IRC Feedback!

[travisvroman]

Hey y'all, I'd like to get some feedback on your thoughts of using IRC as a replacement for Discord's chat, bearing in mind the original goals of doing so (having searchable forums for history instead of everything being in chat). Let me know what you think!

Also, give some feedback on why you voted the way you did, so that maybe I can improve things! Thank you!

[hermit]

I do not mind IRC at all. The most important part of the suggestion to my mind is that it is not a walled garden. Anyone can host an IRC server and the protocol is dead simple so there are plenty of clients to choose from.

The only downside I see really is the lack of rich media support which has become a staple of IMs. Sharing images with previews, gifs, and so on. Some of this limitation could likely be solved client-sided.

As for the searchable history, I kind of get where you are coming from, but at least to my mind instant messaging has always been more of a social thing, rather than a medium for sharing valuable ideas. In that sense I wonder if everything we share should be indexed, searchable, or kept for posterity because some of it might literally just be a funny picture or the meme of the day.

Naturally, there is a tension then if a conversation that has genuine community value does happen. Would you ask people to post it on the forum? Should they? Anyway, I'm not really worried about potentially losing something valuable since I think the upside of a more immediate social experience offsets the loss, which is why I voted that it's okay with a few caveats referring to the limitations of rich media.

[travisvroman]

This is great feedback, and fair. Thank you for this.

One other thing I forgot to say is there is also the DM feature here in the forum that's often overlooked.

Ideally my thought is if a conversation with community value happens I would hope that it either takes place on the forum or moves to it for posterity. The lesson I learned by using Discord for this is that is really sucks trying to find something way later on down the road otherwise.