Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

That ship has sailed. IRC lost to Discord years ago. Don't care about it being closed source. IRC also lost to the Matrix protocol as not only that is much better, it is also just as competitive with Element and they are making money, meaning that they can afford to add more features.

IRC is prehistoric ancient history. It's time to evolve and leave that protocol in the dust and go with modern alternatives like Matrix.

View on HN

> IRC lost to Discord years ago.

A couple of years ago you'd have told me the exact same thing but with s/Discord/Slack/

IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant. Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified?

Last I checked Slack has many more users than IRC

IRC will still be around after Slack is long gone.

FidoNet is also still around, but...

> IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around.

IRC is no more relevant than the fossils that are still underneath the ground.

> while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant.

So Matrix is gone and irrelevant?

> Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified?

Even if that happens I can guarantee you that they won't be going back to IRC.

Matrix is very much alive and well; we just hit 100M total addressable users on the network :)

How do you count users? I couldn't find a way to get stats from other people's homeservers when I looked into it

the optional phonehome stats in synapse. this is total mxids reported (104M or something).

Does matrix.org publish these stats somewhere?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com