in light of the ongoing Discord Palantir Kerfuffle, there’s been a lot of discussion about potential discord alternatives. i’m hearing about “stoat” and all sorts of other mammals.
well, we can talk about “replacements for discord” in a moment. for right now, though, i want to talk about one of the things discord replaced:
IRC!!!
it stands for Internet Relay Chat, and it’s a chat protocol (not an app—a protocol) from literally 1988. it predates the World Wide Web! like discord, the world of IRC consists of servers divided into chatrooms called “channels” where users self-moderate and talk about whatever. and despite its age, IRC actually has extreme advantages over discord and discord-likes:
IRC is a protocol, not an app. an app that supports the IRC protocol is called an “IRC client”, in the same way that an app that supports email is called an “email client”. like email, anyone at all can make an IRC client, and those clients can run on pretty much any device with an internet connection.
unlike discord servers, an IRC server is literally just some software that anyone can install on any server anywhere, and anyone with an IRC client can then join that server.
“well, hang on. at what point exactly do the corpos swoop in and delete my server for posting unregulated booby pictures?” my friend, the answer is never. because there is no IRC corporation. because IRC is a protocol, and not an app!!!
in other words, IRC is enshittification-proof.
…………………………………too bad it sucks!!!!
look. there are good reasons why me and all my IRC-using friends switched to discord. IRC is old. it is missing many, many features that today’s user has come to expect in a chat program:
it’s text-only. no images! if you want to post an image in an IRC channel, you have to host it yourself on the internet somewhere and then link to it on IRC.
IRC servers don’t maintain a user-readable chat history. in other words, when you join a channel for the first time, you can’t just scroll up and see what people were talking about three weeks ago. whatever chat history you can see is down to the logs your own IRC client keeps, and critically, it can only log messages while you are connected to the server.
irc has no accounts. you do not register to IRC and have an IRC account you use to join IRC channels. instead, when you connect to a server, you just tell it what username (or “nick”) you want, and then that’s your nick. your preferred nick might be free on one server and taken on another. when you log out, anyone else can use your nick. (on most servers you can “register” a nick by sending a direct message to a bot called NickServ, and then the bot will kick people who try to use your nick without the password, but that’s all you get.)
for someone who grew up with this stuff it’s easy to downplay the amount of friction this is. but if you take the median phone user and tell them, “go host your image somewhere so you can link it on IRC,” every part of that sentence requires them to learn a whole bunch of brand new shit.
so, if you were wondering, the answer is no: I categorically do not think IRC is going to re-replace discord any time soon.
where does that leave us?
let me lay it all on the table: i don’t think there is a “discord replacement”. any true, one-to-one discord replacement would, in the best-case scenario, enjoy five to ten years of goodwill before it, too, shoots itself in both feet and bleeds out on the floor frenching the heels that week’s tech overlord.
the enshittification of for-profit apps is inevitable. it might as well be a law of the universe. we can’t keep treating this stuff as an aberration when it happens.
you know what people will still be using in ten years, though?
email.
email is unkillable. email endures. email is so ubiquitous and so mundane that we don’t even capitalize the “e”. in 2017 the Chicago Manual of Style had to throw up their hands and finally admit that it’s okay to spell it without a hyphen.
email endures because email is not an app. email endures because it’s a protocol. (technically it’s a handful of protocols, but the list doesn’t exactly change very often.) if an email provider enshittifies, it doesn’t take the concept of email down with it. jumping ship doesn’t result in the loss of all of your messages and contacts: you take them with you to, you know, wherever!
and in ten years, you can bet that people will still be using IRC, too. though its limitations may leave it a perpetual underdog, it will endure for the same reason as email.
maybe i’m sending mixed messages. again: i don’t think IRC is The One. but to me, it’s such a perfect example of what The One would look like.
so, instead of recommending any specific discord alternative—because i haven’t actually had time to investigate them all myself—let me tell you what i think you should be looking for.
to avoid discord’s fate, any replacement should meet these criteria:
it must be an open-source app implementing an open-source chat protocol. this is non-negotiable. also, the more choice you have in terms of third-party clients, the better: those are the ships you can jump to without losing your friends and history.
for discord-style chat servers, it must be possible for at least your average techie to host their own server on their own hardware that can be accessed by any client implementing the chat protocol.
in that vein, there must be no corporate “upper management” who can make unilateral moderation decisions on behalf of a server (such as banning pictures of boobys service-wide).
there should be no authority capable of banning a user from the protocol; only server mods can ban users, and only from the servers they moderate.
no one who is not a member of a server or private conversation should have access to the unencrypted chatlogs thereof.
finally, a warning about data.
i need you to understand this: not even two decades ago, the idea that we would all be using apps that let you just upload arbitrary amounts of data, and that those apps would be expected to store that data indefinitely, for free, was fucking preposterous. and guess what? it’s still fucking preposterous!!
data storage isn’t free. if an app is free, and it stores your data—pictures, audio, and especially video—then that app is hemorrhaging money every day that it exists. this is literally a law of physics! at some point, they have to get paid or go out of business.
before you commit to an app, find out how it’s getting paid. where does it put the goddamn data? this is another reason (aside from moderation) that i think the ability to self-host a server is so important. storing one discord server’s worth of data ain’t all that expensive; it’s well within the realm of financial possibility for A Bloke. storing all of discord’s worth of data is a completely fucking other question.
this is the other shoe that Bluesky is currently dangling, by the way. it’s gonna drop at some point! here now at this crossroads of post-discord destiny, do your best to identify the shoes.
and if all else fails: IRC literally isn’t actually that bad like it’s fine it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
we need to team up… to put together the WB4723 48-Inch Workbench With Power Outlets and Lights… it will take all of our power… and though you are my greatest foe, i can’t do it without you !
one day i'll be out at a club and some stunningly beautiful they/them will say "i really need an input voltage to 5 volts to power my electronic circuit but all i have is a power source providing 7-20 volts and no voltage regulator!! whatever am I to do?!" and i'll be eavesdropping and make my way over to them and say "i have exactly what you need, handsome" and chivalrously take off my earring for them and then everyone would clap. and the best part is that this could happen twice in one night and i'd still be prepared
Obviously blonde4blonde ships are fucked up and scary, but it's important to remember that fiction isn't reality. Many people enjoy things in fiction that would be fucked up irl, and writing blonde4blonde ships doesn't inherently mean that someone is actually okay with two blonde people dating in real life.
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