It was a collection of silly quotes from IRC channels everywhere, many of which dated back to the 90s. It was rarely ever updated in the 2010s, but now, the URL no longer resolves.
Last capture was July 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230601000000*/bash.org
EDIT Someone archived all the quotes on the Internet Archive.
IRC was so much better than Discord. People are stupid.
Relevant xkcd
Oh that is so true!! Love it.
I hope you don’t mind me linking https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1782:_Team_Chat
I’ve lost a lot of my rose tint for discord, right around the arbitration clause thing, but I can’t deny that it’s convenient. Chat, streaming to friends, popping up a new server for whatever project or group, VC for playing games together. There’s platforms that do all of these things better, but few that do all of them decently well.
Of course, it’s a privacy nightmare and I stick to IRC for anything I wouldn’t feel comfortable having linked to my identity, but I wouldn’t call people stupid for using it.
Mostly I think its fine for all that.
But there’s a special circle of hell for projects that rely on it for “documentation”.
I get the temptation, I really do. But once you’re taking money or have more than a couple people involved and semi-organized you really need at least a small wiki/git-hub landing page with the basics.
I know documentation is a separate skillset and a lot of work in its own right but projects can also stagnate and die because there isn’t any.
Oh 1000% agree, having a discord for support is nice and all, but using it as a crutch in place of good documentation is a sin worthy of eternal damnation.
I haven’t used irc for years but isn’t it all plaintext unencrypted? And isnt your ip tied to it?
I’ve never looked into any of that for irc so maybe I’m way off base.
I do remember making my own fvwm config where an irssi irc terminal would slide out of the top of my screen with a hotkey and roll back up again. I was pretty proud of that.
How is Discord a privacy nightmare?
Closed source software without end to end encryption and has access to all chats, voice and video calls. How can it not be a privacy nightmare. You have no idea what they collect and what they don’t.
Don’t they claim that they can’t access your chat logs unless they get like reports and stuff?
Edit: This question needs an answer, not a downvote
I doubt that. If you do a gdpr request for your data, you’ll see how much they log about your activities. Obviously chats and VC activity, but also all the timestamps of what you play, session data over all time, etc.
They told me it was encrypted unless you got reported
Or maybe… How is discord any worse of a privacy nightmare than IRC? I love me some IRC, but it ain’t exactly a bastion of secrecy.
It’s wild how a good deal of decentralization and FOSS focused communities insist on having Discord be their primary center for community. Worst one is privacy focused communities…
I can’t say that bridging them to matrix was a foolproof endeavor though
How?
Not centralised for a start. Think of it like ‘federated Discord’.
Matrix?
I have used both, aside from the monetisation (Nitro), Discord (and Slack) has a lot more functionality. Not sure it’s ‘correct’ to say that people are stupid because they prefer a 21st century version of IRC.
Matrix stack would be the 21st century equivalent. Discord is just another Skype - entirely a proprietary product that you don’t operate yourself. Fine for corporate use where people don’t care about longevity because it’s not their problem or interest, but trash for everything else.
I just searched for “Matrix stack” but I’m none-the-wiser, what is it?
Right, you don’t run the thing yourself at a program level, but you can create and moderate channels as you wish, which is what most people want. Sounds like the Windows v Linux argument, just because a lot of people prefer something doesn’t mean we have to shit on it. Discord seems to work well with lots of integration (including on consoles) and fulfils its purpose pretty well from what I can tell.
How?
It’s an entirely closed source, proprietary codebase, run by a for-profit company where you have little control over anything. These corporations don’t care about actual users and they will leave you high and dry. There is a reason people still use IRC - it’s open, easy to connect to and has been around for literal decades. Remember CompuServe? AOL? AIM? ICQ? Google Chat shutting it’s doors to xmpp? If so, you understand the pattern. It’s about walled gardens and blocking interoperability. The industry doesn’t need more of that. We are chatting on an open source link aggregation site because bean counters at Reddit decided to shut off APIs to existing apps arbitrarily.
The matrix stack solves most of those problems by providing an open source codebase and protocol, easy to connect to solution that is akin to Slack. I am fortunate enough to not have to use discord much beyond checking on a class schedule and downloading some sheet music, so I will never be a discord power user. Maybe some there is crazy awesome feature that discord provides that no open source platform does, but I have some serious doubts about that.
It would go into discord feature parity megaissue on github
I don’t think any open source platform brings together the kind of functionality Discord currently has, but I’m open to being corrected on that. If there was a better platform doing what Discord does then that would be great to use. Having had to switch from different platforms for video calling for various reasons I get what you mean.
Any guides on how to get started on IRC? I gave it a try a couple months ago but couldn’t find any good communities.
Have you tried asking on alt.irc.die.die.die?