Discord users often make temporary servers to suit a particular need at a particular time when a group of people need to collaborate. Some of these servers become permanent, some die. If there’s any friction to creating a server then it loses the dynamic of how communities start on discord.
But it's not.
Discord is more popular than IRC because to most people it's better.
Telling everyone to rent a VPS and run a server to hack in an essential feature is insane.
https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory
Plus, again, IT's not necessary to rent a VPS. IrcV3 has a module for backlogging. You just have to actually plug it in and use it.
"People still listen to terrestrial radio?"
Sadly, yes.
There's a new crop pf users today. Depends on the network, depends on the server.
Some of these people are like me, they felt the world was full of possibly back in 2000, they just want the feeling back.
Mind you, some of us know our old uncle that says the good old days were better is full of shit, and has just you know, failed to remember the bad parts of the past. and prefers to only think about the good.
But I started using myself back in like late 1999 to get mp3s before Napster was around, and I'm not like boasting about warez like I'm still 13 I'm actually just matter of fact about it these days like shrug.
Like I don't really think it makes me cooler than anyone else or better or anything, I just- I'm an honest broker.
I do feel an affection for things like the old humorist logs that wwent on bash and everything. the past wasn't better, different, in a lot of ways worse.
but not better.
Since you need to maintain a constant connection to irc for it to work, it’s unusable on mobile since the connection will be killed as soon as you switch app or lock the screen. Which is why everyone used irccloud.
The experience is pretty sub standard even on desktop. Back in the day I ended up IP banned from the whole of freenode because my internet connection was flaky while I was away and I ended up banned for spamming join/quit messages.
Ouch. I feel you there. Intermittent connectivity can truly suck. I've had issues like that before.
I try not to connect to IRC in situations like that. but these issues can often be resolved with a Bouncer.
like, I was beginning to wonder why you were saying what you said.
I was going to be like what do you need logging or such? I honestly prefer the logging situation on IRC. People will expect you to read the entire backlog on discord.
Discord is indeed free of cost which could save enterprises money I suppose. The ocst of maintaining a BNC for networks that don't offer it for free can get high. Running ZNC was beginning to cause hash ocean to ask me for over 100 a month.
But Rizon and the networks I use most frequently run their own free of cost that provides permannence so you get your backlog.
Not enough to matter for the vast majority of people, not even humanly noticeable for most of them. How does that skewer anything?
Most people have Chrome running in the background behind their games too, maybe one or two apps like G-hub or Razer(whatever they call theirs), one to several apps like steam/origin/epic games, etc.. This clearly isn't a relevant argument to normal users, or to serious/professional gamers.
/s
UX, usability, and accessibility all matter.
Alright. https://www.irccloud.com/ fixd.
No, sometimes you need to know something to see it's value.
No, sometimes you need to know something to see it's value.
Companies are capitalizing on this ignorance now and somehow convinces even us techies that our decentralized/open stuff is inferior to their lockin, and so the cycle just continues with a bit more shit at every step..
The problem of "how do I get people to use and fund my server" is still an unanswered one by projects that implement a lot of FLOSS-based services. It's a bit better than it used to be, but if I suggested that my Discord servers try my new IRC system that I hosted somewhere, most people are just going to pass because it's not going to have the level of polish and ease-of-use they're used to from group chat applications.
A better suggestion is to use Matrix/Element, Mattermost or RocketChat. Not IRC or XMPP.
I get wanting mobility, I don't get wanting to scale things down to the point where it fits in a single hand, especially because, the smartphone manufactures seem to not want to allow the same kind of freedom and flexibility available on the PC to their smartphones. The "Smart" part of a "Smartphone" makes them in fact mini tablet personal computers, and that they don't offer the kind of control only a PC does to their end user, is unforgivable. It's a shame, the world favors convenience over freedom.
In terms of logging history, you could use a bot anyway on discord. This is generally not more friction than fully controlling logs in a freer option.
That attitude is why we have Discord and why it’s so popular, and also why IRC is not. People want features like scrollback when they’re not connected without having a set up screen session via SSH. They want to mobile app, It doesn’t even have to be that good of a mobile app. Yeah, I know you can do all of these things with IRC but people just want it all nicely packaged up by a company who has a UX team to make things nice and easy For them.
Looking at the success of slack, there’s a lot of money to be had if you don’t try and force people to “suck it up”.
There are good salesmen and bad salesmen, and telling customers to “suck it up “ is not a winning move.
It was readily apparent to me, I simply felt other things were more important. It wasn't the priority.
The same is true of money, being able to take part in the gift economy of the hacker under world is of more value to me than money.
The IRC clients are mostly bad and ugly, and they don’t even implement basic formatting features (bold, italic) in the same way.
NickServ sucks.
Having to use bouncers to keep track of history sucks, this only makes it a non suitable choice for a chat platform today.
Does IRC even support long messages and multi line messages yet?
Oh and btw, net split is not acceptable today.
And considering multiline messages as "bloat" is a wild take to be honest.
No, thanks. If Discord were, you know, open source, The way I compiled it would strip those options out as well as any edits to pure ASCII Smileys.
Given that, Rich text support is not wanted. I would however like to be able to Share VIDEO Over RCS that's not so tiny.
Rich text might not take much bandwidth, but I'm focused right now on removing and DNS sink holing all unwanted packets. Tracking, adverts, etc.
So the little bandwidth it takes, yeah sure, but multiply that with everything else that's eating it, and it's another leak to remove.
IRC sucks, but it can be made more or less tolerable with things like IRCCloud or Lounge (or tmux+weehcat if you happen to prefer something like that), but AFAIK nothing can help with the poor performance and the unreliability of Matrix.
While Matrix developers have finally acknowledged the problems, they have run out of venture capital, and have hard time getting any funding to fix the protocol, clients and servers.
They might be ugly, but most are fast. It shouldn't take more than 0.1s to display a new tab or channel.
JSON transport is also eh. At least with XMPP one could embed things like rich text easier and in a more "native" way.
There's also some shadiness with how for example the reference client Element got a CLA a couple months back, because I guess Element wants to sell the AGPLv3+ code with a proprietary license. Of course one need not use Element or Synapse or whatever, but this kind of action is still something to consider.
Matrix is certainly very, very good. But the best? Eh.
What negative experiences would a user face as a result of long polling?
Also, it means that a server can't really push events at you, especially if they're coming in rapidly, as they might be with a sufficiently active community. Like sure, once you're waiting for the server response for your long poll request, you'll get the data, but between receiving the data and the next time you poll, there's bound to be stuff happening in your chat room that you'll only know about the next time you poll. Of course with that, you wouldn't need to poll for long, but that also causes problems with battery.
In contrast WebSockets or even raw, real TCP sockets the server can just push stuff at you.
The timing also isn’t fixed. It isn’t like you only receive data on the poll interval. The request finalises when data comes in and a new one is created instantly. So I can’t imagine there being more than a second delay for receiving messages which is entirely acceptable for the use case.
If nothing is happening, you’d only be making a request every couple of minutes, but in an active chat it’s perfectly capable of making them continuously. And for mobile, it isn’t long polling while the app is closed, it’s using the regular push notifications system.