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> It's technically far inferior to anything including the ones you can self host. This depends heavily on just what you value for determining "superior" and "inferior." IRC takes, as a first order estimate compared to most other options, no resources. It uses almost no RAM on the server side, almost no CPU on the server side, almost no bandwidth, and has actual native clients on just about any platform out there that also use no resources. It's trivial to host small interest-based IRC servers that people can join freely without registration. Compared to most other platforms, which require fairly heavy servers to host (Matrix struggles with less than a gig of RAM if anyone joins large rooms) and use utterly absurd clients (hundreds of meg of download, many hundreds of meg of RAM to run), it's a nice breath of fresh air in the chat world. It's clean, simple, text based chat in a registration free form (mostly - larger networks do tend to require nickserv registrations). If you don't care about any of that, OK, that's fine. If all you're doing is looking at the feature lists, sure, it's "inferior." But in terms of utility value on very limited resource uses (which I still care about greatly, and have done extensive work on making Raspberry Pis into quite usable little desktops), IRC still holds up amazingly well. Matrix lags on a Pi4. Discord... I'm not actually sure the client builds and the web app is heavy. IRC is light and crispy, just as it's been on everything I've used it on back down to a 486. Also... that it's mostly an obscure backwaters means that it filters for the sort of people who like those things, which means that, especially on small little niche servers and very focused channels on larger servers, the signal to noise ratio is through the roof - there is an insane density of skilled people, far more than you'll find any other places I've looked. Having instant access to what often is quite literally hundreds of years of relevant experience in a field, at the tip of your fingers, is amazing. |