I thought it was Sony that had a partnership with Discord...
> But it’s possible that people were sharing Nintendo’s cryptographic keys, firmware, or even entire pirated games in these servers despite those commitments. At the end of the day, most people seeking out a Nintendo Switch emulator are looking to play Nintendo games on it.
Emulators are legal, but running unlicensed games is usually the killer app, especially for more recent consoles.
But is sharing cryptographic keys illegal, especially if they are widely known already and are no longer "secret?"
Copyright maximalists managed to circumvent the law by inventing a generic "law" that allows them to ban legal things. I.e. DMCA 1201. As long as they claim it's "circumventing protection measures" they can claim it doesn't matter that it's not infringing anything - it's still forbidden.
That's why this garbage "law" should be complete repealed.
But as easily as they can claim it, as easily it can be defeated if everyone massively ignores it and shares it everywhere, which can highlight absurdity and stupidity of this "law".
We need better open source and decentralized technologies that cannot be blocked in this manner. The walled garden model, which Discord also uses, is always going to be susceptible to this type of takedown. Expect more of this as they gear up to go public, in a bid to look “legitimate” just like Reddit.
Yeah, not having proper nickname ownership beyond the crap NickServ offers is not a feature, it's a gross overlook from a time where we could afford to be naive on the internet.
And considering multiline messages as "bloat" is a wild take to be honest.
Why either, when I first went online bandwidth sucks, it still sucks even in the United States today only it sucks more upstream, especially, when in the world of file sharing, everyone hates a leach.
Given that, Rich text support is not wanted. I would however like to be able to Share VIDEO Over RCS that's not so tiny.
Rich text might not take much bandwidth, but I'm focused right now on removing and DNS sink holing all unwanted packets. Tracking, adverts, etc.
So the little bandwidth it takes, yeah sure, but multiply that with everything else that's eating it, and it's another leak to remove.
Matrix is not better than IRC. It is in some ways much worse. While I get that IRC has not exactly aged well, Matrix' performance and reliability problems are much worse than the very rare netsplits.
IRC sucks, but it can be made more or less tolerable with things like IRCCloud or Lounge (or tmux+weehcat if you happen to prefer something like that), but AFAIK nothing can help with the poor performance and the unreliability of Matrix.
While Matrix developers have finally acknowledged the problems, they have run out of venture capital, and have hard time getting any funding to fix the protocol, clients and servers.
Matrix has annoying HTTP long polling. That still hasn't been fixed. There's still no officially blessed alternative transport that wouldn't require you to send a request every N seconds just to see if you have a new message.
JSON transport is also eh. At least with XMPP one could embed things like rich text easier and in a more "native" way.
There's also some shadiness with how for example the reference client Element got a CLA a couple months back, because I guess Element wants to sell the AGPLv3+ code with a proprietary license. Of course one need not use Element or Synapse or whatever, but this kind of action is still something to consider.
Matrix is certainly very, very good. But the best? Eh.
Decreased battery life, because you have to actively keep polling. Either WebSockets or even real TCP sockets would make that a lot better.
Also, it means that a server can't really push events at you, especially if they're coming in rapidly, as they might be with a sufficiently active community. Like sure, once you're waiting for the server response for your long poll request, you'll get the data, but between receiving the data and the next time you poll, there's bound to be stuff happening in your chat room that you'll only know about the next time you poll. Of course with that, you wouldn't need to poll for long, but that also causes problems with battery.
In contrast WebSockets or even raw, real TCP sockets the server can just push stuff at you.
Those polls sit suspended for quite a long time. I can’t imagine it moves the needle at all on battery life. Just open reddit and it fires off more network requests than an entire day long polling.
The timing also isn’t fixed. It isn’t like you only receive data on the poll interval. The request finalises when data comes in and a new one is created instantly. So I can’t imagine there being more than a second delay for receiving messages which is entirely acceptable for the use case.
If nothing is happening, you’d only be making a request every couple of minutes, but in an active chat it’s perfectly capable of making them continuously. And for mobile, it isn’t long polling while the app is closed, it’s using the regular push notifications system.
I agree with the persistence part for sure. Auth I think is debatable on a per community basis, but probably the spec could allow for more than it does. UX though I think is mostly on the client side and for any open spec you're going to have a multitude of clients. Or at least you SHOULD have a multitude of clients least you simply be open in name only.
