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Comment by ivegotnoaccount | Hacker News Reader

I think you forgot "and never ever have internet or electricity issues" to your list. The big advantage of Slack/Discord is that once a message was sent, everyone will receive it. Maybe in some time if the user is not always up but it will be received. Not to forget, not everyone interested in this or that FOSS project is tech-savvy enough to setup what you said.

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This is a very narrow and short-sided point of view. Push the logic of this argument a little bit further, why is the issue lnxg33k1's internet and electricity a problem? The reason is that of course Discord controls the servers and they pay for the infra, and they essentially own your ability to chat with your friends. That isn't a problem until it becomes a problem[0]. Until then it's buying time, hoping Discord doesn't get bought by Amazon or Meta and then daddy decides it's time to extract rent.

Again, going to highlight it's such a short-sided POV, this sort of thinking "today it's free, it's better, and thus it is the right choice for the investment of my time, my community's time, even my project's time." Such short sided thinking in favor of convenience right now is way too common leads to a lot of problems (in society generally but that's another discussion). I really want people to have a longer term view of utility for the sake of longevity and stability of things as important as our channels of communication.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29711001 this was just posted a few hours ago.

That's a very genuine problem with Slack where my email address is somehow unable to register with their site, so I've never been able to use Slack. I don't even think I've been banned or blocked - since I never used the service - I think there's just something broken at their end and it's been impossible to find anyone who can fix it.

I haven't said that I wouldn't prefer a free alternative, only that trying to say IRC is the solution to all this is short-sighted too.

In short, using IRC for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Ease of use matters — that’s why you’re writing code, after all. To make peoples lives easier. Using IRC partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the complicated, archaic client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about ease of use — i.e. your most self aware contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.

I do mentoring for LibreOffice and this year I've interviewed over 100 people on IRC and had over 200 further mentoring chats. Most have never used IRC before and KiwiIRC web chat seems to work fine as the first client.

But there is also IRCCloud, like I think it stands to support my initial point about it being omnipresent, which now makes me wonder if one of the main issues of IRC for many people is not just about the presence of choices

Perhaps we should get rid of command lines in open source software, too. It's just so uninviting!

I'm not against people choosing discord for some projects, but there's nothing so terrible or oppressive about choosing IRC. It doesn't deserve the "considered harmful" treatment. Hopping on IRC is a very low bar for a potential contributor to clear.

Using IRC is not oppressive, I agree, and it wouldn't come to my mind to complain on an IRC channel about it not being Discord, but the point of the article is to show you must not use Discord and you are bad for doing it.

In my experience slack/discord are close to unusable when you have a really bad internet connection (for example on certain trains). They will pretend to send your message, but it will not actually go through (if you even manage to start slack/discord in the first place).

Mosh is the only thing that actually works in those cases.

I agree that SDiscord too is far from perfect in this circumstances (Though usually, the Discord client explicitly shows me when it acjieved to send the message as is it shown in light gray before this point)

But using Mosh means having a server, seting it up and so on. Yeah, Mosh+IRC is better from a FOSS perspective. But it comes with usability drawbacks too.

Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective but you're right, I have a UPS at home, so I solve that easily, for internet I've had a lot of problems in the past, but now I have a FTTH so that never happens, I guess if you have frequent issues with electricity and internet you have bigger issues other than saving IRC channel history :D, but I guess those are solvable with UPS, 4G modem backup connection and there are also some websites that save IRC channels history

Once again, the average user does not have all that. Discord has the advantage, for me as a user, of not having to pay hundreds of dollars simply not to loose messages because my connection go down ~5 minutes a day.

> Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective

It is, but the the average user's perspective is not that they'll set up an IRC bouncer (which odds are high they don't even know exists) so they can have message permanence and cross-device sharing.

Instead they'll say that IRC has no history / offline support (which is, technically, true) and will use discord because it does.

I bit the bullet and set up ZNC for my IRC connections this summer. Even by the standards of open source software, it was a chore, and the web interface is unbelievably clunky. I continued to use irssi in tmux instead.

What we learned from the Freenode implosion is that for most IRC users the concept of different networks was entirely alien. IRC was Freenode for those people.

It doesn't help that the authentication story for IRC is a bloody mess. In Discord, I have one account and can join any server^Wguild and have a different nick in each (and the nicks support unicode, and emoji). If I want to have different nicks on different channels on an IRC network I need 2 separate logins.

I tried ZNC a few years ago, but the replaying of chat history, that had already been received and seen, on every connection to the bouncer was frustrating and made it feel like a bad hack. Maybe I missed an option there, but I moved onto Quassel (and Quasseldroid), which was a game changer in ease of use, but I'm not personally a terminal IRC fan so I don't miss that aspect.

It's the same for me, I've used ZNC for a while and I think it being an agnostic IRC bouncer not forcing you toward a protocol and being usable from any IRC client is very big pro, but it also means that it always requires a bit in order to change anything, while quassel might be a bit less portable, even if it has clients for any platform I use (so it's personal), but being able to easily configure the server from the client easily for me was enough to stick with it

As the lead quasseldroid dev, and a contributor to quassel, it’s awesome hearing these success stories, as over the past months I haven’t heard anything from users.

I’m sorry that the new update for quassel and quasseldroid is taking so long :(

Hi, thanks for your efforts, it goes without saying, but I've read that some open-source software users started being rude with maintainers, so maybe it's not needed but I'll say it anyway, I really like your software, or your software is really useful for me, there is a thing I would like to have, but it is something that is given to me for free, so I will just say thank you a lot

Also IRC net splits used to happen often enough to be a concern a few years ago when I last used IRC.

And one big one just happened this year: https://ariadne.space/2021/06/14/the-end-of-freenode/

As sibling commenter said, that's not what I am talking about.

Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit

netsplit is a disconnection between two servers

Freenode imploding was not a netsplit.

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