to be honest, my thoughts on IRC are too long to write about in microblogging.

i think the whole concept of an "IRC network" is obsolete.

Matrix's "spaces" are kind of an acknowledgement of that reality: Discord's "servers" are the jurisdictional boundary that people actually see.

at the same time, Matrix invested heavily in that complicated federation protocol which makes doing things like "i want to defederate matrix.kiwifarms.cc" difficult to accomplish.

to "save IRC," i think that IRC pretty much needs to be thrown away. so many assumptions made by its model are destroyed by things like CGNAT.

what we need is something modern which can provide a UX similar to Discord, while providing nomadic identity.

but Ariadne, what about the smaller IRC networks, which are still community driven? well, they would still exist as they are.

but monolithic IRC networks like OFTC and Libera are obsolete.

how do i know this? almost all of the actually useful moderation tools require IRCop privileges. i can deal with asking for extended banlists, and writing a bot to sync all the bans across all of the channels (or use the `$c:` extban, I guess), or i can set up my own infrastructure (which can be free of cost at this point outside a domain registration) and just use `/KLINE`.

but in reality, i can just click "new server" in discord, and have a new chat environment 5 seconds later, and nearly all of my users are already there.

that's what IRC is competing against.

i hate to say it, especially as the person who started IRCv3 in the first place, but there is literally no world in which i would deploy a new project on IRC.

i can manage all moderation tasks on discord with terraform. that is something impossible to realize with IRC.

any project to take back mindshare from Discord has to frame their strategy from this perspective.

with Discord, or any other SaaS, you are dealing with a loss of software freedom, and that should be highlighted, but the solution is to provide a libre alternative that is competitive. IRC (and frankly Matrix) isn't that.