Mattermost is not hard to host, and it's a damn sight nicer to use these days than discord is. Hard to break the "I don't want to use another new system" barrier though.
If you require more than two clicks to create a server then you’re not in the same market as Discord. The point of Discord is that users can make servers instantly.
Discord users often make temporary servers to suit a particular need at a particular time when a group of people need to collaborate. Some of these servers become permanent, some die. If there’s any friction to creating a server then it loses the dynamic of how communities start on discord.
I disagree, people just need to learn to suck it up and learn how the fuck to to use IRC. We HAVE technology can get the job done already. People just h ave to get used to it and start using it.
I beg to differ, most people are whiny spoiled brats who could easily suck it up and learn how to use IRC if they were determined enough to do so, this is not a matter of ability, it's a matter of will.
You can't just make people do what you want because you think it's better. IRC is unusable to the average person without significant investment whereas Discord is immediately familiar.
Discord is more popular than IRC because to most people it's better.
It astonishes me that the prospect of being on a platform where literally you would never have to pay for access to anything that could be digitized again in your entire life is not enough incentive to overcome this reluctance. IRC is the motherload from where all Warez originates. How the fuck is that not enough?
Further, even if it were the case, it's the fault of android and Apple developers for having failed to implement a client for mobile. An issue that could and ought to be resolved.
Um if you need backlogging, as I noted, a Bouncer will provide. if they don't provide it for free hosting this on something like a digital ocean droplet can implement it, but then again, it can get expensive.
Everyone needs backlogging. If you open your phone, check a chat, but can only read messages sent at the exact moment you had the chat open, it doesn’t work.
Telling everyone to rent a VPS and run a server to hack in an essential feature is insane.
IrcV3 is an improvement but it’s very much a too little too late situation. They should have been discussing this in 2005. Now it’s too late since the users have all left.
"The users have all left." the comment reminds me of the way people are when I talk about how badly I want Terrestrial radio to die in a fire.
"People still listen to terrestrial radio?"
Sadly, yes.
There's a new crop pf users today. Depends on the network, depends on the server.
Some of these people are like me, they felt the world was full of possibly back in 2000, they just want the feeling back.
Mind you, some of us know our old uncle that says the good old days were better is full of shit, and has just you know, failed to remember the bad parts of the past. and prefers to only think about the good.
But I started using myself back in like late 1999 to get mp3s before Napster was around, and I'm not like boasting about warez like I'm still 13 I'm actually just matter of fact about it these days like shrug.
Like I don't really think it makes me cooler than anyone else or better or anything, I just- I'm an honest broker.
I do feel an affection for things like the old humorist logs that wwent on bash and everything. the past wasn't better, different, in a lot of ways worse.
By does not work, I don’t mean that you literally can’t connect, but that you can’t practically use it.
Since you need to maintain a constant connection to irc for it to work, it’s unusable on mobile since the connection will be killed as soon as you switch app or lock the screen. Which is why everyone used irccloud.
The experience is pretty sub standard even on desktop. Back in the day I ended up IP banned from the whole of freenode because my internet connection was flaky while I was away and I ended up banned for spamming join/quit messages.
"Back in the day, I ended up IP banned from the whole of free node because my internet connection was flaky while I was away, and I ended up banned for spamming join/quit messages. "
Ouch. I feel you there. Intermittent connectivity can truly suck. I've had issues like that before.
I try not to connect to IRC in situations like that. but these issues can often be resolved with a Bouncer.
like, I was beginning to wonder why you were saying what you said.
I was going to be like what do you need logging or such? I honestly prefer the logging situation on IRC. People will expect you to read the entire backlog on discord.
Discord is indeed free of cost which could save enterprises money I suppose. The ocst of maintaining a BNC for networks that don't offer it for free can get high. Running ZNC was beginning to cause hash ocean to ask me for over 100 a month.
But Rizon and the networks I use most frequently run their own free of cost that provides permannence so you get your backlog.
And of that familiarity, I could instantly skewer it rather quickly in the sense that Discord is a bloated RAM hog that uses too many system resources, and will slow a gamers PC down. Honestly, ventrilo was superior for gamers. And IRCloud fixes most of their complaints. They should prefer lightweight voice chat protocols.
