joined an irc server again and remembering all the quality features a real chat program gives you, like "the ability to style individual channels how you want" (this channel gets comic sans, this channel is double-spaced) and "the ability to pop out, rearrange, and otherwise customize windows"
did you know i have it set so that mirc makes a little chirp when i get a dm or a message hits in certain channels?
remember what discord took from you
things you can do in pretty much any irc client that you cannot do in discord without breaking their terms of service:
- join as many servers and channels as you want, on demand, without needing to find an invite or validate your phone number
- leave as many servers and channels as you want, and be easily able to rejoin them when and if you choose
- create temporary channels for small groups of people that vanish when you're done instead of cluttering up the channel list forever
- post colored text
- utilize the entire ascii set without Fcking Markdown Bullsht ruining perfectly good text
- not be surprised by masked links
- ...or random updates out of nowhere that rearrange the entire app
- utilize multiple clients/connections
- pop out multiple channels or conversations at once or arrange them however you like
- customize your client, including notification sounds, colors, timestamps, formatting
- customize your client with new features, scripts, or aliases
- easily utilize and create bots or other tools
- full client-side history-keeping — no more loading in 20 message batches or using discord's awful fuzzy search
discord is more convenient, of course; you can paste an image or video in directly, there are link previews (if you like them, i guess; they take up half the screen most of the time), all your friends are on it.
but irc was always a protocol, first, and a very simple one at that. there are hundreds of clients out there in all shapes and sizes, and you can adjust them to your needs. want your chat messages paragraph-spaced, in comic sans? you can do that. want to make channel #fart play a little toot every time someone sends a message there? you can do that too.
the capabilities are mostly based on mIRC, a classic, long-time irc client, but you can use pretty much anything.
and like, i get it; discord is on top for a reason. they have greased the wheels to a degree that there's very little friction involved in using it. it's just important to not forget how much you give up when you hand that much control over to a single walled-garden app.
