[kiklion]

In short, using IRC for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Ease of use matters — that’s why you’re writing code, after all. To make peoples lives easier. Using IRC partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the complicated, archaic client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about ease of use — i.e. your most self aware contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.

[buovjaga]

I do mentoring for LibreOffice and this year I've interviewed over 100 people on IRC and had over 200 further mentoring chats. Most have never used IRC before and KiwiIRC web chat seems to work fine as the first client.

[lnxg33k1]

But there is also IRCCloud, like I think it stands to support my initial point about it being omnipresent, which now makes me wonder if one of the main issues of IRC for many people is not just about the presence of choices

[smolder]

Perhaps we should get rid of command lines in open source software, too. It's just so uninviting!

I'm not against people choosing discord for some projects, but there's nothing so terrible or oppressive about choosing IRC. It doesn't deserve the "considered harmful" treatment. Hopping on IRC is a very low bar for a potential contributor to clear.

[ivegotnoaccount]

Using IRC is not oppressive, I agree, and it wouldn't come to my mind to complain on an IRC channel about it not being Discord, but the point of the article is to show you must not use Discord and you are bad for doing it.