A long, but interesting personal reflection on the virtues of IRC in the age of centralized services such as Discord:
Much as the dreaded Reddit has largely paved a fascist monopoly over the niche once occupied by a bounty of independent Web forums, Discord has done the same with the chat world, replacing the sea of independent and free IRC servers with a single corporate walled garden whose owners each user must avoid offending in any way, lest they be entirely cast out of the public square.
Anyone who has ever used IRC knows that there is nothing even remotely complicated about using it, but the terminology and the steps required to use one are ostensibly terrifying enough to reliably keep the technically illiterate at bay.
I’m still on IRC to communicate with various private torrent trackers. There’re people who I’ve known for over a decade who still hangout there.
Whatever platform or protocol evolves, the communities I like to participate in will gravitate to what is useful for them. Seems like the top platforms will never be able to truly host a home for pirates. Fuck em.