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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sitting down for an hour and talking about tech /is/ the barrier.
I'm reading this as you'd prefer something inherently intuitive. Which yes would be great. Some tools need at least some instruction and guidance.
Group chats are great, but they still have a bunch of problems that their predecessors didn't: they're walled and often not private. In certain cases, using your own client is anathema and an opportunity to be kicked off the platform :/
For tech groups there are a lot of good ones on matrix which is a federated network.
It is self-hostable, and provides a modern baseline of features (though Riot is the only fully-featured client at the moment).
Burying myself in a walled garden is a no-go, so it has been working pretty well for me so far. I only regret the fact that the reference server implementation consumes a lot of resources, but it should be coming down [1][2] (the current state stems from the proof-of-concept python implementation having grown unchecked over the years), with alternative implementations hopefully becoming viable soon[3].
[0]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients-matrix
[1]: https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/projects/9
Chats based on hashtags. Are you watching the newest Game of Thrones ? Just search for #gameofthrones and enter the chat to talk with others. Chats go bad once too many people participate, so you split chats into channels of ~50. You can upvote messages and once they reach a threshold they will be broadcasted to all channels. Broadcasted messages can be saved in an archive and reread later by everyone.
Monitization can be done by allowing people to pay for broadcasts.
Everyone can start their own chatroom of course but names are unique.
Please, someone do it, I want this. Discord is to cumbersome because you need to find an interesting server first and you have to commit to much.
I'm running a small site where people can play pen&paper-style roleplaying games together in small groups, featuring persistent channels and a wiki for each channel, in addition to the core dice rolling and chat functions (https://rolz.org for anyone who's curious). The site has survived the stunningly well-funded and abundantly feature-rich Roll20.net, because it's non-commercial and doesn't require user accounts. However, since Discord appeared on the scene, traffic has been declining massively and steadily.
Where we once had hundreds of groups online at a given time, it's now usually in the low 20s. At first, people kept asking for a Discord-bot version, and at least one user made one using the public API, and now Discord is pretty much the only game in town.
Meanwhile IRC is also pretty much dead, as many people have noticed in this thread. I still hang out in the #ludumdare IRC channel, but over the last two years that community has dwindled from hundreds of users during the Compo to maybe ten, and from dozens of users during the rest of the time to maybe 2 or 3 being online per day. While the LD Discord has replaced the IRC channel, it is also a lot less vibrant and social. It's now more a loose collection of mildly disinterested people who sometimes hang out in the same chat room, mostly unconcerned with each other. I wonder how symptomatic that is.
30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.
> it's harder to discover channels. IRC never had any channel discovery, so how does modern breed of group chats make channel discovery harder? IRC does make a lot of things we now take for granted harder (file/image/video sharing, search, persistent history, mobile support...)
30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.
At least your friends don't need a whole lot of instruction to join. Inserting pictures is pretty easy. And it's mobile.
30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.
At least your friends don't need a whole lot of instruction to join. Inserting pictures is pretty easy. And it's mobile.
If someone can figure out Facebook (and trust me, Facebook is far from intuitive for someone who doesn't know) or any other web-based service, they can figure out IRC.
The main reason people do not use IRC much nowadays is that other people moved off IRC to Facebook and other social places. It isn't a technical thing, it is mainly a social thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's harder to discover channels. IRC never had any channel discovery, so how does modern breed of group chats make channel discovery harder? IRC does make a lot of things we now take for granted harder (file/image/video sharing, search, persistent history, mobile support...)
> IRC never had any channel discovery wot? It didn't have server discovery, but once you connected to a server, you could definitely discover channels.
Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's harder to discover channels. IRC never had any channel discovery, so how does modern breed of group chats make channel discovery harder? IRC does make a lot of things we now take for granted harder (file/image/video sharing, search, persistent history, mobile support...)
As long as the channel doesn't have the +s (secret) mode, you can list all channels on a server, and that feature has existed since the first RFC iirc.
Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).