Is Discord the new modern IRC?

[kevdog]

Just a question to all you young folk out there who use Discord and who may possibly have used something once known as IRC.

I've been shown the Discord program? Utility? a few times, and honestly it just seems like the modern day IRC. Are there any additional capabilities Discord has as compared to IRC other than it might be easier to use?

[EuclideanCoffee]

I was confused about Discord too until a colleague began working there.

Discord is an online social community, primarily for gaming, but it has general tools that are useful for any community such as voice chat, textual chat, and "channels" that permit various topics of chat.

I'm part of a few Discord "servers." Servers are instances which provide isolated access. They are not literal servers in the sense that you must administrate accounts, disks, or even network resources. Instead SSO, network, and security are all managed by Discord that provides a social media service to "communities" who wish to have these services.

If you're curious about the newest IRC, you may want to check out Matrix as Riot.im or any other service that provides a Matrix server. The French government for example uses a Matrix service to communicate with its many different departments, all under different domains.

Matrix has an IRC bridge, which allows its uses to participate in IRC servers.

Discord provides bots that act like a bridge, which may be essentially how Matrix does it (though I believe you are actually joining an irc relay without a bot in Matrix).

Others may convince that Discord is not a social media company, that it provides scalable servers, or whatever nonsense people spout out about Discord now. But I wouldn't buy into it. I felt very disappointed when I actually discovered that Discord doesn't connect servers but simply leases out a third space like Twitter or Facebook does while scanning your computer for whatever.

[walts48]

Just a question to all you young folk out there who use Discord and who may possibly have used something once known as IRC.

I've been shown the Discord program? Utility? a few times, and honestly it just seems like the modern day IRC. Are there any additional capabilities Discord has as compared to IRC other than it might be easier to use?

Mozilla is moving to Matrix.

The proposed shutdown date for their current IRC server is March 1st.

https://matrix.org/blog/2019/12/19/welcoming-mozilla-to-matrix

[kevdog]

Hmm thanks for the Matrix link by Firefox. Is there a client to use for Matrix? Would FreeNode still be accessible with Matrix?

[EuclideanCoffee]

Yes, I wrote it down. I said Riot.im.

[walts48]

Hmm thanks for the Matrix link by Firefox. Is there a client to use for Matrix? Would FreeNode still be accessible with Matrix?

Right now I'm connecting using the this Riot (https://chat.mozilla.org/#/welcome) link in a Firefox tab until Thunderbird gets Matrix support in a future release.

The SeaMonkey channel on FreeNode is federated to that Matrix link, but Mozilla isn't shutting down FreeNode.

[PriceChild]

Relevant recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22384356 "Discord Is Not An Acceptable Choice For Free Software Projects" and original link here: https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-choice-for-free-software-projects/