Matrix is an open source protocol run by a community interest company, Discord is proprietary software which needs to be monetised. There's a big difference between the two.
I agree Id be happy with IRC and dont care much for extra features. But I think the Freenode "hostile takeover" of 2021 dealt a heavy blow to the IRC community. At the same time Matrix has seen a lot of growth including Firefox who had a rigorous and public selection process.
Perhaps.
It was a painful experience for many but I think what came from the ashes (libera.chat) is a yet better FOSS-centric IRC network and now it is on much more solid footing than what Lee burned to the ground. This resurgence was due to the hard work of very dedicated opers and the users all wanting to keep the good parts of freenode and fix the bad.
I just checked netsplit.de and libera.chat has around 45k current users. Less than freenode showed before the coup but also I think clear that this number is less inflated by zombie bouncer connections than it naturally was for any long running network. Point being that all the "real" users moved and largely picked up where they left off.
In any case, my feeling about the Gnome IRC vs matrix thing is that the game is not zero sum.
From my single IRC client (weechat) I connect to multiple IRC networks and a few matrix channels. In some cases I'm in several channels of the same topic across these connections. And, that doesn't really degrade the experience. I don't use Gnome any more so have no skin in this particular game, but I think "officially" moving to matrix (specifically) would not be damaging to the community (the same is not true for the proprietary options). Any Gnome IRC channels continue (assuming Gnome doesn't get pushy on that front!) and Gnome matrix will become yet another way for people to connect.
If you see me on IRC, say "hi".
When I lumped Matrix and Discord together, I was thinking of them as "modern instant messaging systems" (not sure whether this is generation 3 or 4). You are correct, there is a huge difference between the two, and given the choice, I would always chose Matrix over Discord.
On a user level, my resilience towards Matrix and Discord is generally motivated by the same reasons (powerful protocols compared to IRC), but thinking beyond merely that, Discord's proprietary nature makes it a non-starter for me.
If there was (is there now?) a standard way of clients requesting all messages since they were last connected, that would solve my biggest problem.
Although it also helps that Matrix being relatively close to Discord in terms of basic feature set made it possible for me to convince friends to use it as a Discord backup and for more private conversations. With IRC they would've probably shrugged it off as another "Linux nerd" thing.
As someone who was essentially constantly on IRC back in the 90s to early 2000s, IRC is just significantly less usable "out of the box" than Discord or Matrix; either is significantly easier to teach someone to use, especially multiple-device.
The ship has sailed and I don't think IRC3 will ever get traction even if it ends up actually being good.
Sysadmin's do lot more stuff y'know
Random round trip time combined with the energy storage limitations of the radio modem mean tcp back-off and inability to actually hold open a port (if they even have a routable ipv4!). But somehow that's everyone else's problem, not the smart phone's.
It's an advantage in the sense that if you want those features, you get to implement them yourself in a very complex series of IRC bots and server plugins.
You need to:
- open a TCP connection to a specific port and keep it open
- check for PING/PONG messages asynchronously and automatically
- parse a bunch of kinda-sorta RFC defined strings and parse them to a structure of some sort
- and if you want to be fancy, you can start storing all kinds of stuff what happens on channels and keep a in-memory state of everything and (try to) keep it in sync
- on a pro-level you need to be able to have multiple TCP connections open to multiple servers (different irc networks) and not mix up channel #hackernews on network A with #hackernews on network BTelegram/Discord/Slack bots are a fun project too, but they're a lot easier because they are asynchronous by default.
Everybody always cries "IRC is minimal and good!"
Except ...
You have to start installing a whole bunch of extra crap to make IRC useful. Want to be offline? You need a bouncer. Want to search? Well, you need to record things. And why is it that every IRC channel seems to have a custom bot to do a bunch of things and they all have different syntax?
Sorry, as an occasional user of IRC, I found IRC to be lousy. How do I get a nick on your node? Which node? Which port? Okay, great, I finally got onto the node. Now, which room? Oh, okay, and finally I can ask my question. "That's in the FAQ. Download it." Erm, I thought I checked the FAQ elsewhere, but maybe not. What cryptic command downloads the FAQ and then displays it on my computer? Ah, finally. Oh, guess what, my question ISN'T in the FAQ ... whoops, I bumped into one of the know-it-all jerkbags of the channel. Okay, mark that nick to be ignored and ask again. etc.
I'm happy that Matrix bridges to IRC--that is good. I'm also happy that I don't have to use IRC directly.
It's going to turn out like TheWeb(tm), where there are only one and a half clients to choose from and instead of a protocol with real standards you just get pseudocode documenting whatever the current version of the dominant client does.
IRC is an IETF standard. Matrix has gone the WHATWG route.
It’s true to compare Matrix with WHATWG though - we used the model of WHATWG’s pragmatism as a direct inspiration for Matrix as an implementation-first approach, where we’d then write an open governance spec (having proven it worked) as per https://spec.matrix.org and eventually merge it into an established standards body like W3C or IETF when stable.
There used to be loads of very functional independent web browsers too. There still are, if you count "only works with websites that haven't been up^Wworsegraded in the past decade and a half" as "functional".
No, there's only one.
Matrix tries to confuse people by calling the important part of the client a "homeserver".
v1?
v2?
v3?
v1?
v1.2?
v1.3?
What is the point of your comment?
These are different hesitations! Please keep being old, someone has to keep us from straying too far.
Gone are the days where people left a desktop running 24/7 to run irc and a torrent client. And sat at a desk to chat.
Matrix, meanwhile, is complex in some places and simple in others all in the wrong ways. For all of its features, all major clients still lack the capability for video previews from links, something that has been a feature in forums for as long as I can remember now.
Of the 20K issues on https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues i can only find one where someone (indirectly) asked for this: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/17072. And it has no upvotes at all, and simply isn’t on our radar.
If this is a showstopper for you, please upvote it. (It’d also be a fairly easy PR if anyone wanted to help out).
It's hard to speak in earnest about the benefits of Matrix when you know the people you're talking to will immediately view it as a downgrade, and from the user's perspective in many ways won't even be wrong.
Reasonable people will disagree, but I think IRC's lack of features is actually an advantage and not a disadvantage. My opinion is that the Matrix protocol is too powerful. That being said, for a project like GNOME, it's extremely important that one maintains a form of communication that those engaged are willing to use.
I realise I'm an old fart for being extremely hesitant about Matrix and Discord, but fortunately, I am also not in charge of deciding any community's lines of communication.