forum.sickos.net

but where software like phpBB and discourse live on in a meaningful way across a wide array of digital communities, it feels like irc hasn't quite survived in the same way. i'm personally bummed that discord is acceptable for a lot of communities today that would have used irc + forums in the past. i do, for the most part, understand why things are the way they are, but i'd be curious to further unpack all of the history and user interface discoveries that brought us here.

i'd also be curious to hear from those of you with experience using matrix versus irc, etc!

tl;dr; probably stuff included in the "i understand why things are the way they are" but I already wrote the thing so...lol. with your second question answered near the end.

ux wise, i think photos and voice chat were some of the biggest major innovations in IMing technology that really spelled the end for purely text-based chat services, let alone the other multitudes of bells and whistles. those things remain big hurdles that people complain about the most (that I've seen) when utilizing IRC. IRC also by default has a very terrible habit of existing in a high-trust mode of providing full names and IP addresses of users, which...probably fine back when the internet was smaller but nowadays almost certainly a non-starter without bouncers.

i still think the biggest factor in discord's favour is sorta the same thing that created every other social media monopoly we see, i.e. the centralization. just having one place where everyone talks is unfortunately a much easier model to grok for most people, especially in the age of all other models falling by the wayside. connecting to IRC alone is sorta outside of the reach of a lot of people for whom technology is something to be utilized not operated.

a single centralized UX platform helps to really seal the deal IMO - you create a unified experience for everyone using your service, and therefore whenever someone does something there's a uniform response, not mojibake when someone puts an emoji into an older ASCII-compliant terminal e.g. it "just works." critical mass doesn't help - i've stopped talking to a lot of people since leaving discord, and I can't really encourage them to use matrix or xmpp or irc because...why would they just to talk to me, lol.

as per forum communities, i think it's a bit easier of a metaphor to survive centralization as they're inherently self-centralized microcosms. they still lost a lot of mindshare to truly ultra-siloed communities like reddit as you mentioned, but it makes more idiomatic sense to people that boards are just another website, as opposed to IRC where you have a bunch of independent, largely incompatible services with individual sets of channels for different interests.

my experience with matrix and XMPP is that they both suffer similar problems to IRC but also their own individual issues: matrix, its many security lapses and general sluggishness. XMPP...being pretty much a shell of a communications platform with a bunch of extensions bolted on that are oft-unsupported or otherwise inconsistent. additionally i've tried some other discord-lite clones on open-source homegrown protocols, and those all perform about as well as you would expect - for all of the evils discord has perpetuated into this world, their engineering stack is pretty damn amazing.

i worry about accidentally ignoring conversational partners

irc netiquette say, join channel, wait 5 minutes, if no one is talking its safe to assume its okay to interrupt, if people are talking, uh, well i forgot that part but now you know what theyre talking about..?

i'd also be curious to hear from those of you with experience using matrix versus irc, etc!

you approach matrix in a discord-like way, including the part where its jank and only works sometimes, but with the added variety of 100 different clients that suck in their own unique incompatible way, truly a great discord replacement

recently got to try xmpp, it probably has a worse client situation than matrix (fewer sucks to choose from), it is somewhat usable, i havent used it enough to form a coherent opinion on it (i guess animated avatars are even less of a thing that exists, you "can" have animated avatars on matrix in the sense of they will be animated in exactly one context in exactly one client, xmpp? its the png way or the high way, and you should know enough about apng adoption to understand why this is a definitive no-go for animated avatars)

tl;dr; probably stuff included in the "i understand why things are the way they are" but I already wrote the thing so...lol. with your second question answered near the end.

thank you for unpacking my lazy half-sentence and enriching the thread. :)

ux wise, i think photos and voice chat were some of the biggest major innovations in IMing technology that really spelled the end for purely text-based chat services, let alone the other multitudes of bells and whistles. those things remain big hurdles that people complain about the most (that I've seen) when utilizing IRC.

the biggest hurdle i often see is lack of persistent history. the users most affected by this don't usually call it out by name. i see them entering and then re-entering a room and either not understanding what's happening from the middle of a conversation or asking, "did anyone respond to my earlier message?" as nerds we know that between irc bouncers and irc v3 this is a solvable problem, but i guess since irc is already considered kind of a legacy, non-growth platform it's not a huge priority for server admins and client developers to jump on all the new features.

you approach matrix in a discord-like way, including the part where its jank and only works sometimes, but with the added variety of 100 different clients that suck in their own unique incompatible way, truly a great discord replacement

YoOo, quite the review.

the biggest hurdle i often see is lack of persistent history. the users most affected by this don't usually call it out by name. i see them entering and then re-entering a room and either not understanding what's happening from the middle of a conversation or asking, "did anyone respond to my earlier message?" as nerds we know that between irc bouncers and irc v3 this is a solvable problem, but i guess since irc is already considered kind of a legacy, non-growth platform it's not a huge priority for server admins and client developers to jump on all the new features.

yes! i'd totally forgotten about that. honestly some people would consider IRC chat losing its history by default part of its charm or even a value-add, but yeah, it's mega-inconvenient for everyone else! and yeah, IRC v3 is very cool but it's polish on a platform i think the vast majority of its users, mostly nerdy tech folks, think is largely polished to completion excepting individual personal tastes. it's also a very easy standard to pick and choose with, so that extra doesn't help.

matrix solves that for the most part but as other people have mentioned...boy howdy, is it a bit of a jankfest at times.