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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Discord is more featureful than IRC, and prettier than IRC clients, but there are no local archives or logging, and its searching capabilities are atrocious in comparison to having local logs searchable with ordinary text-processing tools.

Not that it matters to most users, because they wouldn't know how to use such tools to begin with, and don't know what they're missing.

Discord is an information black hole, and I pity future generations who'll have virtually no access to the petabytes of history lost in dark data vaults like Discord.

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Discord also has a godawful client that you can't (without breaking the EULA) substitute for another. And even then, the options are pretty limited.

Matrix seems to bring along the features of Discord with the freedom of IRC. But, as usual when freedom is concerned, it does come with a fair amount of responsibility, particularly in the form of setting up and running the server.

Interesting. Personally, I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations.

I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server. Also, sometimes the server would not let go of my disconnected nickname, so I would get one with one of more `_` appended to it.

Re-joining would not fetch the previous messages, and I would have anxiety that someone has replied to my message that I posted a few minutes prior, but I would never see...

I know that IRC bouncers exist, and I have even tried using `tmux` on a server to keep my irssi connection alive, but that is in no way user-friendly, even for a fairly technical person. Last resort is to find the public channel logs somewhere, if they even exist.

At that point, I would just give up and use Discord.

"I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations. I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server."

This far been a solved problem for 30 years. You just run an IRC bouncer on a host that's always up (like on a VPS) and have your IRC client connect to that. The bouncer will keep scrollback and logs for you.

Of course if you use Discord you don't need to bother to do any of that, so the convenience it offers is real, but it's not like if you're an IRC user you can't have persistent history.

On the other hand, with IRC you only log the channels you're in (unless you run your own IRC server), so you will miss out on history from other channels.

“solved problem” for 0.01% of use cases is not how I would normally define the phrase.

It's a solved problem in the sense of how to change the oil in your car is a solved problem. You can learn how to do it and do it yourself with equipment that already exists. You don't need to design or build anything yourself, but use existing components.

Now, most people might not have any interest in learning how to change the oil in their cars, and don't want to bother even if they have the knowledge. They prefer to hire someone else to do it for them.

So it is with Discord, where you "pay" for the service by giving Discord your data and handing over control over your communities to them.

Every user needing a server to run a caching daemon 24/7 is not even within the bounds of "solved" for me. I acknowledge it "works", and have used it myself for years, but it's like saying "of course the local newspaper has archives! We all just hire our own PAs to buy and store a copy every day!"

There used to be a great android app called Irssi-Connectbot (which was a slightly modified Connectbot app, which was an SSH client. You could set it up for automatic running of commands upon connection (ie, "screen -d -r"), and it featured the ability to use gestures to do some basic things to avoid typing out commands, like swipe left or right to move between windows.

It does appear to be discontinued at this point, but I do believe I've seen other ssh clients that do support the swipe at this point. I must confess though my use of IRC on the phone has always been relatively limited -- chatting in general on a phone is tiresome. Even SMS I do more in a browser these days on my desktop.

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