It's not your server. I hope you have everything backed up and alternate means of communicated with your community. Discord has and will ban you from their platform for things as innocuous as making bots for Team Fortress 2.
Interestingly, one of the servers I'm in has people who feel the exact opposite. Some of them are upset that Discord doesn't allow them to download the entire chat history of a server. I think it's a good thing that it's not easy to do. Many conversations are better left as vague memories.
This FUD is not going to convince anyone to stop using Discord and IRC is not immune from this kind of childish meddling. Just a few months ago freenode underwent a hostile takeover and unlike most Discord communities, it is probably not coming back from that BS.
>IRC is not immune from this kind of childish meddling.
IRC is just a protocol, Discord is a service provider.
I'm in no control over what Discord deems appropriate and they can terminate my "server" (Guild) that they're letting me use at their own whim (or by accident) with little to no recourse.
I can run my own IRC server or use a variety of preexisting IRC networks which typically are fairly lax on over-enforcement unlike Discord.
>Just a few months ago freenode underwent a hostile takeover and unlike most Discord communities, it is probably not coming back from that BS.
Similar to Discord, Freenode is a service provider.
Should the folks who administrate a IRC network have goals that don't align with you (or there's a hostile takeover which changes the operation's goals) you can connect to a different IRC network, this is largely what happened in the case of Freenode -> libera.
If Discord decides to nuke your guild there's not an alternate discord to connect to, they must switch to a different client and service.
If an IRC network decides to nuke my channel I can just switch to a different network.
Overall the likelihood of a well behaving guild on Discord getting nuked randomly is low, but regardless of Discord or IRC you should still have alternative methods of communications and not put all your eggs in one basket. You don't want to lose connections with all of the people you talk with because some moderator or IRCop got bored.
You're still missing the bigger point: whether you're using Discord or IRC (as a service or not) if the server/network is taken away from you, your entire community has to almost start from scratch or pick up the pieces regardless of the platform being used.
You'll all still be displaced and will have to gather again elsewhere.
It's also complete bullshit that IRC somehow saves the day when it falls short on all the same points as Discord does with regards to saving messages, which it also doesn't do for, PLUS it falls short on some other critical points: too much client choice is a bad thing; it's complex to set up and is something you have to administrate; you have to keep it secure; IRC servers get targeted by (D)DoS attacks all the time - it's a hobby for some arseholes; people new to industry don't know what IRC is and are simply going to find it confusing; most of the teenage population on the planet is using Discord already (and as a primary communication channel).
Using IRC isn't nearly as complicated as you make it out to be. Kids in the 90s/2000s would frequently have it open in internet cafes along with Star Craft or whatever else they were playing. The move to Discord says more about features (which I won't deny are nice) and marketing than it does about usability. And most of the world's teenage population isn't on Discord.
>if the server/network is taken away from you, your entire community has to almost start from scratch or pick up the pieces regardless of the platform being used.
>>regardless of Discord or IRC you should still have alternative methods of communications and not put all your eggs in one basket.
As previously mentioned, relying on any single platform is a risk that should be mitigated by having alternatives available. Some of the Discords I use extensively have telegram as backups for when Discord is down.
If Discord were to disappear tomorrow, you'd would be well served to have a backup of some sort to avoid losing contact with everyone, IRC has the advantage of being relatively easy to setup independently with extremely low hardware requirements.
>You'll all still be displaced and will have to gather again elsewhere.
Ideally you have somewhere off platform that people would know to look for updates (website, twitter, etc), but irrespective of what you're using such an event would always be pretty disruptive.
>falls short on all the same points as Discord does with regards to saving messages, which it also doesn't do for
Can arguably be a good thing in keeping chats a bit more ephemeral and more casual, but that's not necessarily a good thing depending on the topic. Regardless you can log client-side or with a bot plenty fine if it's critical to be able to reference the past.
