Discord can be accessed by any client adhering to Discord standards, which are closed and proprietary.

Nobody has an obligation to publish information for public access, nor is free necessarily superior to proprietary or vice versa, but Discord is absolutely less accessible than IRC or HTTP(S) as an objective fact.

Notice that every single chat software used by normal humans (iMessage, Google chat, FB messenger, etc) has most of these features, just with much lower bitrates than Discord.

For the very few users that don't need any feature they didn't have in the 90s, IRC is still around. The rest of us just add one of many text logging bots to our discord servers.

Of course sometimes having the user design the product or tool is the only available option. Just remember it is a terrible thing when it happens.

Plain text protocol with poor (and optional) auth? Please where are the adults in the room

"oh but extension XYZ etc" yes and how many servers do implement that in a mandatory (and user friendly) way?

The user wants their images and reactions and I can't blame them because it's the 2020's and IRC was already limited 20 years ago

What do you mean "they"? I'm the dev in this scenario and I also prefer to eat tasty food that supposedly kills me. I know how to count my calories.

> sometimes having the user design the product or tool is the only available option. Just remember it is a terrible thing when it happens

I'll continue to have my users design my product/tool every time and those who don't will get eaten alive in any market that has consumer choice. Also Santa Claus isn't real.

Somewhere, the ghost of the man responsible for the iPod and iPhone is laughing at you.

Besides clients/users you have (not in any order): investors, employees, security, stability, sustainability, usability, education, learning curve, ethics, morality, honesty(?), the community, the environment, the economy, humanity, history...

I'm sure I'm missing a dozen things.

Maybe if they spent 1 minute thinking about their software as a product and decided to enable those plugins by default, Pidgin would be relevant in 2023.

>Twitch uses IRC for instance

That's not at all what I'm talking about, Twitch has nothing to do with Discord.

Eg your friend's Discord status shows you what they are doing in-game and many games let you join your friend's team directly from discord.

It's worse. Official Twitter account: >All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them.

https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248

In practice you can't have a client that has local chat history, local search, or just better information density on the screen, and simultaneously hope to not have your account nuked.

Discord standards include "official Discord", which doesn't take away from the point.

IRC didn't pretend that you had information stored there, though...

Discord hides this fact better by offering semi-permanence and a "search" feature, so it seems like its a real-time forum, when in fact its just slack with better video features...

Its very different. The IRC of the yester-yore was filled with people sharing links to more-permanent docs, mailing lists. Discord is filled with people under the mistaken impression they have documented anything by having a chat with a search feature, (and this is has happened to me) claiming that the "rules" are documented somewhere in a channel and why haven't I seen them, when the "rules" are in fact buried, no longer accessible, or just hidden in a wall of conflicting information.

If you have an IRC, you have a dedicated community of people who try because they must, if you have a Discord you have a group of randos at best, or at worst a delusional echo chamber.

Part of this is a result of some communities not being organized well enough but also making do with fitting an IRC-like format ('servers'/channels/message buffers) into a more structured one. People are willing to compromise on having less suitable structure for denser/more important information since Discord offers such attractive and easy-to-use features in one place.

That said most communities I know of create channels devoted to rules/FAQs, though for things like lists of file announcements/releases (in eg: modding communities) it's messier.

The new forums channel feature has helped by making things sortable and more structured but those only apply to new channels not existing. The forums feature also highlights Discord has recognized how communities have been using their site like a forum for certain channels such as Q&A/releases/showcases (and why comparing it to publicly indexable forums is even more relevant since the feature set will only grow).

so the death of lore happened essentially when textual knowledge moved from the printed, physically stored version to the electronic version that has no easy way of going and getting the verifiable source of lore for reference when needed?

sounds about right.

But it is patently false to say nobody used IRC as a source of information. IRC was essential in sharing information quickly back in the 90s. Information on things like natural disasters and the fall of the Soviet Union were shared live using IRC.