[croon]

I've been on IRC more or less 24/7 since 1996 and love it, and started using Mumble in 2005 or 6.

While I think they're both great, neither of them are an alternative to Discord.

Getting in? One click on email/URL and then sign up. Join a channel? One click. Voice chat? One click. Stream your game? One click. Seamlessly switch to mobile app? Done. I have yet to meet a user that can't get into it with just an invite link. It's amazingly user friendly. And if I want to, I can granularly create roles for users and administrators of arbitrary levels and access rights.

I share the privacy concerns, and that I can't grep any logs easily (though with voice chat that's harder regardless), but simply from a user perspective if it wasn't for the network effect of my IRC communities, and Messenger groups, I could happily just use Discord tomorrow.

I strongly dislike that it's closed source and partly Chinese owned, but I've been using Messenger to reach people I couldn't on IRC for years already, and that experience is much worse, with no privacy gain.

Credit where credit is due, they knocked it out of the park in most aspects.