IRC was basically a persistent online text chat. You could have a community and because everyone accessed the internet via computers, people would leave their IRC client open and just have this chat server with different rooms running in the background.

You could jump in and see what was happening. Today, discord serves the same function, but instead of having a client always connected, it uses an app that can push notifications to the user.

The other big difference was that IRC was open, so you had many clients that could connect to servers, and they were available for many different platforms. Hell for a while I had an irc Client on my T-Mobile sidekick that used the old 2g pager network for data.

Discord added a lot of quality of life features like easy attachments , images etc , but that comes at the cost of a closed network run by 1 company.

[–] Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Discord is so ideal for having a federalized decentralized platform, with a main customizable client to connect to servers, but it seems no one has built a good enough clone yet that fills the server swapping role and being open source well enough yet

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

You have no clue about what a privacy nightmare that concept is. Of course, the alternative is that everyone is anonymous like Lemmy. But it would be, as discord already is, a public and traceable record of accounts linked to people that can be easily exposed if a central auth point of failure gets compromised. To preserve privacy, persist chats, be decentralized, secure. It's almost too much. Something's got to give.

Matrix tries to be that but it's not polished, and some architectural decisions might mean that it will never be.

[–] Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Discord is already a privacy nightmare. I'd much rather a privacy nightmare controlled by the people instead of faceless corporations.

What would make it any less private than lemmy, though?

[–] Soleos@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Hey friend, I'm people, I've got a face, and I'm no corporation. Can I control your privacy? I promise I'll be good ^^

[–] Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

A corporation I know is selling my data vs a person who might be. Obvious choice?

[–] Soleos@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

Sorry, I shouldn't be so obtuse on the internet. The point is that corporations in general are not exactly non-people. They are a groups of people. The greed, selfishness, choices to violate privacy, these are all of people, granted in conjunction with the machine of late-capitalism. But there is always this false assumption that just because it's "people" and not a "corporation", it's inherently better, or for the benefit of all people. Your choice isn't between a group of people and some faceless entity, your choice is between different groups of people.

The same people who make up the faceless corporations will participate in your "owned by the people" system. Just look at the US government, supposedly "by the people and for the people", which controls/regulates corporations. Where there is power there is politics and where there is politics there is the accumulation of power. You have to do more to manage the accumulation of power that oppresses than just say "oh just let all the people own the system".

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Discord shouldn't have the expectation of being private anyway.

It should be two systems: decentralized chatrooms with little guarantee of privacy (if not being publically searchable), with a 'private chat' button to farm out to some separate E2E app when it matters.

Honestly one of my biggest gripes about Discord is that so much info is 'locked way' from being search engine accessible. If a publicly scrapable alternative caught on, that would make my day.

[–] InFerNo@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago

Just use irc with a web client like irccloud or mibbit, it's basically discord, unless you want the spyware that tells everyone what game/program you're running.

imo discord is just an online chatbox that segregates people into "servers" based on a subject of interest (a game or whatever). This is much like irc where you have servers dedicated to gaming (quakenet) or software.

What makes discord actually stand out are the tools that allow people to create a server quickly. With irc, your are literally spinning up a server like you are running a webserver. You need to know what you're doing. Discord is allowing game developers to integrate it into their games and it has voice chat built on. You could argue about the possibility of integrating irc in your game, but discord is all about convenience. Api, moderation tools uniform across the entire platform, single point of entry. IRC is none of that, but efforts are made and worth exploring.

[–] InFerNo@lemmy.ml 0 points 4 days ago

That's not what I meant, and probably also not what the OP meant. Something is suddenly different for discord to feel like irc, but it's not articulated.

Besides, irc is anything but persistent. If you disconnect, your chats are gone, unless you logged the chat. If you reconnect, you don't catch up on what was said when you were offline, unless you use a bouncer like znc with history (which is also limited to the last x number of lines). John Doe sure as heck doesn't even know what a bouncer is.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

my guess is they mean the caliber of user / conversation, not the features of the platforms themselves

[–] InFerNo@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago

Yeah, obviously, maybe they mean its a bunch of idle users saying nothing nowadays because there's so many "servers" now.

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 1 points 4 days ago

Seconded, it's not even remotely similar