[nlowell]

We're in all-caps italics territory so I'm not sure how helpful I can be, but I just want to stress the fact that as a modern human we all have to rely on organizations and companies outside of our control. Things like IRC, in 2022, are for software developers to talk to each other. Things like Discord, are built for my mid-twenties friends to talk to each other. If I moved to IRC for the control, I would have no one to talk to!

[Agamus]

I have been using IRC as a means to stay in touch with the people I actually care about since the 90's, and it hasn't let me down yet. Many of my friends are in their 20s, and only a few are developers.

[oblio]

1. How many of them technical?

2. How many of them are of a libertarian mindset? Or very politically active/vocal, otherwise?

[Hakashiro]

Maybe you should have asked him how many friends he has.

When MSN Messenger existed, I pushed hard to get people on XMPP. "It's no problem, there are multiplatform, multiprotocol clients anyway". I had more than 200 contacts on MSN Messenger. Most or all of them, people I met in real life.

On XMPP? Maybe like... 10? Out of which perhaps only 2 I met in real life, and the rest I met on Linux forums. I was really aggressive on getting people to XMPP to the point I eventually closed my account and told people to reach me on XMPP. Nobody gave a fuck, of course they didn't. The world doesn't revolve around me.

Look, we get it. It's sad that corporations are realising they can hold users hostage for profit, but unfortunately that's the tradeoff with ease of use.

Oh, and Discord does so much more than IRC. It has voice chats "well just use Mumble", yeah but... why? Discord already has it. Or desktop sharing "use Jitsi", again, Discord already does it. Or large file sharing "roll your own FTP server", uhhh... no? Discord does it?

And a web UI if you don't want to chat online. And reliable mobile notifications. And two factor authentication. And in-game overlays.

FOSS fanatics struggle to admit commercial tools are so frickin' easy to use. I used to be like that, I understand. And then I got a job :P

[quadrifoliate]

> FOSS fanatics

I would say, think again about whether this casual drive-by insult is necessary. Is anyone in the above conversation behaving like one?

> ...struggle to admit commercial tools are so frickin' easy to use. I used to be like that, I understand.

I agree, this is the usual tone of FOSS people. "Oh, it's trivial to set up an SMTP server".

But, crucially, that is not what 'rglullis and I are saying in the conversations above. It's more something like "It's not trivial to set up an SMTP server, but maaaaybe you should think of the tradeoff of that versus learning a new chat system and losing all your conversations every 5 years. And yes, we should strive to make open solutions as seamless as Discord".

> And then I got a job :P

Again, a casual drive-by insult by implication that you should really rethink. I think most of the people on this site have jobs as well. That does not prevent us from thinking about long-term robust storage at data. In fact, it might even be directly relevant to some of our jobs.

[rglullis]

> FOSS fanatics struggle to admit commercial tools are so frickin' easy to use.

No, that is quite easy to admit. What is hard for "FOSS fanatics" to do is to give up their freedom for convenience.

[Agamus]

1. Probably ~30% or so 2. Probably ~10% or so

[selfhoster11]

> as a modern human we all have to rely on organizations and companies outside of our control

While true, we should be striving to minimise that. The internet era radically accelerated the rate at which we pick up new "external dependencies", and we should be trying to bring this rate down rather than embrace it.

[rglullis]

Last paragraph:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30332146