[hattmall]

Yes, that exists in subreddits and Facebook and other site groups. The problem is that those mediums suck, can be hard to find, want to remain exclusive and in many cases the content is walled. Subreddits are generally the most open, but there is so much content in Facebook groups but with terribly low accessibility

[asdff]

Subreddits are honestly pretty terrible for niche interests compared to a traditional forum. In a normal forum, if your thread about 1998 Honda Civics gets a single post to it a month, so be it, but people are at least posting in a relevant thread and reading up on the discussion that's already been started potentially years ago earlier in the thread. On reddit, you have to post a new submission all the time for a topic to stay in play even in a given niche interest subreddit. You can't post comments on threads that are too old, and new comments don't bump up these old threads anyway. It leads to the same old ground being covered all the time (sometimes you can imagine exactly what the top comment will be), and fragments discussion.

[thrtythreeforty]

You've missed one that's flown under my radar until lately, Discord servers. And you might say "well yeah but that's just IRC, nothing new" and to some degree that's true, but I feel Discord also attracts people that wouldn't have been willing to use IRC.

[DoItToMe81]

I've used Discord on and off since 2017. I wouldn't say it's the same at all. Perhaps it's a generational gap, but I find it is much more, for lack of a better word, 'policed' than traditional chatrooms and IRC. People seemed much more open to discussing divisive topics, usually (ir)religion related on IRC for sure.

Over the years, the freer Discord communities I've been a part of have ended up having to close off to newcomers and wound up dying, because people have inevitably got upset and gone out of their own way to close down the community. And Discord seems to have many more people who get upset at things you ordinarily wouldn't ever conceive as being remotely abrasive.

I remember 'raids' on IRC and a lot of petty interpersonal drama, rumour mongering and community splits and feuds, but moderation was far more lax and I never had a single community I was on get falsely reported and taken down by the owners of the IRC server.

I don't feel it's a platform where people are allowed to truly speak their mind like the communities I was once a part of, because all it takes is a few upset people to mine for reportable posts and your community is gone. There's no alternative site, no way to self host and no other server to jump to. It's just not the same.

[Sohcahtoa82]

IRC would be fine if it had one feature that is expected today:

Persistence.

If you close your IRC client, you will miss anything that is sent while you're gone. You can't close it and come back to it later. That behavior is considered unacceptable today.

There's also the fact that people want and expect their communication platforms to support the posting of images and videos in-line. IRC doesn't have that.

Discord essentially is just IRC updated for the modern age.