Just, help me out here.

[patcharcana@furry.engineer]

@mos_8502 In my case it seems to be more of a "the people I want to stay in touch with use this thing" than a serious decision on my part.

Like I'm a technical guy. I can solve all the problems discord solves with like, IRC, an FTP or BT client, Teamspeak, and throwing a dumb image host on my server box.

But that's not a workflow most of my friends would put up with.

[mmu_man@m.g3l.org]

@mos_8502 all that useless stuff like GIFs, reaction emojis…

[mos_8502@studio8502.ca]

@mmu_man What, IRC doesn't have unicode?

[rnd@toot.cat]

@mos_8502 i would say the biggest hurdle is that irc doesn't provide message history: if your computer is not always connected, you can miss whatever conversation is happening, and solving that by using a bouncer or constantly-running account on a public shell server is way too complex for most users

[mr_daemon@untrusted.website]

@mos_8502 Aside from the fact that IRC just covers the text chat part and none of the zillion other features that people use, IRC as a protocol is not well suited to things like mobile use.

Like, yes you can get an IRC client for your phone, but the experience will be miserable, even with a bouncer. You need to be actively connected to receive anything, and then it will be a battery drain.

It's been the cause of the slow move from IRC to Other Things for group chat among my friends. We all started getting jobs or spending most time in higher education back then and it became more and more difficult to "check in on the boys" at random. We didn't move to discord ourselves, but the rationale is the same.

Discord is a lot of things to a lot of people, and unfortunately they're not all simply Solved Problems in this case

[mmu_man@m.g3l.org]

@mos_8502 yeah but I mean emojis as reactions instead of adding to the text.

[mhoye@cosocial.ca]

@mos_8502 The hard truth here is that who constitutes "we" changed. Access to computing in the 90s was a privilege, and the barriers entry were financial, social, geopolitical and mostly invisible to comfortable, privileged and generally very young insiders.

[howtophil@mastodon.social]

@mos_8502 As far as I know, it's not built into the protocol, so it would have to be special to that client /shrug
Like, originally (I think), people sent images over IRC via base64 encoding because it's text-based. Then, dcc file transfers and bots like Eggdrop let people share files more directly...

On the other hand: There's literally nothing stopping people from using Signal to do just about everything Discord does, as far as I can tell. (though it needs to divorce itself from phone #'s)

[radhitya@navi.lain.day]

@mos_8502 @mmu_man It have..

[mhd@tilde.zone]

@mos_8502 I mean, enshittification is a thing, but that doesn't turn dried out coprolites into gold.

[arcanoloth@pleroma.envs.net]

@mos_8502@studio8502.ca Probably the same as always "It's ooooold" shrug

[toxic_flange@infosec.exchange]

@mos_8502 for my old group of people who started in the BBS days, we went to IRC and stayed there for years. Eventually as we got older people moved to FB (and some still are), and while “our” IRC channel exists it’s effectively dead. Once we moved to Discord many of us started interacting again, making plans to hang out etc.

It was the mobile app feature and persistence across clients that really won us over , i can switch from my phone and back to the client on my machine and see this history of what i missed , and the little extras of video and audio chats while gaming are helpful too, all with a single client. we share links all the time and the meme gif sharing is up there too. we’re all people at, approaching or just over our 50s as well , if that’s a factor. ease of use i think is what it comes down to.