> Discord is a bloated RAM hog that uses too many system resources, and will slow a gamers PC down.
Not enough to matter for the vast majority of people, not even humanly noticeable for most of them. How does that skewer anything?
Most people have Chrome running in the background behind their games too, maybe one or two apps like G-hub or Razer(whatever they call theirs), one to several apps like steam/origin/epic games, etc.. This clearly isn't a relevant argument to normal users, or to serious/professional gamers.
Why waste time redeveloping the wheel when what we should be doing is modernizing IRC to bring it into the 2020s and adapting what we already have and know works into something more familiar to these n00bs?
There is probably a lot of stuff you don't know, that would be quite helpful for you. Are you a whiny, spoiled brat, now that you don't know all of it?
No, sometimes you need to know something to see it's value.
There is probably a lot of stuff you don't know, that would be quite helpful for you. Are you a whiny, spoiled brat, now that you don't know all of it?
No, sometimes you need to know something to see it's value.
back in the 90s and early 2000s I knew plenty of non-technical users who were fine using IRC or "mIRC" cuz they didn't know the difference between the app and the protocol/servers.
Companies are capitalizing on this ignorance now and somehow convinces even us techies that our decentralized/open stuff is inferior to their lockin, and so the cycle just continues with a bit more shit at every step..
Since the 90s and 00s, a lot has changed with how internet services are accessed and used.
The problem of "how do I get people to use and fund my server" is still an unanswered one by projects that implement a lot of FLOSS-based services. It's a bit better than it used to be, but if I suggested that my Discord servers try my new IRC system that I hosted somewhere, most people are just going to pass because it's not going to have the level of polish and ease-of-use they're used to from group chat applications.
Which frustrates us oldies because that polish is literally all it is. Even images are as simple as loading the image someone links in chat in the browser.
I wonder if IRC or other alternatives are easy to ban somehow. Like if all “acceptable” users are on walled garden platforms will ISPs or regulations eventually ban everything else. It would be better if all the walled garden usage was also on these alternatives.
I disagree with your disagree. You can't change people and you can't expect them to be any smarter than they are right now, which is not enough to use IRC no matter how much you expect them to be able to learn how to.
I find it highly sus, what you're saying, in that I don't think these people are as dumb, as they want to trick us all into thinknig they are, they pretend, to have a helpelessn and a disability, that they do not truly have, in ordre to give themselves and an excuse not to, it's learned helplessness, it's not genuine incapability.
What if I told you, that I have no interest in addressing the needs of today? Because I feel the whole smartphone revolution was a mistake, and we'd be better off chucking ours all into a river and calling it a day.
I get wanting mobility, I don't get wanting to scale things down to the point where it fits in a single hand, especially because, the smartphone manufactures seem to not want to allow the same kind of freedom and flexibility available on the PC to their smartphones. The "Smart" part of a "Smartphone" makes them in fact mini tablet personal computers, and that they don't offer the kind of control only a PC does to their end user, is unforgivable. It's a shame, the world favors convenience over freedom.
What if I told you you're not the only user on the internet? Discord crushed IRC in popularity because it offers people what they want. Simple as that.
And? IRC offers me the lack of bloat I prefer, it lacks the features they want, but I specifically want to merely be modules and plugins that you can opt out of if you don't want the overhead of having to bother with them. It also offers me access to the bots that enable me to get out in front and join the BitTorrent swarm early so that I actually build ratio on private bit torrent trackers. The whole problem with discord's approach is that if I disagree with the preferences of these users, I cannot meaningfully opt out. Discord is just one big blob of features and if you want to strip out unwanted ones you can't because it's a complete package.
In terms of community, what do you have to lose by hosting discord before moving to a freer option when an event like this happens? The friction seems to me the same.
In terms of logging history, you could use a bot anyway on discord. This is generally not more friction than fully controlling logs in a freer option.
That attitude is why we have Discord and why it’s so popular, and also why IRC is not. People want features like scrollback when they’re not connected without having a set up screen session via SSH. They want to mobile app, It doesn’t even have to be that good of a mobile app. Yeah, I know you can do all of these things with IRC but people just want it all nicely packaged up by a company who has a UX team to make things nice and easy For them.
