[neom]

I'm building a lot on discord right now, I like it but I keep getting scared, then I think, eh, irc servers could have gone away too I suppose, in fact they did, much was lost. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of nuanced thinking in this though.

[monkeywork]

The massive nuance you are missing is that IRC had a default expectation of being ephemeral in nature. Sure you might use IRC for chatting and have some bots around that - but typically your long term storage of information would have been handled in something like a forum, website, email list, file repository, etc - so that even if an individual IRC server went down it wasn't a big deal to move along. IRC was/is less a platform and more a protocol.

Discord on the other hand does everything IRC does but people have made it take the place of forums, blogs, file repos, etc etc. All this information is locked up in a platform that can't be searched or often even accessed without signing up for the platform. Unlike IRC however Discord is not a protocol that others can tie into - it's a platform and they can/do actively lock people out of it.

[mschuster91]

> The massive nuance you are missing is that IRC had a default expectation of being ephemeral in nature.

Bouncers and log bots have been a thing even 20 years ago when I was active on Freenode. In fact, a bouncer and log bot was what made me get my very first own VPS... time flies. It lasted a year until my first attempt at a libc upgrade failed, that was a lot of work to fix.

[MiscIdeaMaker99]

We definitely had bots on IRC in the 90s.

[monkeywork]

Those items exist yes, however they aren't required nor are they tied to the service nor universal so the again the DEFAULT expectation is that anything put onto the platform was ephemeral.

Being able to get a text file log dump easily is also light years ahead of what most people are able to do on discord.

In order to get log bots or bouncers up and running it required some technical know how (meaning most people didn't do it, thus staying ephemeral as default) but those that did do it were well aware how to get and export those log files for archiving etc (thus why we have things like bash.org).

On Discord it's default and while yes someone could setup bots or something to export some of the content - that requires some technical know how (meaning most people won't do it). Thus everything in there goes away when the service closes.... even though the DEFAULT EXPECTATION is that information there is forever.

[sneak]

IRC is decentralized; you can self-host. Discord, despite misusing the term “server”, is one user database and one centralized organization.

[LambdaComplex]

You can always run your own IRC server. If Discord shuts down, then you're out of luck.

[neom]

Indeed. Discord have really nailed the... ircd, if you will, for what I use discord for (community building in non-technical abstract user bases), it's perfect, terrifying, but perfect.

[immibis]

You can run your own Revolt, Mattermost, or Rocket Chat server, which is basically Discord.

[sneak]

If you believe this you haven’t used Discord very much.

[Nextgrid]

You are right, neither of his proposed alternatives start you out with a sea of blinking shit and distractions all over your screen.

[johnisgood]

and Zulip. But they do not support video and audio calls, for one.