The advantage of the big centralized services is that they're more accessible. They're generally very easy to use, it's harder to fuck things up there.

A lot of the kind of nerds that post on hacker news, myself included, frequently discount how much of a barrier technical difficulty is. For us, setting up an IRC client, or even a server, is hardly a big deal at all.

But for the average person, they either can't or won't bother with that. So setting up an IRC client for them, is like a wall.

Responses to pointing this out often go along the train of thought of, "It's not that hard! People could totally do it!" Well, regardless of whether they could or not, they won't. So you're basically just yelling into the void.

> For us, setting up an IRC client, or even a server, is hardly a big deal at all.

I administrated huge systems at massive scale, I deliver, what I believe is very high quality software which solves complex problems.

And you know what? I would never want to setup a freaking IRC client that has such poor UX that you wonder if it was intentional.

Oh, wait, you have to deploy a server to host your bouncer too! Oh, and then you have to interact with the nicserver!

What a joy! Really.

We have to forget about “state of the art protocols”, “unix philosophy” and very dumb UX if we want to see adoption of decentralized services.

You know why HTTP is fucking great and so ubiquitous? Because it fucking works. IRC and what not protocols are so broken that it’s not even funny.

I read too many RFCs of protocols that are so dumb that you understand they were never really written to be implemented and even less to be used but are more there to serve an intellectual challenge.

I don't necessarily agree that accessibility is a universal good thing, at least when it comes to building a community. Reddit is a good example - there is basically zero effort required to join and post. There is also very little incentive to remain active and post good content (karma is more or less irrelevant compared to incentives in forum sites of the past.)

As a result, you get fairly low-quality discussion content and essentially zero sense of identity - both of which were not a problem in pre-centralized niche forums.

Well, it's a good thing if you want a service to be more popular, which is what people here are complaining about: that the centralized services beat the decentralized ones.

It's not like IRC went away, lots of people still use it. It was just massively eclipsed by more accessible alternatives.

I disagree. It's like saying anything else but fast food is too complicated. While in reality the net is full of cooking sites of all sorts.

Let's do more cybercooking in our cyberkitchens!

There is a saying that you are what and how you eat. What is the net? A medium for information of all sorts. Mindfood so to speak. Mind your diet!

Food is a necessity, eating out is more expensive than making your own, and you can make it healthier for yourself.

Chat isn't usually a necessity, it's more or less free regardless of whether you use Discord or IRC, and using your own client doesn't make you any healthier.

I didn't mean to limit this to chat software. But now that you mention it, what if i only have small pans and pots, and/or only a single burner? And that thing with all the bells&whistles just wouldn't fit?