Looking at the success of slack, there’s a lot of money to be had if you don’t try and force people to “suck it up”.
There are good salesmen and bad salesmen, and telling customers to “suck it up “ is not a winning move.
Firstly, IRC is not a Product anyone is trying to sell, I am an IRC evangelist, advocating for an old but adequate technology that can be configured to add the functions that people demand. IRC is not a Product, we are not salesmen, we are Enthusiast. This distinction is meaningful enough to merit pointing out. Do you think when I came to IRC, I didn't notice that the UX was actually rather ugly?
It was readily apparent to me, I simply felt other things were more important. It wasn't the priority.
The same is true of money, being able to take part in the gift economy of the hacker under world is of more value to me than money.
I mean sure but that means nothing to the average user. You have to appeal to your audience, unfortunately, and the audience of mass users has shown time and again that ux is extremely important over anything else.
It's not about the cute icons. It's about meeting users where they are. Discord is popular, and users are reticent to migrate or begin using other community-hosting software. That's not to say that I'm against using Free community software, quite the opposite, but the problem is real; if you exclusively host your own Matrix community you will have less participation than if you make a Discord space. That is simply the state of things. I don't know how we get to a better state here, but I'd love to hear ideas. Perhaps just boycotting Discord and encouraging other FOSS projects to do the same could eventually turn the tide?
Matrix needs to improve the UX a lot. I’m a big supporter and I’ve donated a ton in the past, but I just don’t use it anymore because it mostly doesn’t work properly and a ton of features technically exist but are so painful to use that they may as well not.
Yeah I've been using them for my indie conferences since 2020. I recently argued [0] that it's not the Year for Matrix, even if Discord now has ads and is doing sketchy stuff typical of enshitification.
Unfortunately I just don't see Matrix's priorities going towards UX. I'm dropping them. Revolt has promise [1], at the very least as a stopgap.
It feels a lot like “the last 10% is 99% of the work”. On paper matrix seems like a pretty perfect discord replacement. I think we just don’t realise the incredible feat of engineering that makes discord just work all the time.
Good thing there are alternatives to Matrix that use a lot less resources. It’s not just UX… Matrix by design is wasteful by requiring replication of all messages & attachments of all users in all chats across every server. Most can’t afford to host a multiuser server with the storage bills for this.
Discord is not the problem. Discord isn’t loved by its users, there is no particular loyalty to it. The users like the product, but not the company that makes it.
The problem is entirely that the alternatives are worse than Discord.
There’s no point in a boycott if there’s no destination to boycott to. The reason that the Digg->Reddit boycott was successful was that there was a better place to migrate to.
Matrix chose to prioritize security, censorship resistance, privacy, and decentralization and be a bit slower with UX, and Discord chose UX over everything else.
In the short term people want pretty but enough bad outcomes will push people to consider that UX is not the only thing to value in a communications tool.
There's nothing concrete that Discord holds that makes them remotely better for the users. Discord isn't even mutable, can't be heavily changed or swayed; it's someone else's closed proprietary product. Where-as Matrix or XMPP or irc can be bent, extended, changed to do more, to meet users where they are.
I don't know how any of these assertions that it's Discord or bust are made. This is an article of faith that Discord is simply the one and only way to go, or else, and the tautological definition of an article of faith is that which relies on no external support to maintain itself.
I do think there's a lot of possibility to figure out how to better bring users onto matrix or XMPP or irc, with easy to use web clients & better feature sets. But I also think culture shifts because culture does. For whatever reason there's doctrine that Discord is how it's done, and it's easy as fuck, but if we tried doing other maybe this Discord manifest destiny would not look so horrifically locked in as it is. But that would require not accepting the dogma of Discord crit-hype, that would require multiple folks trying.
This is just three paragraphs of saying the same sentiment: "I don't understand why Discord is appealing despite there being alternatives that I believe are better."
People use what they think is best, where "best" has a wide variety of answers and very rarely is the answer "a feature set that programmers think are good".
There are also moderation issues. This shouldn't surprise anybody by now, but it turns out that a decentralized platform that doesn't do captchas, phone number verification, advanced, closed-source abuse mitigation strategies etc is very much prone to abuse.
