IRC is a completely open source protocol that anyone can develop clients and servers for, it’s been around for decades and has an army of dedicated fans and devs.
Discord is a program owned by a private company that everyone is using to chat while the company slowly implements pricing and walls their proverbial garden off.
With your one Discord account you join all the servers you care about and interact with online/IRL friends.
There are downsides that people at Lemmy will find dealbreaking and I absolutely agree with them, but the convenience of it being a chat, forum (almost), voice/video calling and gaming platform for free with (currently) no ads triumphs all of that for the majority of people, and that’s what makes it popular. It’s also cross-platform so no one’s left out.
I don’t have proof of why discord is getting shoved down our throats everywhere but I think it is probably in large part because there is a fuckton of investor money behind trying to make discord swallow up every online community it can and they have kept costs to customers/shitty behavior dialed back until they establish an unassailable dominance over the market. Everyone just thinks it is great and it doesn’t cost much money so what could possibly go wrong??
Can someone please explain to me why discord is being used for everything? Isn’t it basically IRC?
It’s a great tool to set up with a small group of friends to stay in contact. It’s being pigeonholed for everything else
Its fancy IRC with voice channel support, etc
IRC is a completely open source protocol that anyone can develop clients and servers for, it’s been around for decades and has an army of dedicated fans and devs.
Discord is a program owned by a private company that everyone is using to chat while the company slowly implements pricing and walls their proverbial garden off.
Ease of use.
With your one Discord account you join all the servers you care about and interact with online/IRL friends.
There are downsides that people at Lemmy will find dealbreaking and I absolutely agree with them, but the convenience of it being a chat, forum (almost), voice/video calling and gaming platform for free with (currently) no ads triumphs all of that for the majority of people, and that’s what makes it popular. It’s also cross-platform so no one’s left out.
I don’t have proof of why discord is getting shoved down our throats everywhere but I think it is probably in large part because there is a fuckton of investor money behind trying to make discord swallow up every online community it can and they have kept costs to customers/shitty behavior dialed back until they establish an unassailable dominance over the market. Everyone just thinks it is great and it doesn’t cost much money so what could possibly go wrong??