Haha love how people have rediscovered the functionality and joys of IRC and the like!

Totally... If you enjoy the text/irc aspect, I welcome you to check out https://sqwok.im, a new realtime public discussion site very much inspired by growing up using aol chat/irc/icq/aim and others. I think we live at an amazing juncture of technology and ideas, where excellent communication software like irc that was always limited by it's own access requirements (install something, client, server, huh?), can now be made accessible to the masses, unlocking and hopefully creating entirely new experiences for people to enjoy!

I'll be doing a livestream on AWS Twitch on Thursday discussing Sqwok.im if you're interested check it out.

Or, if you enjoy the text/irc aspect, irc is still very much a thing!

Certainly agree! but it's still limited in use by design.. with Sqwok I'm trying to build something that anyone can use without any technical knowledge at all - Just open the url.

I'm on freenode daily :D

Wow, I visited the site. This is a super cool idea/concept! I hope it takes off and good luck!

thank you! appreciate the comment

Sqwok looks amazing :)

thank you! let me know if you have any questions

One thing that would probably be welcome is some builtin support for threads.

On the Python discord for example, there is a system of help channels which get assigned to the first person talking in it and returned to the pool after 30min of inactivity or once the problem has been solved. A bot keeps a few channels in a "free" pool, marks some as "occupied", and moves the surplus to a "dormant" section for UX purposes. Newcomers often get confused and ask questions in already-occupied channels, etc.

Bots make this possible but it's never as good as the threading that exists in Slack or Zulip. I'm sure any sizeable organization (like a University) is running into this as well.

Personally I think threads ruin conversation flow. If you want to have an in-depth conversation about a topic limited to a few people, you should either open up another channel or do a DM. Just my opinion, but I hate Slack threads and love Discord's system.

The point is not to break a single conversation into multiple threads, it is to split a single conversation away from the other conversations happening simultaneously in your #help channel. Effectively creating a channel, without having to bug a mod to get a new channel for your 5min conversation.

That is impossible in Discord as up to 250 channels per guild are permitted at a time.

Slack became a much worse experience when they added full threads IMO. Discord's new approach of allowing you to reply to a specific message, but not outright fork the channel, is a much better compromise.

this - Discord's approach of allowing you to reply, but having the message show up in the regular conversation flow keeps the feel of an actual conversation.

Screenshot of a reply: https://support.discord.com/hc/article_attachments/360099599... (from https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360057382374-R...)

You are assuming that the traffic is low enough that "a single conversation flow" is happening, or (like in your example) that multiple people reply to a single post.

If you have enough people talking past each other, even with the reply feature, it becomes a huge mess. Having a way to only show the messages that are replying to you while you troubleshoot a specific issue is what a thread view enables.

Having just migrated from Zulip to Slack, I find Slack's threading model really bad. Discord is a little better, but still fragmented over time in a busy channel. Zulip has the best implementation I've seen for putting semi-related topics together without getting drowned out.

Surprisingly, Slack's sales seem unaware of Zulip from what I heard from some colleagues so I doubt Slack is going to steal Zulip's (much better) threading model any time soon.

How would you cope with 100 guilds limit?