My team and I strive to create software dramatically better at security and privacy than anything else that exists, but we offer support exclusively on Matrix and bridged rooms to IRC.
We offer free software and free support. We do not feel it is an unreasonable ask that people use open standards to collaborate with us on open software.
Many have created accounts on Matrix because they wanted our help. It works.
Matrix, Jabber and IRC all rely on DNS, domain registrars, registry operators, TLS certificate issuers and ultimately ICAN themselves, and it has been proven[1][2][3] time and time again that they're as trigger happy and as unreliable as any other centralized platform, which is in fact what they are.
Unlike "consumer" platforms like Discord, they're used to talking with serious businesses, and usually have more sensible rules and customer support procedures in place, but things still can go wrong sometimes.
This is one of a very few things that can actually be solved by a blockchain (because there's no way to have a human-friendly naming system without financial incentives, and there's no way to have decentralized financial incentives without a blockchain), but that causes its own share of problems. Your domain might be impossible to take away, but if you get hacked and your keys get stolen, there's also no way to get the domain back.
It seems that no matter what you do, this is just a risk you're going to face.
Because you need some way to find communities/users. You can either do it the TOR way (AKA give everybody a keypair and treat base64-encoded public keys as addresses / handles), but those addresses aren't human-friendly and are hard to remember.
You can go the DNS way and have a centralized registry. It may be hierarchical and/or distributed, but it's fundamentally still centralized.
You can go the free-for-all way and allow anybody to register any handle/domain under any public key. This works for closed networks with trusted participants, but on an open network where name registration is at no cost, a profit-seeker will inevitably register all the names for themselves and try to sell them, probably at somewhat extortionate prices.
The only way to deter profit seekers is to introduce a small cost to register and maintain a name. You need fees to be high enough for most names to be unprofitable to snatch, but low enough to still be affordable to a vast majority of users. The only way to collect fees in a decentralized manner that we know of so far is via a blockchain.
The crucial realization here is that, with a human-friendly naming system, there's always going to be a cost to acquiring a name. It may come from the designers themselves or from the people who got all the names in a gold rush, but it's always going to be there. The cost doesn't necessarily have to be financial, many centralized system require scarce resources (e.g. phone numbers or human attention to solve captchas) to squat on.
Back to Internet relay chat. Hell, if you find its interface "Too clunky" and it feels like last century and for terminal nerds that never adapted to modern GUIs them use IRC cloud. IRC isn't dead by a long shot, Yes, People still use it, Daily. Traffic is down overall, but it remains a thing along with the XDCC bots "The warez scene" and all.
It's the same as it's always been. There are networks more than happy to host such channels, I remember one IRCop on IRC repeatedly directing me to upload files to FTP Servers that were Bots on Rizon. Either blissfully unaware of these machines being compromised and hacked or knowing and complicit, either way.
He had me initiated into the whole FXP couriering culture for a while. Such Networks would ethuasistatically welcome Suzu and others.
> "In this instance, there was also a court ordered injunction for the takedown of these materials, and we took action in a manner consistent with the court order"
I'm just going to say it, at this point given the way these talks have gone, but Discord is a vague amorphous blob of binary code that cannot be meaningfully forked to strip out and remove unwanted functionality should the end user not share the preferences of those who populate its servers, the appeal of something like IRC being based on extensions that can be added or removed at will at the IRCD level is that in essence, It's left up to the admins to pick and choose what features their users get access to. If you don't like this, you can always create your own IRCD and configure it differently. The frustration as a Gentooist that I feel towards Discord could be summarized as That's nice that people prefer things like code snippets and the photos displaying by default but if I did not share these people's preferences I would have no means of actually stripping out this unwanted functionality from it, which is also as it turns out the appeal for me of compiling my own binaries in that GCC can be configured in such a manner that functions that you lack the hardware to support or simply realize you will never actually use can literally be stripped out of the resulting binaries, but with Discords closed source Proprietary nature if these end users had radically different preferences than I did I would not be able to meaningful with their platform opt out of being dragged along into implementing features I actually didn't want, simply because they increased the resource drain and load on my system.
