As soon as news hit about Discord and the encroaching age-verification menace, I had a feeling sentiment would begin to turn against my favourite chat platform to hate to some degree. Further disasters did prompt degrees of what I felt were appropriate outrage, like with the whole Palantir-connected third-party 'experiment' with UK users. That said, I do wonder how long that fire will last. Modern attention spans approach that of a gnat's, so I feel it would be easy for Discord to just 'ride out the storm' and keep on the path regardless. Still, I'm not going to give them credit for anything; they're just fishing for value out of an IPO as any capitalist parasitic organisation would do. Instead, I'll just take this moment to talk a bit about why I've always disliked Discord and why I sympathise with the kids waking up to it's shittiness.
First and foremost, I am a native citizen of a much more open Internet. I grew up in a time when ISP penetration was just starting to pick up in places that weren't major urban areas, and I value the openness of those times. One might claim that they were worse for that openness because the barriers were actually higher in technical terms or because there were fewer guardrails against harm from bad actors. Certainly, the domain name monopolies of the time that obliged people to pay over a hundred USD a year for a domain weren't great, but it wasn't like there was any shortage of free hosts. Hell, this was the age when ISPs often gave out small-scale hosting for anyone who wanted it. As to safety, well, my position's always been that people need to watch their own damn kids on the Internet; to me, it's the same as anywhere else, and it shouldn't be my problem as an unrelated party. The fact of the matter remains, though, that those were times when small players could step up and do their own thing, and possibly stand the chance of building a community in doing so. A lot has been written on enshittification and the gradual packing of the Internet into siloes, so I'll skip the recapitulation here, but I really, really, really hate the way people have been pushed towards 'platforms'. It feels sinister for reasons that really are sinister, and it just makes everything feel deader than it's ever been and paradoxically noisier than it's ever been. The greater 'culture' of the Internet has been worsened for that tendency towards noise for the sake of noise. My native country has, in a word, been eroded away over time, and I find myself standing in a strange land.
On a more technical and aesthetic level, I've always felt Discord was too overloaded for what it ought to be, which is a messenger service. I never liked the Slack style of presentation that tries to mirror SMS-on-smartphone sensibilities, in addition to things like in-line media and 'reactions'; a could probably write a whole essay alone on how I loathe any notion of 'reacts'. On top of that already terrible baseline, there is also the extreme segregation of communications channels into 'servers'. With Slack, that's a more literal notion — i.e., you are connected to a discretely deployed server, usually for some internal corporate communications. In Discord's case, the notion of a 'server' really deserves the quotes because it's not actually a server in any meaningful sense. At best, it's a node within one of Discord's massive clusters of cloud infrastructure. When you are a server admin on Discord, you don't actually have any ownership over the server itself. You're just being given permission by Discord to have a node with some associated channels on their infrastructure. The segregation angle comes in when you consider that 'servers' in Discord terms (or 'guilds' as they're properly known in the internals) have no actual relation to one another. You can't discover another server except through an explicit invitation link, and all of the contained channels are disconnected from any greater network. Some might see that as a positive because they can have their private little community circlejerk, but the early netizen in me bristles at the closedness of it. Discord guilds are not out there to be found and are instead relegated to the realm of 'if you know, you know'. More damningly, none of what's contained in these sometimes massive guilds with information relevant to more than just community members is publicly indexed or searchable outside the Discord garden walls. In other words, it's all perfectly siloed. If that weren't bad enough, besides the basic user experience-level need for endless scrollback, you have things like 'threads' — which are implemented terribly — and even 'forums' in some designated 'community servers'. We go from being about chatting to more or less trying to reinvent the wheel inside the comfort of the walled garden; Discord explicitly tries to keep people locked within their walls a la Apple and does it with basic notions of communication, trying to replace actual structures of discussion from outside its confines. They may be optional to a degree, but it doesn't change that they foster an attitude of indifference and perhaps even low-level hostility towards things outside of the Discord ecosystem.
To contrast, let's look at IRC. On a very basic level, IRC is made of networks of actual servers that pass traffic back and forth, hence Internet Relay Chat. The traffic largely consists of messages sent within channels contained on the network, to which you have to voluntarily join one-by-one as they interest you, and which are openly discoverable by virtue of being on the network. Notwithstanding logging facilities provided by a lot of clients, there's little persistence to activity on IRC, no endless backscroll to consult. By default, there is a general culture of active discussion (in between a lot of idling) because someone has to be around to be aware of and respond to what anyone says. As soon as the client is disconnected and closed, all of that activity goes away unless it's committed to logs. Channels propped up on networks generally have a singular purpose, and communities that find a need for purpose-made channels make multiple; that's why you'll get #[channel] and #[channel]-offtopic, as an example. The presentation is barebones: it's basically all-text. There's no inline media, no reacts, no stickers, or anything else beyond the words being exchanged between users. Can communities be built there? Absolutely. Entire networks can become communities of their own, hosting general-purpose chat channels. Some channels can become massive and host thousands of users. Can bad actors be kept in line? Both channel-level operators and server-/network-level operators have the ability to ban people pretty easily, especially in the latter case. Users largely understand that they exist in a large public square, and that they can lose their privilege to be there by not acting reasonably. As far as communities go, they're free to move networks if they find conditions not so fine. That very thing happened when Freenode got taken over. In that case, everyone moved over to either Libera or OFTC and picked up as if nothing had really happened in most cases. It's an incredibly flexible and open model because it's largely a simple one. Are there complications on the implementation level? At times, sure. However, I fail to see how registering a nick or a channel on a network is somehow more complicated than making a Discord account. Modern clients make authentication trivial, so most things are set it and forget it to varying degrees. More than that, IRC sticks to what it's good at: chat. If you want other things, you find other solutions outside of it. That's why the average IRC client is far more lightweight than the Electron monstrosity that is Discord's only client; incidentally, the fact that they made third-party clients against their ToS was already a huge strike against them early on.
Now, do I think the habitual Discord users are going to all go rushing to IRC as the alternatives? No, and I honestly wouldn't wish that on either side of the equation. Culturally, Discord has a lot going on that I think is less than optimal, though that has been shaped to a great deal by the medium itself. Also, I just don't think it's going to have the same draw. The perception of technical challenge will provide too much friction, and they'll bounce off quickly. If anything is likely to stand in as a replacement, it will likely be the Bluesky of the landscape, Matrix. I say that despite wanting to like Matrix in many ways. That said, I don't feel like Matrix is a great solution to a lot of people's problems, perceived or actual. There are also a lot of hitches to gaining the sort of feature parity necessary to fully attract the Discord crowd. The development of the protocol itself and of the only real substantial implementations are very corporate-driven themselves, even if they are notionally open compared to the closed-source quagmires of Slack, Discord, et al. There has been minor noise about XMPP possibly having a moment, but that seems unlikely given the failures in bringing any sort of user-friendliness that I've observed over many years. In the end, I think a lot of furor is going to die down, and many who were outraged will eventually settle back into their comfortable spots in the garden. Many will probably give into age-verification pressures in order to use their accounts as they want. Unless it becomes exceptionally onerous, I have the feeling alternatives won't ever be fully considered. Then again, the situation is fluid. Perhaps someone will finally crack the Matrix code and deliver on that last-mile of usability in some fashion. Maybe IRC will suddenly become hip and happening in its retro chic, though perhaps with outside solutions bolted on for certain concerns. Or maybe we'll all figure out that real-time chat has never delivered much of worth to most of us and get our asses back into real forums.