IRC and I are the same age. It’s been 16 years of using IRC for me by now, and I’m still to see any real alternatives really take off. XMPP sadly died. Matrix is promising, but most people seem to still use it as an IRC bridge.
Matrix makes quite a fine IRC bridge though. Better mobile support, lets you see a list of when you were pinged, and image hosting. These days it has almost every feature I need to switch from telegram but the client is still too awkward to use.
The largest slack server I’m on has 70 people. That’s 1/4 of the number of nicks in #lobsters, half of whom are regular participants. Our channel is only the ~150th largest channel on Freenode. There are some significantly larger channels.
I don’t know what the largest Slack channel is (there surely must be some much larger than the largest one I’m on), but I don’t really see Slack going after that kind of audience. Slack feels to me like a meeting or conference room, whereas IRC feels like an auditorium or a stadium. It has tooling and social conventions to accommodate large, public audiences. I haven’t seen that replicated on other chat platforms.
Slack has been undeniably successful and has taken users from IRC in being so. I think it accomplished this through market segmentation, though, and isn’t trying to solve some of the scale problems IRC has solved.
When Slack kicked Reactiflux off the platform for having too many members, they had 7,500 members. Currently, Reactiflux on Discord has 35,000 members. At least one estimate puts freenode at ~88,000 users.
There are some enormous Discord “servers” (which is a total misnomer – they aren’t dedicated servers afaik, but it’s a word that resonates with gamers); maybe Discord would be a better spiritual successor from a scale perspective. I’m not sure what the biggest Discord is, but the biggest streamer I could think of (Ninja) has 40K people in his Discord, 8K of which are signed in right now (on a weekday during a workday/schoolday). These big-name streamers have big fan communities that use Discord a lot like I’ve always used IRC: partially for asking for help, but mostly for dumb jokes :)
I was just addressing the “alternatives take off” part. I agree they might be targeting different segment. I also think they did better job focusing on UX. The next alternative that addresses the segment you’re describing should similarly focus on good UX. Maybe charge for hosted versions or something to pay for developers to keep it a polished product, too. Users hate buggy software when their prior software worked well. They’ll switch back if they can.
IRC and I are the same age. It’s been 16 years of using IRC for me by now, and I’m still to see any real alternatives really take off. XMPP sadly died. Matrix is promising, but most people seem to still use it as an IRC bridge.
Matrix makes quite a fine IRC bridge though. Better mobile support, lets you see a list of when you were pinged, and image hosting. These days it has almost every feature I need to switch from telegram but the client is still too awkward to use.
Slack. ;)
The largest slack server I’m on has 70 people. That’s 1/4 of the number of nicks in #lobsters, half of whom are regular participants. Our channel is only the ~150th largest channel on Freenode. There are some significantly larger channels.
I don’t know what the largest Slack channel is (there surely must be some much larger than the largest one I’m on), but I don’t really see Slack going after that kind of audience. Slack feels to me like a meeting or conference room, whereas IRC feels like an auditorium or a stadium. It has tooling and social conventions to accommodate large, public audiences. I haven’t seen that replicated on other chat platforms.
Slack has been undeniably successful and has taken users from IRC in being so. I think it accomplished this through market segmentation, though, and isn’t trying to solve some of the scale problems IRC has solved.
When Slack kicked Reactiflux off the platform for having too many members, they had 7,500 members. Currently, Reactiflux on Discord has 35,000 members. At least one estimate puts freenode at ~88,000 users.
There are some enormous Discord “servers” (which is a total misnomer – they aren’t dedicated servers afaik, but it’s a word that resonates with gamers); maybe Discord would be a better spiritual successor from a scale perspective. I’m not sure what the biggest Discord is, but the biggest streamer I could think of (Ninja) has 40K people in his Discord, 8K of which are signed in right now (on a weekday during a workday/schoolday). These big-name streamers have big fan communities that use Discord a lot like I’ve always used IRC: partially for asking for help, but mostly for dumb jokes :)
I was just addressing the “alternatives take off” part. I agree they might be targeting different segment. I also think they did better job focusing on UX. The next alternative that addresses the segment you’re describing should similarly focus on good UX. Maybe charge for hosted versions or something to pay for developers to keep it a polished product, too. Users hate buggy software when their prior software worked well. They’ll switch back if they can.