[smolder]

> Many social networks start out awesome and useful, but then go downhill when it's time to start making money and extracting value.

This is why protocols are better than walled gardens. The walled gardens have appeal in the honeymoon stage when they're growing, flush with cash, and funding feature development specifically to attract users, way beyond what open source or just benevolently-built software can manage. The money grab and decline that tends to come after is very destructive, not only destroying the business underlying the system, but the things people built on top of it. Network effects mean you have to do significant harm to your users before they're willing to rip the band-aid off, but the monetization always seems to get more desperate until that point is reached. I hope Discord ends up the exception, but excepting that, I hope IRC outlives Discord. It has a good chance at doing so.