alt Hacker NewsAs someone who spent countless hours on IRC when I was younger and enjoyed 99% of it to the fullest... I'd kindly suggest refraining from pushing IRC any further. It has had its run, and while I know it still exists, it's nowhere near what it once was and it's not coming back.
Times have changed and people have different expectations. Nobody (except very few) is going to use multiple services and set up a bouncer just to get the basics working. It's better to spend time building a good replacement that keeps up with current needs than trying to push these old systems onto people, especially younger ones.
Replies
The corollary to times changing is that periodically what's old is new again. We can't have our cake and eat it too; if the gripe is that for-profit services become enshittified, then necessarily FOSS should be given a shot, but adding to that I'd say some of these platforms re-invent the wheel or add a coat of paint. What you can do with Discord you can already accomplish with a mix of IRC, vbulletin forums, email, Mastodon, and and others in decoupled fashion.
I take the point that a one-stop-shop is nice and probably viable leveraging this tech. At the same time, users already use a slew of different social media platforms that are usually redundant or overlap in some way. For most their mode of consumption is "the algorithm", endless feed of videos. Discord's core offering is not that, it's an orchestration of chat, video-chat, forums, notifications. It's a swiss-army knife.
I'm all for alternatives as long they're based on open protocols and truly open apps -- not some where a corporate entity gets to dictate how many users one may have or how many lines you get to store. It should also be fairly easy to connect to and not every open-source project needs E2E encryption. Matrix is probably okay, but I found it (and the apps) fairly cumbersome.
IRC obviously has its limitations, but it shines as an example of simplicity and maintainability with no corporate strings attached.