Comment by noobermin
3 years ago
Jason Scott put out a plead to discord in 2021[0], with asks similar to the end of the article to add archiveability to their service, and I basically replied saying this is what we get for ditching irc, and he replied a tepid "I know what you're trying to say."
I love Jason and the work he does and I don't blame him. The thing is Discord was never going to play ball, why would they? Again, we're going to have this discussion in 2026 too and nothing will change. I appreciate now he does offer thoughtful rebuff wrt IRC, but it is a pain then that other platforms like matrix haven't had Discord's uptick.
People just gave up on better interfaces to IRC or other protocols. I get it many things are magic and we don't know how to get numbers, but it can't hurt to try.
[0] https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1345422597505351685
My experience, down to the moment, is that IRC may be "superior" to other services because it never tries to extend past its small set of core competencies. Which means it appeals exclusively to people who are fine with that small set, and every extension past that is lambasted and doomed to obscurity because there's no interest on the whole to push the entire realm as a whole into the late 20th century, much less the 21st.
My response was tepid because I don't like telling someone stuck in a little tiny fishbowl going "the fishbowl is perfectly adequate" and dissuading them that the fishbowl is not adequate. Not that Discord is "the ocean" but it's a cruise ship and it's expensive, and a very nice ride comparatively.
My weblog entry describes a situation beyond Discord, and that of knowledge, and is at best a framing of the problem in a static area, because I believe this is the year Twitter closes down, closes up, or dies.
Err, ArchiveTeam uses IRC as primary communication method.