) but no spam please. They want hierarchies of users in those public rooms - admins, mods and regulars and newbies. They want to be able fork threads and subgroups. They want a web interface, and a app, and gateways to all the protocols they prefer using despite all the effort you put into this one. And being open source it must be a lightweight and easy to understand protocol, with trivial setup.

We've had three attempts - IRC, jabber and matrix. None are there, IRC least of all. But IRC is simple and mostly just works.

Discord is more or less just IRC in the browser ...

This site does some shadows on the links that makes them unreadable with dark mode extensions.