These kinds of things make loathe closed source for the simple fact that with a black box you are left in a situation where, like I said, if most of the users want a feature, but you don't because it would be too demanding on your computer, you're fucked. You cannot meaningful opt out of it being implemented
we can't, you know, fork a discord lite. Because of how this works.
Based on should be, that IRC can be extended, if users want to. They can have the features they want, but with discord, if I don't, I'm just along for the ride they provide.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] thread> But it’s possible that people were sharing Nintendo’s cryptographic keys, firmware, or even entire pirated games in these servers despite those commitments. At the end of the day, most people seeking out a Nintendo Switch emulator are looking to play Nintendo games on it.
Emulators are legal, but running unlicensed games is usually the killer app, especially for more recent consoles.
But is sharing cryptographic keys illegal, especially if they are widely known already and are no longer "secret?"
That's why this garbage "law" should be complete repealed.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag
But as easily as they can claim it, as easily it can be defeated if everyone massively ignores it and shares it everywhere, which can highlight absurdity and stupidity of this "law".
The IRC clients are mostly bad and ugly, and they don’t even implement basic formatting features (bold, italic) in the same way.
NickServ sucks.
Having to use bouncers to keep track of history sucks, this only makes it a non suitable choice for a chat platform today.
Does IRC even support long messages and multi line messages yet?
Oh and btw, net split is not acceptable today.
And considering multiline messages as "bloat" is a wild take to be honest.
No, thanks. If Discord were, you know, open source, The way I compiled it would strip those options out as well as any edits to pure ASCII Smileys.
Given that, Rich text support is not wanted. I would however like to be able to Share VIDEO Over RCS that's not so tiny.
Rich text might not take much bandwidth, but I'm focused right now on removing and DNS sink holing all unwanted packets. Tracking, adverts, etc.
So the little bandwidth it takes, yeah sure, but multiply that with everything else that's eating it, and it's another leak to remove.
IRC sucks, but it can be made more or less tolerable with things like IRCCloud or Lounge (or tmux+weehcat if you happen to prefer something like that), but AFAIK nothing can help with the poor performance and the unreliability of Matrix.
While Matrix developers have finally acknowledged the problems, they have run out of venture capital, and have hard time getting any funding to fix the protocol, clients and servers.
They might be ugly, but most are fast. It shouldn't take more than 0.1s to display a new tab or channel.
JSON transport is also eh. At least with XMPP one could embed things like rich text easier and in a more "native" way.
There's also some shadiness with how for example the reference client Element got a CLA a couple months back, because I guess Element wants to sell the AGPLv3+ code with a proprietary license. Of course one need not use Element or Synapse or whatever, but this kind of action is still something to consider.
Matrix is certainly very, very good. But the best? Eh.
What negative experiences would a user face as a result of long polling?
Also, it means that a server can't really push events at you, especially if they're coming in rapidly, as they might be with a sufficiently active community. Like sure, once you're waiting for the server response for your long poll request, you'll get the data, but between receiving the data and the next time you poll, there's bound to be stuff happening in your chat room that you'll only know about the next time you poll. Of course with that, you wouldn't need to poll for long, but that also causes problems with battery.
In contrast WebSockets or even raw, real TCP sockets the server can just push stuff at you.
The timing also isn’t fixed. It isn’t like you only receive data on the poll interval. The request finalises when data comes in and a new one is created instantly. So I can’t imagine there being more than a second delay for receiving messages which is entirely acceptable for the use case.
If nothing is happening, you’d only be making a request every couple of minutes, but in an active chat it’s perfectly capable of making them continuously. And for mobile, it isn’t long polling while the app is closed, it’s using the regular push notifications system.
Discord users often make temporary servers to suit a particular need at a particular time when a group of people need to collaborate. Some of these servers become permanent, some die. If there’s any friction to creating a server then it loses the dynamic of how communities start on discord.
But it's not.
Discord is more popular than IRC because to most people it's better.
https://github.com/znc/znc
Telling everyone to rent a VPS and run a server to hack in an essential feature is insane.
https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory
Plus, again, IT's not necessary to rent a VPS. IrcV3 has a module for backlogging. You just have to actually plug it in and use it.
"People still listen to terrestrial radio?"
Sadly, yes.
There's a new crop pf users today. Depends on the network, depends on the server.
