No, it's not. "People" didn't build Discord. A company built it, then sold it to Microsoft for more than $10 billion. There is nothing guaranteeing that it's still going to be around in the next 5 years, let alone the next 10 or 50 or 100.
Remember the last "better alternative" that was also very good, worked on all major platforms, also got sold to MS for multiple billions?
To go back to the OP's point and the article. If you are a neophyte who cares about nothing but the immediate convenience, sure, stick with whatever Big Tech is pushing you. But if you want longevity and stability, DO NOT BUILD YOUR HOUSE ON SOMEONE ELSE'S LAND.
We're in all-caps italics territory so I'm not sure how helpful I can be, but I just want to stress the fact that as a modern human we all have to rely on organizations and companies outside of our control. Things like IRC, in 2022, are for software developers to talk to each other. Things like Discord, are built for my mid-twenties friends to talk to each other. If I moved to IRC for the control, I would have no one to talk to!
I have been using IRC as a means to stay in touch with the people I actually care about since the 90's, and it hasn't let me down yet. Many of my friends are in their 20s, and only a few are developers.
Maybe you should have asked him how many friends he has.
When MSN Messenger existed, I pushed hard to get people on XMPP. "It's no problem, there are multiplatform, multiprotocol clients anyway". I had more than 200 contacts on MSN Messenger. Most or all of them, people I met in real life.
On XMPP? Maybe like... 10? Out of which perhaps only 2 I met in real life, and the rest I met on Linux forums. I was really aggressive on getting people to XMPP to the point I eventually closed my account and told people to reach me on XMPP. Nobody gave a fuck, of course they didn't. The world doesn't revolve around me.
Look, we get it. It's sad that corporations are realising they can hold users hostage for profit, but unfortunately that's the tradeoff with ease of use.
Oh, and Discord does so much more than IRC. It has voice chats "well just use Mumble", yeah but... why? Discord already has it. Or desktop sharing "use Jitsi", again, Discord already does it. Or large file sharing "roll your own FTP server", uhhh... no? Discord does it?
And a web UI if you don't want to chat online. And reliable mobile notifications. And two factor authentication. And in-game overlays.
FOSS fanatics struggle to admit commercial tools are so frickin' easy to use. I used to be like that, I understand. And then I got a job :P
I would say, think again about whether this casual drive-by insult is necessary. Is anyone in the above conversation behaving like one?
> ...struggle to admit commercial tools are so frickin' easy to use. I used to be like that, I understand.
I agree, this is the usual tone of FOSS people. "Oh, it's trivial to set up an SMTP server".
But, crucially, that is not what 'rglullis and I are saying in the conversations above. It's more something like "It's not trivial to set up an SMTP server, but maaaaybe you should think of the tradeoff of that versus learning a new chat system and losing all your conversations every 5 years. And yes, we should strive to make open solutions as seamless as Discord".
> And then I got a job :P
Again, a casual drive-by insult by implication that you should really rethink. I think most of the people on this site have jobs as well. That does not prevent us from thinking about long-term robust storage at data. In fact, it might even be directly relevant to some of our jobs.
> as a modern human we all have to rely on organizations and companies outside of our control
While true, we should be striving to minimise that. The internet era radically accelerated the rate at which we pick up new "external dependencies", and we should be trying to bring this rate down rather than embrace it.
Ok. I stand corrected. Doesn't change much of the picture, does it? Do you think it is wise to concentrate so much power into one single corporation? What is Discord going to do in order to make enough profits to beat the return of a 10bi sale?
Remember the last "better alternative" that was also very good, worked on all major platforms, also got sold to MS for multiple billions?
To go back to the OP's point and the article. If you are a neophyte who cares about nothing but the immediate convenience, sure, stick with whatever Big Tech is pushing you. But if you want longevity and stability, DO NOT BUILD YOUR HOUSE ON SOMEONE ELSE'S LAND.