[omegote]

> Unfortunately some are also moving to entirely closed source platforms like Discord

From an openness point of view, yes, that's unfortunate. But discord channels are arguably way more useful than IRC nowadays. The mere message persistence is something that tips the scale in favour of Discord.

[robjan]

That's great until discord changes their business model and reduces or removes the free plan.

[b0tzzzzzzman]

This is what I fear will happen, as it seems to be the cycle. I do however need to give some credit for not selling out to Micro$oft.

[anticensor]

The past and recent changes show they have been adding more paid features, rather than moving features to paid plans.

[_jal]

Moving away from IRC means a lot of more casual open source types will not follow. I not going to install some random chat app I'm never going to use again and go through signup bullshit just to see if there's someone who can give me a hand on something - to big of a barrier.

[CydeWeys]

Discord works perfectly fine as a simple webpage with a basic email/password user account. In that sense it's actually significantly more accessible than IRC, which is not web-native and does require the use of either a client or some web bridge.

[Zababa]

I think Zulip is a good alternative. It's FOSS and has persistance and threading. I do dislike the fact that you have to sign up and can't see the discussions without it.

[foobar33333]

Matrix is still far ahead of IRC while still being open.

[anthk]

You can run an IRC client in really limited machines. You can have a client even with Netcat and SH.

[gowld]

Message persistence is provided by irc log services.

[hnlmorg]

That only solves half the problem. There's no easy (read: 1 click) way of quoting an older message. No easy way of handling notifications (read: not PMs but when someone mentions you in a channel like @handle in other chat services), no easy way of handling roaming, etc.

Yes, ZNCs solve some of these problems, but they're not easy to set up, the channel mentions isn't even remotely as intuitive as that in Slack et al and the playback history isn't as user friendly as the history in other chat services because it replays _n_ messages irrespective of whether you saw them or missed them while DCed. Which can make roaming a PITA at times.

I say all this as a someone who loves IRC. I've built IRC clients in the 90s, numerous IRC bots, ran ZNC services and even use IRC as my primary IM back in the early days of Android (and thus seen first hand the frustrations of using IRC on the train and getting frequent disconnects to my bounce).

IRC as a concept is amazing however IRC as a protocol sucks by modern day standards and while all the little workarounds are fun to hack together, ultimately they still fall short of what products like Slack and Discord are doing. So I can totally see why some people don't bother with IRC any more.

I've not (yet) played with Matrix. Maybe that's the spiritual successor to IRC. It sure as hell can't be any worse than XMMP (I _really_ wanted to like XMMP but just couldn't get past how unnecessarily over-engineered it was)

[Zak]

Kids these days, who should get off our lawns, do not like that user experience.

If I was starting a new chat channel for a project, I'd use Matrix, not IRC. Matrix is more decentralized than IRC due to federation, and Element offers a user experience that should be familiar and comfortable to users of Slack and Discord.

[lokedhs]

If they need that, they can use Matrix. There is really no reason to move to a closed ecosystem.