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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

> if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there

I can't believe how delusional some people are. And sorry for being so rude.

In 2021 everyone expects history and other things. You can't realisticaly expect everyone to "just have a fully set up always-on raspberry pi and install some server on it". That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead.

> I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put

Good for you. The absolute vast majority of users, however, don't.

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I don't. I bugs the hell out of me when I open discord with hundreds of new messages in different channels that I am assumed to want to keep track of. Yes, you can disable notification but still annoys me when it doesn't immediately show me the last messages.

The general idea of group chats was to facilitate ad hoc real time communication. People were not assumed to be always online and messages were only of interest for the discussion happening in the moment. There are much better options for sharing information that might have a longer lived scope of relevance anyway. Plus remembering some chats that I hung out with friends, it had a sense of intimacy, sometimes I wanted to share the information exactly with those online at the moment, so no history was a feature. Popular open source IRC channels have archives that one could look up if need be anyway.

Of course there is also the modern idea of work-oriented chats like slack that have a powerful search function and are mostly about async communication, being a bit of everything, a way to share information with lots of people, a documentation system, discussion and so on.

> I bugs the hell out of me when I open discord with hundreds of new messages in different channels that I am assumed to want to keep track of. Yes, you can disable notification but …

I really don’t understand how people can think that having everyone self-host and maintain things like Quassel on a Raspberry Pi is a perfectly reasonable solution to the UX shortcomings of IRC, but then also insist that having to spend 30 seconds adjusting the basic settings in Discord is an unacceptably difficult task.

At some point, this conversation isn’t actually about UX or functionality. It’s about hating the new thing and clinging to the old ways.

People argue against discord for different reasons. You are making a straw man.

I would argue that those Raspberry Pi based solutions are nice to have but not needed. In fact I argued you don't need history most of the time and that not offering central storage of history can be reasonable.

The irony being that discord is absolutely horrible for discoverable/searchable history. I would argue the main value of searchable history for FOSS projects is not that you yourself can go back and look at the chats you had, but that it gets indexed by search engines, so one can find the solutions when encountering problems.

That's the big value of mailing lists over most of these chat solutions.

I think another value of mailing lists is asynchronicity of conversation and the time that can go in the thought process enriching the conversation, and I think that is unmatchable by any chat protocol/client

Yes but it's also the problem. Email is, for the most part, horrible to use. Even the crappiest chat app is nicer in almost every way than email.

People are more thoughtful about email only because it's slow and relatively low volume. You see the same on stack exchange.

I think there was a misunderstanding about my message, I wasn't forcing anyone to use IRC, I was offering a solution in case someone wants, I am quite happy if people want to use Slack or Discord, I use IRC, and a lot of people use IRC with or without a bouncer be it quassel or znc and talk every day, works for us and everyone is happy, but if other people is happy other ways so be it, was just mentioning that if those are issues, then there are solutions, so I didn't take the rudeness personally, as I don't feel that I have to convince people to use something or what people wants is my concern to be worried about?

> And sorry for being so rude.

You freely chose to post the insult, so you are not.

> In 2021 everyone expects history and other things.

I should hope I am included in "everyone" and I do not expect that. I think IRC rules and I think chats are better when they are ephemeral. I know people disagree with me; that is the point of discussing it. It's strange (a cheap rhetorical trick, really) to point out the expectations of a group of people in the current year as if that was an inevitability and that is how things always shall be unto the ages.

They didn't. They are saying that if you poll 100 in the grocery store about whether they expect to eventually receive messages sent to them during the period where they were riding through a tunnel or lost power in a thunderstorm, 90 of them will say "yes" and 9 will say "I don't know" and then there's you.

> That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead.

IRC is still used by countless open source projects and there are many public XMPP servers everyone can use. I switched my family and most of my friends to XMPP this year and no-one runs an XMPP server at home.

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