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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

Discord has some structures and dynamics that really work against it for the sort of communities IRC excels at.

The standard Discord experience has you look for and join a "server", each of which is meant to feel like distinct island. This has every server duplicate the same set of boilerplate #general, #off-topic etc. channels, as if there are no others. As a result the vast majority of servers are fairly dead and barren, the userbase is spread too thin. Also because the UX makes switching between servers a fairly heavy context switch, so monitoring this deluge of channels is not fun and nobody can stay on top of all of their servers.

I once looked around for maker-y/electronics Discords, and joined probably 7-8, and they were all dead. ##electronics on Libera is highly active.

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> deluge of channels

Also, once you create a channel in Discord you cannot get rid of it without destroying chat history.

With IRC, you just /part without disrupting other people and even then you can go back and read chat logs, nicely persisted on your local disc as text files.

> Also, once you create a channel in Discord you cannot get rid of it without destroying chat history.

This is true; the closest thing you can do is collapse the category that channels are in, and mute the ones you don't want to show up. Any new conversation in a channel will pop them out.

For a while now you've been able to remove a channel from your channel list in its right click menu.

True, but the channel still stays visible for everyone else, including new users.

To have IRC-level feature parity, the deletion action should make the channel read-only, visible only to past participants and push it down on the channel list, preferably under a special archive category that is collapsed by default. This can of course be done manually, but especially the permissions part is tricky and it still allows other people to nuke your chat history retroactively.

If you think about it IRC is the same, but making an IRC server is much harder so nobody does it, while creating a Discord server is so easy you'll have too many.

IRC is also different in the sense that it is federated, but when most people think about an IRC "server" they actually think about "networks".

i think this is not an easy problem to solve. but this has been a big enough of an itch for me and i've got some time on my hands these days so i'm building www.ever.chat for anyone interested to take a look.

if anyone wanna chat, stop by and/or hit me up on X!

Jabber would work better in these niche cases.

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