Its looking like Microsoft is gonna buy Discord. Preferably open source, and has a big userbase, and has Windows and Linux option. (but mainly windows because i only game on windows now.)
Its looking like Microsoft is gonna buy Discord. Preferably open source, and has a big userbase, and has Windows and Linux option. (but mainly windows because i only game on windows now.)
You have seriously outdated information about IRC. Nearly all of what you describe can be done with one of the above mentioned clients and a modern IRC daemon like Oragono or a bouncer like ZNC.
Why should my users need to install or use a bouncer to be able to enjoy a fundamental function like “chat backlog”?
And this still fixes none of the issues related to growing a cohesive community on IRC. As mentioned, I can’t enforce 2FA/Phone/Email for users/moderators last I checked, not without making them use 1 specific client, so why bother at all?
Heck, IRC doesn’t even support proxied previews of links posted, nearly all of the IRC clients that have it will leak your IP without some extra care taken. This is a risk for many users that they won’t understand without guidance as most of them aren’t technophiles. A lot of them will simply jump board to discord facing such issues, and then nothing it won at all.
If you are setting up an IRC server, you just provide also a bouncer or use an daemon like Oragono that has it included… really not rocket science. Just think of an IRC server as a set of micro-services ;)
NICKSERV does support Email and probably other types of account verification and is client independent. Phone would obviously required a 3rd party service, but such API access is probably easy to add (not that I would recommend using such an anti-feature).
And image/preview proxying is very much supported by the web clients I mentioned above. And AFAIK ZNC also does that client independent.
I really feel like you are making up excuses not to consider IRC. Sure there are old clients that do not offer all the functionality you want. But those are just optional, most users will use the client offered by you and that really isn’t any different from another chat system, just that those usually do not support 3rd party clients at all.
So why use IRC+Bouncer when I could setup something like Matrix (which granted is still not suitable)?
My issue is this is all client-side. If one user uses an older client or non-compatible client, I can do nothing about it and they will have a worse experience. It also still does not solve the issue of keeping multiple channels moderated at once, nor does it provide good moderation tools.
Part of the beauty of Discord (and Matrix I begrudgingly admit) is that there is integration. The protocol implements all these things, instead of having to be implemented on a half-working Layer 2 that some users might not adhere to.
I think you severely underestimate how hard it is to build up things like this. Especially when you’re a community that is under constant attack by internet trolls on a larger scale (can IRC moderation tools handle raiders sending 2k messages per second into a channel? Can the clients handle this workload even on mobile connections? Can I mass ban raiders easily from all channels? Is there even existing bots to handle anti-raid measures? Is there a coherent way for user PFPs across all clients? Can we set visible roles and channel access based on roles? This is all stuff that I don’t have to think about on Discord that’s why. Heck, is there even a way for me to just deliver a signed and trusted app to users with all settings and features preconfigured, including proxy for image previews? Atleast on Android and iOS I will have to pay dev fees and hope I never get banned. Is there webclients that are 100% feature parity with all this? Because the web-users will need to be able to do all of those things too, including bouncers. And if any of these settings or features isn’t working 100% I risk that users will be exposed to death threats or worse.
On IRC I have to worry about these things and make 20 different tools work together. Not exactly the UNIX experience when I need 20 tools to do one job and do it well; chatting in communities.
But on the other hand, why use lemmy or reddit when I could just dial into a BBS and get all the same features and more with just enough additional patchwork tools on top…
Nearly all of that has 20 year plus “battle proven” solutions in IRC and hosting IRC is much more scalable than Matrix.
Sure it takes effort to set all that up, but you are comparing it to a a multi-million (billion?) dollar VC funded company like Discord. Of course you will not be able to replicate that with IRC on a 5$/month VPS set up from your bed room.
It might be an unfair comparison, but the comparison I have to make because that is where a lot of communities are. If you want to replace Discord with IRC, I don’t think you’ll have much success. And the thread is about alternatives to Discord so the comparison is necessary.
Matrix might be harder to scale but it’s easier to get started in with all the tools just working because they’re integrated into the solution. That is worth the extra price of scalability issues down the line (which if Matrix would get it’s stuff together, would be easier to achieve too).
Replacing a single Discord guild with a few hundred users is easily possible with a self-hosted IRC service. By using Oragono + Convos it is also quick and relatively easy as that is pretty much all you need (plus Mumble for voice chat), at least not any harder than Matrix, while being much lighter on server resources.
We’re talking 5000+ users, not a few hundreds. A community that has to constantly take attacks from 4chan and other vile places of the internet. I do not believe IRC would be the tool for managing this community not only coherently but as a unit.
Mumble solves audio chat, but not screencasting, which we often have in the game related channels. Audio chats routinely hold more than 20 users, with one or two people screencasting at 1080p30. Even if we used mumble, it would split the community from IRC as the people on Mumble can’t coherently interact with IRC in the same client.
There are good bridges between Mumble chat and IRC.
Screencasting… hmm. Would probably be not very hard to implement in a webclient, but yeah that doesn’t exists right now AFAIK. But I think Peertube is working on a chat addition that is based on XMPP/IRC/Matrix (not sure).