>too much client choice is a bad thing;
Don't entirely disagree, but no client choice (Discord) is oppressive. I'd much rather have an open protocol where I can use open source clients I can trust aren't scanning my processes and sending telemetry without my consent. If I miss out on features that my client doesn't implement I'm fine with that as long as the basic functionality works.
>it's complex to set up and is something you have to administrate;
Many ircds are hardly more complex than setting up a web server, and of course there's still multitudes of existing IRC networks to choose from if you don't wish to administer it yourself.
>you have to keep it secure; IRC servers get targeted by (D)DoS attacks all the time - it's a hobby for some arseholes;
Yeah, not really much debate here. (Although if I have to be pedantic figuring I've been rambling on anyways there's a good amount of vps/server providers that provide decent DDoS protection these days)
Spammers are still a minor issue on Discord though.
>people new to industry don't know what IRC is and are simply going to find it confusing;
And that's a darn shame, but it's not an impossible barrier. People can be taught what it is an how to use it if there's any demand for it.
> most of the teenage population on the planet is using Discord already (and as a primary communication channel).
Yep, it's convenient and popular and has a large user-base.
>IRC is dead. Get over it.
IRC will almost certainly outlive Discord and Slack, but it's past its prime for sure.
I still believe there's plenty of value in protocols rather than being tied to companies like Slack or Discord and perhaps Matrix (or something else) will be a proper "modern" successor to IRC and enjoy the freedom in communication that not being tied to a particular organization's terms of service/code of conduct.
Ultimately though a lot of that will depend on if the internet gets entirely centralized (as has been the direction many things have been going), or fracture back into more decentralized structures. Time will tell.
> If Discord were to disappear tomorrow, you'd would be well served to have a backup of some sort to avoid losing contact with everyone, IRC has the advantage of being relatively easy to setup independently with extremely low hardware requirements.
I don't see why you wouldn't need some sort of alternate contact info on IRC. There's no real identity system with IRC, so you'd need to validate people are who they say they are when they register their names with your new NickServ.
At last, a constructive response to something on Hacker News. Thank you.
I might consider a back up to Discord, but in my game the best back up available is a mailing list. That's my goal for the commercial side of my community engagements (the Discord isn't commercialised, of course.)
I certainly stand corrected on a few of your points though.
To be fair that takeover was only possible because the owner of freenode sold the server to a malicious party which is only possible because you own the server, so that kinda reinforces parent's point.
As a freenode user I have no say over who the freenode owner is, much like I have no say over Discord's moderation policies. It's the same puppet with different masters; neither situation really empowers me. Yes I can always start my own IRC server but if nobody wants to join it what's the point? 99% of the battle is getting people into the same virtual room.
You usually own the domain, unless you sell out of course. So you can start wherever you want from scratch on your own or on leased infrastructure. People will connect to the domain/irc network.
I'm not saying you should use IRC over Discord, but hey, that's how the web got centralised and why certain platforms have lots power: because people just gave it to them. If Discord decides to monetize by leveraging ads, good luck to you and your community.
You don't truly own the domain though. You rent it. You have to continually pay to maintain control over it. It also wouldn't be hard for the registrar to claim you violated their ToS and revoke your access to the domain (or if they don't think they can get away with that, then they can say that they failed to process your payment when the domain renews and then snatch it up instantly themselves so you can't get it back).
Yes you have to continually pay pizza money, yearly, true. Rent a country level domain and it won't be revoked without a judicial order. Also rent from a registrar with good reputation.
I don't know what a self-hosted service that lets every user have power over the instance would look like, but the original argument was that IRC gives you ownership over your own server.
Hell, the "no say over the owner" argument isn't even restricted to self-hosted services, there have been numerous cases of a discord admin nuking the server over some petty drama.
It's not your server. I hope you have everything backed up and alternate means of communicated with your community. Discord has and will ban you from their platform for things as innocuous as making bots for Team Fortress 2.