Sounds like you’re hanging out in the wrong places on IRC. As an open source contributor IRC is a place where I do a lot of my coordination.
Comment on Can we please unpin the proprietary off-site/off-network promotion of discord
Vlyn@lemmy.zip 10 months agoNo matter what niche Discord server I join, if I write something in the general channel I usually get a reply in seconds to a few minutes.
IRC? Has always been a dumpster where I might not get a single reply in an hour.
Kangie@lemmy.srcfiles.zip 10 months ago
dustyData@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s just a product of sheer number of users. I was there in the IRC chats 20+ years ago. You also got replies in seconds. Sometimes chat rooms flew by so fast that admins had to force timeouts or the chat was unreadable. Less people use IRC now, but they tend to be far more tech knowledgeable people, with more experience and less toxic than Discord.
Vlyn@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
I’ve been on the internet for roughly the last 27 years and I’ve never had a good experience on IRC. It always felt like a black hole for me and near unusable. No chat history, no proper channels and too many idlers.
Discord is proprietary, which isn’t great, but it has the features down pat. I can join whatever niche community and have fully indexed chat channels. I can write something new, or just search through the public logs if someone already asked my question in the past. Each server has a single topic, for example a certain game, so there’s also a split in channels for general discussion, bug reports, new player help, change logs, …
It’s well organized and does exactly what I need. And if you find someone you want to play with on a server, one click and you’re in a voice chat with them.
Compare that to the crap we used in the past: ICQ (just text chat, you had to know the ICQ number of everyone), Teamspeak (Just voice chat pretty much, I hosted my own server for over a decade, but it was always crap), Mumble (Similar to Teamspeak), …
There is a damn good reason why Discord is the standard nowadays. You might not like it, but that’s just the way it is.
Bo7a@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
This is patently false. Your chat history is in your client AND in most cases put online somewhere by the admins or a bot they control. I can still go look at my IRC chats from 18 years ago today.
Vlyn@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
I’m talking about chat history for the entire channel, no matter if you’re online or not.
Maybe admins can put them up somewhere in another place, but they are never there when you join fresh in a channel.