As someone who still uses IRC daily please understand that telling people IRC is a replacement for Discord is utter nonsense

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@j0ebaldw1n not sure how anyone can think IRC was ever perfect, and I say this as someone who used it as a teen!

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko irc is *terrible*

[ratsnakegames@mastodon.social]

@eniko @aeva i still get traumatic flashbacks to fiddling with authentication bots, and figuring out the correct encoding for any given channel

[ligniform@infosec.exchange]

@eniko Yeah there's no way people are moving to IRC. It'll stay a niche with tech nerds, but the average person who uses Discord isnt going to move to a platform that doesn't let them call their mates while playing a game.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@eniko @j0ebaldw1n

«IRC is the worst chat platform, except for all the others»

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@j0ebaldw1n @ligniform i mean, mastodon has polls and images in DMs and bluesky still does not

bluesky didn't even have animated GIFs for the longest time

[ligniform@infosec.exchange]

@j0ebaldw1n @eniko personally it fully replaced Twitter for me, but I can see why some people didn't connect with it. It's more what you use the app for imo

[gabe@mendeddrum.org]

@eniko IRC is amazing for a particular purpose.

Comparing it to Discord is like comparing Peppermint Tea to Onion Gravy. Yes, they're both liquid and comestible, but there is literally no situation where they are interchangeable.

[ligniform@infosec.exchange]

@j0ebaldw1n @eniko quotes are hardly comparible to the main usecase of Discord (Voice calls) for most users. It's not exactly the same, but replying to a post has almost the same impact as quoting it on Twitter and on Fedi

[oreolek@icosahedron.website]

@eniko yeah and mobile IRC is just barely decent… but only if you have a bouncer

[c0dec0dec0de@hachyderm.io]

@slaeshjag @eniko wait, what? How does one use mastodon via irssi???

[slaeshjag@bitbang.social]

@c0dec0dec0de @eniko @slaeshjag I use bitlbee as a gateway

[jonikorpi@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko @aeva Also: good luck explaining netsplits to people

[srazkvt@tech.lgbt]

@eniko irc is the best alternative for the minecraft chat

[xoagray@tiggi.es]

@eniko Honestly, I think this is genuinely part of the problem, People are looking for something that is a 1:1 direct replacement for everything that Discord is, and that just doesn't exist. So people get upset when you suggest anything that isn't 100% exactly Discord with a different name.

Nothing does what Discord does 100%. Not Matrix, not IRC, not Telegram, not Octotalk, not Trello, nothing.

If people want to get off of Discord they're going to have to understand that it's going to take a couple different pieces of software. you might have to combine IRC with Trello and use something like Signal or Telegram (as much as that sucks too) for your offline IM's. And then stream to YouTube or Twitch to let people watch you game.

People need to get away from this kind of monolithic software where one program does everything. And one bad decision can hurt everyone.

That said I have no expectations that there will be any kind of mass movement away from Discord, no matter how bad it gets. No one left when it was obvious the CEO was a scumbag, No one left when he put a new CEO in place that was worse. No one left when it was clear Discord wanted to dominate the game chat space and become the only program people could use for chat. No one left when they talked about adding ads all over, and no one left when they planned to move game stores out of games and into Discord where they could charge the game devs, AND their users to double dip on their prices. So why would anyone leave now?

[navi@social.vlhl.dev]

@eniko

goguma (android/ios flutter client) has link and image previews, offline usage, and supports file upload via a server (or bouncer) provided http POST request

and i maintain that voice chat and screensharing should not share a protocol with text channels

not that irc replaces discord though, it just, does those things and has been doing for a while, the problem is that the required setup is messy, and client support is limited -- things are getting better but far from one-stop-shop like discord

[terrorbite@meow.social]

@eniko my primary use case for Discord is voice chat while streaming games to each other. I do that almost daily with my partner. Discord messages? Those get looked at maybe three times a month if I'm lucky. I have other platforms for text chat.

[zugschlus@zug.network]

@eniko
It is at least WAY faster. The Discord App on Windows is an abomination.

[mkj@social.mkj.earth]

@xoagray Looking for a single exact replacement for everything the current solution does is also a problem with moving people (and businesses!) off of the huge hyperscale cloud providers. It's an understandable impulse to want to find something which is an exact drop-in replacement for what one currently has but without the perceived bad parts; but that also makes it very easy to point to some obscure feature and say "the replacement lacks this, so is unusable".

Whether Discord or not.

@eniko

[leviamicky@meow.social]

@TerrorBite @eniko yeah. its an alternative for the people who moved off IRC onto discord and just kept using it like IRC because they just wanna hang in the same chatrooms as their friends.

its not an alternative for all the other uses.