I wasn't planning to talk about irc but since so many people are going "weeee, time for IRC!!!!"...
first off: I, like many others, still have some IRC going. 2 decades and a bit.
there's a reason most people glommed onto discord so extremely rapidly. and anyone not acknowledging that reason is ill prepared for the ensuing conversation
this reason, idly, is shaped the same as why so many people rapidly took up irccloud as their primary irc client when that first came about
I'm not even going to bother enumerating the this-vs-that of discord vs irc vs others (again bc I wasn't even planning to have to post about this), but in broad thoughts:
1) the wild west of the internet does _not_ have to have a heyday. especially with how much more hungry the sharks in the pool are today
seriously, the dark days of the internet were unhinged. a fedi admin slapfight has nothing on the irc jupe wars
2) chat services with a fedi-style "oh hey yeah there's a server I can sign up to where 5 competent people make sure it goes" is probably the thing to get to, but damn near nothing does that right now (afaik)
zulip and stoat seem to be the most promising other options atm (mattermost went off the deep end trying to cozy up to the MIC cluster), but unclear whether they're ready for primetime
and part of this you _only_ get to refine with active user load (which again is a bit chicken&egg too)
3) fuck matrix et al for how much air it sucks out of the room on what _could_ be happening for #2
(e.g. I was looking at SimpleX the other day and while I can't conclusively it's got ill intent, enough of the choices are Weird and I don't know if I buy any of it)
it's not a great time, see @zzt's thread for more: https://mas.to/@zzt/116045651572809856
all hope is not lost, things can always be built. but wow do we ever not have the good answers right at this moment :|
@froztbyte I do wish people were willing to settle for worse experience over surrendering privacy, which I think current gen irc can give, but yeah I get why it sucks for most
@maxine @froztbyte one of the great successes of signal is to give specific solid and useful privacy guarantees, but *still* be completely usable by normal non techies who really need that, and by normal non techies who don't
@davidgerard the main (only?) argument I hear against using Signal by less techie people is that they don’t want to use WhatsApp and Signal or don’t have space for both on their phone.
@aimaz don't have ... space? what
