Haha I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed the irony. It really devalues the whole thing. The next phase in online consumer culture will certainly be the commodification of the old web: reduced to a performative aesthetic, divorced from its original substance.

Ye it what artists and designers talks, the trend cycle.

What irony? It is made for the artistic look and feel of websites as they once were. Seems to have nothing to do with the "open web" as you might like to put it.

You'd be lucky if that's the next phase, more likely it's just more Twitters and Facebooks.

The people of Nekoweb demand an IRC server -- maybe, IDK.

Welcome to HackerNews, a proprietary service

At least you can use Hacker News without an account. You can probably even read the news and discussions here with curl.

I think you can also use Discord without an account (sort-of). If you get an invite you can use a temporary account.

From my recent expirenence though, it seems like this feature is a little broken with it requesting email verification.

Nobody is talking about IP here, it's about using standard and open protocols. HN and Nekoweb are both proprietary services, that's fine, but they run on HTTP and the only thing you need to interact with it is a web browser of some sort, whereas nekoweb's discord “server” relies on a third party (Discord) and uses a nonstandard closed protocol.

By your reasoning, any backend that’s not accessible directly by the user is proprietary. HN would then also be proprietary, because it relies on a third party (HN) and uses a nonstandard closed protocol (this comment section). Any website that stores data and exposes it via their own UI is proprietary (I leave this vague on purpose, as it is up to interpretation). Discord can be run in the browser and is accessible via APIs. I think it’s as open as any other web app by a company that has a commercial interest.

Services like Discord have lowered the entry barrier for non-technical conversation and community-building online. It certainly seems to be polarizing. I’ve noticed a lot of my friends and colleagues either embrace it or despise it. I wouldn’t mind an open-source alternative to it, but with the extensive features that it offers that’s hard to achieve.

> By your reasoning, any backend that’s not accessible directly by the user is proprietary

I've never said such thing. It doesn't matter if you can access things directly: proprietary means it's not FOSS, that's it.

> Discord can be run in the browser and is accessible via APIs. I think it’s as open as any other web app by a company that has a commercial interest

You need an account to browse Discord, which they can take away from you anytime. If you lose your account you lose your membership to any invite-only communities you belong to, which can be a big deal if you don't have other means to communicate with them to get invited back.

Also, Discord isn't indexable by search engines. So, no there's a big difference between Discord and most web forums.

Also, I don't have anything in particular against Discord (it's miles ahead of Slack in UX for instance, which I hate with a passion), but when people advertise themselves as fans of the old web, and link to their Discord, one can only smirk from the irony.

Kinda weird to start talking FOSS when the website itself never ever claimed to have anything to do with FOSS.

What does search engines indexability have to do with FOSS? There's no shortage of old school forums locked behind membership system, not indexable by any search engines.

Also Discord is an instant messaging software and not "web". It just happens to have a web frontend. It's OK to be nostalgic of the old web but not the old instant messaging softwares.

Discord runs in the browser, same as HN. And the HTTP APIs they use aren't officially documented (except HN's read-only ones via Firebase and Algolia) (though both are easily reverse engineered and OSS frontends exist). There's not much difference.

Discord it's a cage. HN can be accesed by JS-less browsers and the content will be indexable by any web search engine.

There's a huge difference.

The big difference is that Discord is a third party here. Nekoweb, like HN, could implement their own first party forum, but instead rely on a centralized third party from which they cannot migrate. It's very far from the “passionate for the old web and personal websites” stance they are marketing in their pitch.

Also AFAIK you cannot be banned from HN for using the API, whereas Discord will ban you for any “misuse”. You also don't need to be logged-in to access HN, which is also indexable by search engines, whereas Discord isn't.

I really don't get the discord phenomena, it seems like more bloatware and demands on attention and notifications - I mean - IRC is right there and you can at least control your own attention span however you want.

Try asking a question in a IRC, and in a Discord, and you will get the phenomena is just that in discord at least someone answer you.

I didn't get it either. At first. Then I had a reason to use it.

I am a long time IRC user, and still use that to this day, but in a much less frequent capacity. IRC is a comparative ghost town when thrown up against Discord.

Part of the reason for that is accessibility. Discord does everything IRC does in terms of channels, bots, etc, but packages it in a UI that the masses can easily consume. The addition of voice without having to run Teamspeak or something alongside like we did back in the day. A stable mobile app brings it all together in a portable, easy-to-use package.

