It was a collection of silly quotes from IRC channels everywhere, many of which dated back to the 90s. It was rarely ever updated in the 2010s, but now, the URL no longer resolves.
Last capture was July 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230601000000*/bash.org
EDIT Someone archived all the quotes on the Internet Archive.
How?
Not centralised for a start. Think of it like ‘federated Discord’.
Also, IRC doesn’t constantly try to throw “upgrades” (Nitro) in your face every single moment that it gets.
Matrix?
I have used both, aside from the monetisation (Nitro), Discord (and Slack) has a lot more functionality. Not sure it’s ‘correct’ to say that people are stupid because they prefer a 21st century version of IRC.
Matrix stack would be the 21st century equivalent. Discord is just another Skype - entirely a proprietary product that you don’t operate yourself. Fine for corporate use where people don’t care about longevity because it’s not their problem or interest, but trash for everything else.
I just searched for “Matrix stack” but I’m none-the-wiser, what is it?
Right, you don’t run the thing yourself at a program level, but you can create and moderate channels as you wish, which is what most people want. Sounds like the Windows v Linux argument, just because a lot of people prefer something doesn’t mean we have to shit on it. Discord seems to work well with lots of integration (including on consoles) and fulfils its purpose pretty well from what I can tell.
How?
It’s an entirely closed source, proprietary codebase, run by a for-profit company where you have little control over anything. These corporations don’t care about actual users and they will leave you high and dry. There is a reason people still use IRC - it’s open, easy to connect to and has been around for literal decades. Remember CompuServe? AOL? AIM? ICQ? Google Chat shutting it’s doors to xmpp? If so, you understand the pattern. It’s about walled gardens and blocking interoperability. The industry doesn’t need more of that. We are chatting on an open source link aggregation site because bean counters at Reddit decided to shut off APIs to existing apps arbitrarily.
The matrix stack solves most of those problems by providing an open source codebase and protocol, easy to connect to solution that is akin to Slack. I am fortunate enough to not have to use discord much beyond checking on a class schedule and downloading some sheet music, so I will never be a discord power user. Maybe some there is crazy awesome feature that discord provides that no open source platform does, but I have some serious doubts about that.
It would go into discord feature parity megaissue on github