There's still a few holdouts, but it's usually just 3 or 4 good-ol-boys who haven't left the server for 12 years.
It's interesting to watch contenders like gitter, slack, mattermost, riot/matrix, etc, falling to the rise of Discord, which was for gaming communities but now it's like the reddit of chat servers.
Yeah you can keep saying that but it doesn't make it true.
IRC has what most people need a text chat. A lot of the new features that these new programs have are unnecessary. End to End encryption being the most useful one, fortunately there's things like Matrix.
> In other words, a large number of communities I frequented have re-formed in Discord, and are much more active.
A lot of communities don't have a Discord server/channel so how active are those ones?
I wouldn't correlate activity with quality either. Typically I have found I get better/more knowledgeable responses from mailing lists, those are as old as email itself.
> There's still a few holdouts, but it's usually just 3 or 4 good-ol-boys who haven't left the server for 12 years.
If anything the introduction of Matrix has meant those channels are even more active with bridges especially on Freenode and OFTC where such bridges are officially supported.
> It's interesting to watch contenders like gitter, slack, mattermost, riot/matrix, etc,
Gitter is accessible by Matrix, Slack I've never needed to use as with mattermost. There's just so many 'options' out there that.
For private business stuff I'd probably use Rocketchat because I can self host it and not depend on some other company. It's good for sharing code snippets.
Matrix, particularly Riot still needs to become more mature. It is not as mature and dependable as IRC yet for general chat yet.
The Matrix spec isn't even finalized and is subject to change. That said it is making good progress. Their effort in regard to bridges makes it far more appealing than any of the other dozen proprietary options. If anything has the possibility of displacing IRC it will be Matrix.
I have seen that already particularly for developer communities.
> falling to the rise of Discord, which was for gaming communities but now it's like the reddit of chat servers.
Yeah but that's not developers, and yet despite these subsections using it I've never had the need. Next year it will be something else. The only reason Discord is as popular as it is is because Twitch ran a very aggressive advertising campaign.
For gaming you still can't beat a private mumble server.
Running a bouncer is a lot less effort than your own synapse home server for Matrix I might add.
Many people still do use paste-bins especially when they want syntax highlighting. Most of the support channels for major Linux/BSD distributions are on IRC still as with open source software.
For public communities end-to-end encryption isn't really necessary because they are public. IRC has authentication and transparent encryption.
Additionally it's very distraction-less and there are plenty of good console command line clients, eg weechat, irssi etc.
To this very day I use email and IRC daily. Thunderbird and Weechat start when I login.
Sometimes I use qTox to stay in touch with family (parents etc) as it's easy to use (particularly for non computer literate users). Decentralized and peer to peer. Many of my computer-illiterate friends have commented on it's simplicity when compared to other proprietary options.
I sometimes use Matrix if I need 'some other service ie gitter' or Matrix itself. When gaming with close friends we usually use my mumble server.
As much as I would like to use Signal do not like the fact that it is bound to a phone number and is centralized. I wrote about that more in depth here https://reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/9re6l5/chat_sol...
Many years earlier I used XMPP with OTR particularly when GoogleTalk and Facebook had gateways. Now that Google shut down their gateway, and now Hangouts I'm certainly not going to adopt their next fly-by-night software.
I've never had any motivation to go near discord, slack, telegram or some other fly-by-night software. I also have no need to try out things like Rich Communication Services (RCS) which are also vulnerable to state "technical assistance order" style notices.
It is time more people used more end-to-end, decentralized encrypted tools. The more people that uses these tools the less eager governments will be in passing useless laws that won't really help anyway.
It's clear state governments won't stop at trying to make the centralized ones put backdoors in on command, UK Australia etc.
Social networks come and go. IRC is FOREVER. ;)
I've been on IRC for just shy of 20 years. It is still the network that provides the most value and help, BY FAR.