Some of these people are like me, they felt the world was full of possibly back in 2000, they just want the feeling back.
Mind you, some of us know our old uncle that says the good old days were better is full of shit, and has just you know, failed to remember the bad parts of the past. and prefers to only think about the good.
But I started using myself back in like late 1999 to get mp3s before Napster was around, and I'm not like boasting about warez like I'm still 13 I'm actually just matter of fact about it these days like shrug.
Like I don't really think it makes me cooler than anyone else or better or anything, I just- I'm an honest broker.
I do feel an affection for things like the old humorist logs that wwent on bash and everything. the past wasn't better, different, in a lot of ways worse.
but not better.
Since you need to maintain a constant connection to irc for it to work, it’s unusable on mobile since the connection will be killed as soon as you switch app or lock the screen. Which is why everyone used irccloud.
The experience is pretty sub standard even on desktop. Back in the day I ended up IP banned from the whole of freenode because my internet connection was flaky while I was away and I ended up banned for spamming join/quit messages.
Ouch. I feel you there. Intermittent connectivity can truly suck. I've had issues like that before.
I try not to connect to IRC in situations like that. but these issues can often be resolved with a Bouncer.
like, I was beginning to wonder why you were saying what you said.
I was going to be like what do you need logging or such? I honestly prefer the logging situation on IRC. People will expect you to read the entire backlog on discord.
Discord is indeed free of cost which could save enterprises money I suppose. The ocst of maintaining a BNC for networks that don't offer it for free can get high. Running ZNC was beginning to cause hash ocean to ask me for over 100 a month.
But Rizon and the networks I use most frequently run their own free of cost that provides permannence so you get your backlog.
Not enough to matter for the vast majority of people, not even humanly noticeable for most of them. How does that skewer anything?
Most people have Chrome running in the background behind their games too, maybe one or two apps like G-hub or Razer(whatever they call theirs), one to several apps like steam/origin/epic games, etc.. This clearly isn't a relevant argument to normal users, or to serious/professional gamers.
/s
UX, usability, and accessibility all matter.
Alright. https://www.irccloud.com/ fixd.
No, sometimes you need to know something to see it's value.
No, sometimes you need to know something to see it's value.
Companies are capitalizing on this ignorance now and somehow convinces even us techies that our decentralized/open stuff is inferior to their lockin, and so the cycle just continues with a bit more shit at every step..
The problem of "how do I get people to use and fund my server" is still an unanswered one by projects that implement a lot of FLOSS-based services. It's a bit better than it used to be, but if I suggested that my Discord servers try my new IRC system that I hosted somewhere, most people are just going to pass because it's not going to have the level of polish and ease-of-use they're used to from group chat applications.
A better suggestion is to use Matrix/Element, Mattermost or RocketChat. Not IRC or XMPP.
I get wanting mobility, I don't get wanting to scale things down to the point where it fits in a single hand, especially because, the smartphone manufactures seem to not want to allow the same kind of freedom and flexibility available on the PC to their smartphones. The "Smart" part of a "Smartphone" makes them in fact mini tablet personal computers, and that they don't offer the kind of control only a PC does to their end user, is unforgivable. It's a shame, the world favors convenience over freedom.
In terms of logging history, you could use a bot anyway on discord. This is generally not more friction than fully controlling logs in a freer option.
That attitude is why we have Discord and why it’s so popular, and also why IRC is not. People want features like scrollback when they’re not connected without having a set up screen session via SSH. They want to mobile app, It doesn’t even have to be that good of a mobile app. Yeah, I know you can do all of these things with IRC but people just want it all nicely packaged up by a company who has a UX team to make things nice and easy For them.
Looking at the success of slack, there’s a lot of money to be had if you don’t try and force people to “suck it up”.
There are good salesmen and bad salesmen, and telling customers to “suck it up “ is not a winning move.
It was readily apparent to me, I simply felt other things were more important. It wasn't the priority.
The same is true of money, being able to take part in the gift economy of the hacker under world is of more value to me than money.
If you advertise your community on Discord, especially if you are working on something open source, you are part of the problem.
Use Matrix, Jabber, or even IRC before giving companies like Discord money. The cute icons are not worth it.
