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

[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.

[doraii@furry.engineer]

@Zugschlus @eniko imho it's even worse on linux. it does a piss poor job on anything OTHER than debian, and god forbid it just... won't update.

[cheeseness@mastodon.social]

@eniko Honestly, these are selling points for me >_<

All these seem like things that are better done in their own applications (eg: I don't want my realtime text chat to also be my videoconferencing software, and I want offline messages in my email inbox when I sit down at my desk)

[xoagray@tiggi.es]

@mkj @eniko Very true. It makes it so much harder to get anyone to change to something else because many people will just go out of their way to do anything NOT to change.

[silbinarywolf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko 100% agree

I’m in my early 30s and always saw IRC as this archaic annoying thing I was forced to use in rare circumstances like:
- Getting FTP access to rare music live show archives
- Asking questions about N64 rom hacking / reverse engineering

Id rather attempt to use open source MSN reimplementation thing (Escargot) or a Facebook Group Chat or something.

[zanagb@mastodon.social]

@eniko The future should probably be a small swiss knife of tools.

IRC/Matrix/Jabber for the text chat.

TeamSpeak/Mumble/Signal/Telegram for voice.

Some own-cloud type deal for file hosting + text client integration.

And twitch/yt/picarto/piczel/whatever else for screen sharing/streaming.

Perhaps on the client-side someone could revive something like Adium/Pidgin/Trillian to stuff several non-operable protocols into a single UX. It would make things easier for users for sure.

[nini@oldbytes.space]

@eniko IRC is not suitable for 2026, it was barely suitable for 2006 and you may as well be telling people to use Telnet or a BBS. I used IRC for years but I fucking hated how much of a pain dealing with zero persistence for chans, netsplits, insecure everything, inscrutable permissions, plaintext or gtfo, netsplits and dealing with the various servs was. Unless IRC has actually changed and is doing relevant things now then I don't need it back, it was archaic back when I used it a lot in 2004 and used it only under duress.

[wearemuesli@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko IRC is awesome for text-only conversations, but it is definitely not a replacement for an entire ecosystem, whether it's Discord or not.

-D.

[d1@autistics.life]

@eniko as soon as any [clears throat] "gateway" is needed, ~98% of all normies are not interested. Any solution - in order to be sufficiently elegant - should *not* need to stand on any such crutches.

[raymaccarthy@mastodon.ie]

@eniko
Something like Viber is better. Zero security and only text on IRC. Handy maybe for a 1 kbps radio link or dialup.

[netraven@hear-me.social]

@eniko I don't actually want any of those things. All of those things used to be individual programs and that was better, TO ME, not saying any more than that.

[burnoutqueen@todon.nl]

@k @eniko ergo ircd implements a lot of it