I am angry about it constantly, but to be fair, IRC is pretty awful. You need to selfhost a bouncer to get a halfway-usable experience. And Matrix is really really bad to use.

Discord should be a public utility! Servers should be servers!

What don't you like about Matrix? I've only used it a little, but I didn't have any issues with it.

I'll take the clunkiness of IRC over having my data sold any day

yes, but irc was really not easy to use for people who weren't the most tech literate, and the alternative those people used before discord was skype (bleeugh).

ideally there would be an easy-to-use, not-for-profit option but we don't really live in a system where projects like that can get enough development resources to solve the usability issues irc and matrix face.

perhaps even an update to the irc standard or something would have been cool.

so like yeah, discord sucks but it does enable more people to connect in an irc-like fashion than irc did. it's a mixed bag.

Discord has a lot of issues, but I really don't ever want to go back to IRC. From a usability perspective, IRC has aged horribly.

The onboarding is confusing and alienating to me, and while I'm someone with a high tolerance for that, it makes it hard to recommend it to other folks.

Then there's the performance of the element client. It drains battery and uses a lot of CPU on every device I use it on.

And despite being "e2ee", I only use it for public channels, which make the hurdles of e2ee meaningless (even if channels I were on didn't all have bridges to discords and/or ircs).

I still don't have a mental model for how to do identity/key management with it. Every time I use it, I just make a new account. I understand why keys can't be tied to a username/password, but I would want to at least be able to maintain a consistent identity without having to think about it.

I think IRCv3 is the update to the standard, but it's been brewing for awhile.

I want to add that I don't mean to be a hater-- A Discord alternative is a LOT of work, especially adding E2EE, which is an important thing. They made a modular ecosystem that is working pretty well. There's a lot I like about it! But this comment was only to address the negatives haha

Discord replacing IRC is bad. Discord replacing open web forums is a catastrophe for indexable information.

From a usability perspective, IRC has aged horribly.

/me agrees