The general idea of group chats was to facilitate ad hoc real time communication. People were not assumed to be always online and messages were only of interest for the discussion happening in the moment. There are much better options for sharing information that might have a longer lived scope of relevance anyway. Plus remembering some chats that I hung out with friends, it had a sense of intimacy, sometimes I wanted to share the information exactly with those online at the moment, so no history was a feature. Popular open source IRC channels have archives that one could look up if need be anyway.
Of course there is also the modern idea of work-oriented chats like slack that have a powerful search function and are mostly about async communication, being a bit of everything, a way to share information with lots of people, a documentation system, discussion and so on.
I really don’t understand how people can think that having everyone self-host and maintain things like Quassel on a Raspberry Pi is a perfectly reasonable solution to the UX shortcomings of IRC, but then also insist that having to spend 30 seconds adjusting the basic settings in Discord is an unacceptably difficult task.
At some point, this conversation isn’t actually about UX or functionality. It’s about hating the new thing and clinging to the old ways.
I would argue that those Raspberry Pi based solutions are nice to have but not needed. In fact I argued you don't need history most of the time and that not offering central storage of history can be reasonable.
That's the big value of mailing lists over most of these chat solutions.
People are more thoughtful about email only because it's slow and relatively low volume. You see the same on stack exchange.
You freely chose to post the insult, so you are not.
> In 2021 everyone expects history and other things.
I should hope I am included in "everyone" and I do not expect that. I think IRC rules and I think chats are better when they are ephemeral. I know people disagree with me; that is the point of discussing it. It's strange (a cheap rhetorical trick, really) to point out the expectations of a group of people in the current year as if that was an inevitability and that is how things always shall be unto the ages.
IRC is still used by countless open source projects and there are many public XMPP servers everyone can use. I switched my family and most of my friends to XMPP this year and no-one runs an XMPP server at home.
I can't believe how delusional some people are. And sorry for being so rude.
In 2021 everyone expects history and other things. You can't realisticaly expect everyone to "just have a fully set up always-on raspberry pi and install some server on it". That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead.
> I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put
Good for you. The absolute vast majority of users, however, don't.