Unfortunately I just don't see Matrix's priorities going towards UX. I'm dropping them. Revolt has promise [1], at the very least as a stopgap.
[0] https://youtu.be/WxAO4xDPpkg
[1] https://revolt.chat
Meanwhile the old Element apps aren’t improving because all our (limited) bandwidth is going into Element X, which we hope to be ready this summer.
The problem is entirely that the alternatives are worse than Discord.
There’s no point in a boycott if there’s no destination to boycott to. The reason that the Digg->Reddit boycott was successful was that there was a better place to migrate to.
In the short term people want pretty but enough bad outcomes will push people to consider that UX is not the only thing to value in a communications tool.
There's nothing concrete that Discord holds that makes them remotely better for the users. Discord isn't even mutable, can't be heavily changed or swayed; it's someone else's closed proprietary product. Where-as Matrix or XMPP or irc can be bent, extended, changed to do more, to meet users where they are.
I don't know how any of these assertions that it's Discord or bust are made. This is an article of faith that Discord is simply the one and only way to go, or else, and the tautological definition of an article of faith is that which relies on no external support to maintain itself.
I do think there's a lot of possibility to figure out how to better bring users onto matrix or XMPP or irc, with easy to use web clients & better feature sets. But I also think culture shifts because culture does. For whatever reason there's doctrine that Discord is how it's done, and it's easy as fuck, but if we tried doing other maybe this Discord manifest destiny would not look so horrifically locked in as it is. But that would require not accepting the dogma of Discord crit-hype, that would require multiple folks trying.
Behold, for the answer has revealed itself.
People use what they think is best, where "best" has a wide variety of answers and very rarely is the answer "a feature set that programmers think are good".
We offer free software and free support. We do not feel it is an unreasonable ask that people use open standards to collaborate with us on open software.
Many have created accounts on Matrix because they wanted our help. It works.
Unlike "consumer" platforms like Discord, they're used to talking with serious businesses, and usually have more sensible rules and customer support procedures in place, but things still can go wrong sometimes.
This is one of a very few things that can actually be solved by a blockchain (because there's no way to have a human-friendly naming system without financial incentives, and there's no way to have decentralized financial incentives without a blockchain), but that causes its own share of problems. Your domain might be impossible to take away, but if you get hacked and your keys get stolen, there's also no way to get the domain back.
It seems that no matter what you do, this is just a risk you're going to face.
Unsure why a distributed ledger like a blockchain would be needed for DNS independence :)
You can go the DNS way and have a centralized registry. It may be hierarchical and/or distributed, but it's fundamentally still centralized.
You can go the free-for-all way and allow anybody to register any handle/domain under any public key. This works for closed networks with trusted participants, but on an open network where name registration is at no cost, a profit-seeker will inevitably register all the names for themselves and try to sell them, probably at somewhat extortionate prices.
The only way to deter profit seekers is to introduce a small cost to register and maintain a name. You need fees to be high enough for most names to be unprofitable to snatch, but low enough to still be affordable to a vast majority of users. The only way to collect fees in a decentralized manner that we know of so far is via a blockchain.
The crucial realization here is that, with a human-friendly naming system, there's always going to be a cost to acquiring a name. It may come from the designers themselves or from the people who got all the names in a gold rush, but it's always going to be there. The cost doesn't necessarily have to be financial, many centralized system require scarce resources (e.g. phone numbers or human attention to solve captchas) to squat on.
Connect via IP and you can connect with no issues. Self-signed certs work well for IRC too.
It's the same as it's always been. There are networks more than happy to host such channels, I remember one IRCop on IRC repeatedly directing me to upload files to FTP Servers that were Bots on Rizon. Either blissfully unaware of these machines being compromised and hacked or knowing and complicit, either way.
He had me initiated into the whole FXP couriering culture for a while. Such Networks would ethuasistatically welcome Suzu and others.
> "In this instance, there was also a court ordered injunction for the takedown of these materials, and we took action in a manner consistent with the court order"
These kinds of things make loathe closed source for the simple fact that with a black box you are left in a situation where, like I said, if most of the users want a feature, but you don't because it would be too demanding on your computer, you're fucked. You cannot meaningful opt out of it being implemented we can't, you know, fork a discord lite. Because of how this works.