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Comment by arminiusreturns | Hacker News Reader

I disagree on the ease of use of the other tools. I ran a mumble server for a guild for almost 10 years and it was quit easy and awesome to use... for voice. Then due to reasons I turned it off for a while and by the time I came back everyone was on discord...

The main thing that discord did was combine voice with the chat side of things, and with per user chats and history. A lot of people don't know that mumble has a pretty decent html capable chat, but it's the history searching, dynamic rooms etc that set discord apart. Mumble still has the superior voice capabilities (simultaneous multiroom, easy permission, hierarchical, etc)

I have put most of my hope in mattermost to do murmur integration to solve this problem.

In the meantime I find myself considering trying to get everyone back on irc+mumble.

edit: Also, just have to say I bet the gov loves having a single place to send all those NSL's... cough hint cough

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Nobody's going to embrace IRC again until multi-device gets solved.

But the default answer to the question "how do I have seamless transition between my desktop and my phone" for IRC remains "pay for a shell/bnc, run irssi in screen, etc" which is of course a UX nightmare.

Discord has a buttery smooth onboarding process.

Maybe The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat/) could help ?

What I'm describing can't be achieved without server-side changes. The lounge is great but from what I can see it relies on having a persistent connection from the user's desktop.

Doesn't really solve the problem.

That still means running your own server, and having a machine running 24/7 to host that server. For many, many people nowadays a laptop is their primary and often only machine.

Why not have a little box plugged into your router with an app for your phone or web interface on your desktop with an app store like interface where you pick out the services that you want to run instead of paying $5 a month.

Make a Kickstarter for it?

Saying is easy. But for some reason, it still doesn't exist.

Because I don't have static ip.

Most people keep the same IP address for months. Your machine can update the address a public domain or subdomain points to on the rare occasion it reboots. If content is cached by hosts that have previously viewed it then this wont even cause an interruption.

With IPv6 one would suppose that it would be easy to keep the same address given that there is virtually no chance that anyone could accidentally be assigned it.

Because iPhones only deliver notifications through Apple's Notification Services which costs money. (Good for battery life though.)

Similarly for Android, the most reliable notification method is using the Google Play Services servers.

> But the default answer to the question "how do I have seamless transition between my desktop and my phone"

The "modern" answer is "don't do that". There is a time to play social games, there is a time to do what you are doing, and you should spend some time talking to yourself too.

Answering a valid usability question with unsolicited suggestions on how someone should structure their social life isn't very helpful.

"The grapes are sour anyway" is the standard open source answer for decades..

Just because it is not the answer you were expecting doesn't mean it is useless. People that give you what you ask for are not always your best friends.

Not fulfilling user requirements however, just means that your product is bad.

Thus the success of discord.

I agree with the sentiment of this answer.

While I think it could have been said better, we all need to quit feeling the need to have everything so perfectly connected all the time and feeling frustration when our tech gets in the way.

Actually, the modern answer is "use something other than IRC", which is partly why Discord became so popular with gamers.

The answers to changing user tastes is not to proclaim their tastes are wrong. That's the attitude displayed by a lot of IRC server operators and prolific IRC users, and it's that refusal to adapt that's driving IRC into obsolescence.

Maybe those people are ok with an ever-dwindling userbase, and if so that's great. But I'd like to see a Renaissance of IRC to the detriment of proprietary walled gardens like slack and Discord.

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