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Comment by encom | Hacker News Reader

IRC was here before Discord, and it will still be here after.

I've never heard of Stoat. Looks like IRC but it's Electron. Total waste of time.

IRC does not support group voice & video calls, which is one of the primary features of Discord (and previously Skype, from which everyone migrated to Discord in the first place)

Kids these days...

Should be blame the majority of the users, or should we accept times change?

It's a viable system for the many open source software projects that collaborate over chat. Expo, Typescript, and Effect are relatively large examples. I'll participate there if available and I get locked out. Otherwise, I'll just use the stuff without contributing, no problem.

IRC exposes your IP and you can't even access history unless you're willing to self-host your own bouncer, which costs time, money, and risk even if you already know how to do it, which most people don't. Being IRC only will exclude a lot of people who want to contribute to your project while also adding a lot of friction to the mere act of sharing screenshots, which is problematic if you have any software which renders to something not text.

I grew up on IRC and still use it, I have my own bouncer set up, etc. But the devs on Discord and not IRC probably aren't the devs with the skillset and resources to host their own server and bouncer. IRC just isn't in the running to fill the Discord shaped hole.

I haven't used an IRC server implementation in 20 years that doesn't do host masking. (IE; cloaking of client IP addresses).

That said, I'm biased as I have been running an IRC community for 22 years or so... but I prefer to have video/voice in it's own system. (mumble/jitsi)

>IRC exposes your IP

That hasn't been true for decades, and even if it was, it sounds like Hollywood's idea of a problem.

>IRC only will exclude a lot of people

If they can't figure out how to point a client to an IRC server, their contribution is worthless. It's the most trivial barrier to entry possible.

>sharing screenshots

Print screen > paste to image host > share link. Not hard.

I get that the Discord experience is slick, if you're willing to give up any sort of privacy or confidentiality. IRC is lightweight and simple, and its shortcomings can be worked around without too much effort. Discord is bloated, malicious, evil - I will gladly suffer some inconveniences of IRC.

Keep in mind that I am an IRC user, and I am not advocating for staying on Discord. I'm just stating that IRC is not - and probably never will be - a contender for "Discord alternatives", even among developers.

I can still see other peoples IPs on IRC today. When writing this comment, I can see people on major IRC servers with IP addresses that appear to correspond to consumer ISPs.

Another benefit of not being on IRC is that they don't have to interact with people who will disregard their contributions as "worthless". That's so dismissive of other people that I can't really take your comment seriously on the topic of interpersonal collaboration and communication.

And yes, even sharing screenshots becomes difficult. What host would you use that works in every country the IRC server operates in, works with people using any given VPN, and has a ToS and PP that is at least not worse than Discord's? Keep in mind this excludes Imgur and Catbox.

IRC is not simple and its many problems are not trivial.

Someday the big-name networks will support IRCv3 ChatHistory and all will become well with the world.

For most Discord users IRC simply does not have the feature set that people need. Basics like simple drag and drop media sharing, threaded conversations, emoji reactions and voice comms, up to more complicated stuff like screen sharing and video calling.

Or even persistent chat history

The real sin is that if they went with electron, they probably could have gone with a web app, and while web apps have downsides, they make fellow user buy in trivial, instead of "download this client" it's "go to this web page"

I am especially bitter because electron advertises as being "cross platform" by which they mean that it also runs on linux and as a openbsd driver I get to go "cross platform my ass" and then weep because of how close I am, if it were a web app it would probably be trivial for me to to run. What I really want is a method to unelectronify electron apps.

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