I resisted it for awhile, with my younger friends adopting it fairly quickly. Then small businesses and we apps started using it and suddenly half the things I interacted with on a daily basis had their own Discord server. So, I broke rank and tried it

What I found were a few key communities relevant to my interests that were having actual neverending conversations about this I like. Compared to IRC, where response time can be days for any type of question, and that's if someone is in the mood to be friendly instead of crufty. This is the primary reason why I stay in Discord and IRC is just sort of collecting dust in my world. The community either aged out or just became so jaded that they made it inhospitable.

Had the same experience more or less. I was on IRC during 9/11, and many other major world events, and it's key to my online experiences back in the day, but these days I haven't used it in almost a year. I moved to Slack over a decade ago, for business, introducing it to where I was working at the time, and then five years ago or so, moved to Discord for the community aspect.

These days it's almost primarily all on Discord. There are a lot of features that I don't use, but it's what Slack should have been, back when Slack was meant to replace IRC. The interface works, it's available on my phone, it has call ability, multiple servers within my account and no need to keep a bouncer running.

Your mention of being on IRC during 9/11 brings back memories. I happened to have taken a sick day and was home watching the news when the first tower fell.

I immediately got on EFNet where I knew a few people that worked for CNN and CNBC at the time. We'd usually get together and talk old broadcasting/radio tech, but not that day.

Side note; you can disable all notifications or be selective about the ones you receive, like most apps. The idea of being bombarded with pings is not really a thing that happens unless you are a dev and forgot to disable that on your server.

We have conventions and protocols for dealing with text before - discord is some platform it will bring a whole bunch of new conventions and protocols - needlessly complicated and just a waste of human energy and time - but you know - maximize "engagement" or what have you for your KPI metrics - it's like selling water in bottles to people with easy access to drinking water.

This reads like you're part of the salty thugs that killed IRC to begin with. Offer zero help because you built some mythos about being self-taught and think everyone else should suffer the same, ejaculating "RTFM!" every chance you get, your biggest gripe ultimately distilling down to whining about change, an inevitable outcome of progress that you spite for the simple reason that you liked how "the way things were" denied use to a lot of people who were not as technically proficient. That attitude is the problem, not the solution. Make no mistake.

Stay in the cave and be quiet, or step out into the light and be helpful. Those are our choices.

Why are you seething this hard over some dude preferring one chat platform over another?

This reads like you're part of the salty thugs that killed IRC to begin with. Offer zero help because you built some mythos about being self-taught and think everyone else should suffer the same, ejaculating "RTFM!" every chance you get, your biggest gripe ultimately distilling down to whining about change, an inevitable outcome of progress that you spite for the simple reason that you liked how "the way things were" denied use to a lot of people who were not as technically proficient. That attitude is the problem, not the solution. Make no mistake.

Stay in the cave and be quiet, or step out into the light abd be helpful. Those are your choices.

discord suck so bad and I also have no idea why all the kids love it, i guess it's network effect.

I really spent time on it. It's terrible software. Pure bloat.

Probably because Discord is not just chat; it's sharing and hosting images, video, audio, files... IRC can't do that.

What's the problem with forums (bulletin-board systems)?

They're not instant-messaging platforms. Though it's true that Discord often gets misused as a permanent knowledge-base (where a forum would be much better)

My close friends and I have a Discord server that we interact on regularly and I've actually looked at switching us over to irc, since I like open, self-hostible standards with competing servers and clients better than proprietary software, but there were a couple reasons that the switch would be unsatisfying for us.

First, with Discord if you aren't online for awhile you don't have to miss the conversations that happened while you were offline — you can just read them later. Whereas with IRC, you will absolutely have to miss everything you are not online for, which creates a much larger fear of missing out, without any benefit in not being distracted or whatever since you can (and I do) just turn off all notifications that aren't direct pings in Discord so you can just check the app whenever you feel like it. So Discord has all the benefits of not getting notifications while you're offline, with none of the downsides of literally missing out on important discussions between your friends where they might have been pouring their heart out with no one currently on the server or whatever.

Second, Discord just has a lot more features that we actually really like using. Maybe that's "bloatware" to you, but the purpose of software is to have features users use. For instance, embedded images and gifs, custom emojis, the possibility of having voice channels and sharing your screen, and stuff like that. Having custom emojis is actually a pretty great way to expand your expressivity and have really fun in jokes and losing that is actually pretty sad.

Third, like the other commenters have said, the Discord servers for stuff I care about are actually active and friendly and interesting.

Finally, although you could make an IRC interface that works like the Discord app, which happens to be my favorite layout for a chat app that I've ever used, I don't think anyone has to my knowledge.

We ended up going with an open source clone of Discord called revolt, which I developed a custom Android application for.

Does Nekoweb declare to be part of the open web? Seems more like the artistic feel for websites as they used to be. Not a very valid argument in that context.

The word "free" here doesn't seem about being a "free software", but being a complimentary service.