hey tech folks:
please stop pushing discord. i get it. it works. please help us with something better, or we will be in a situation a while from now where suddenly we are all panicking because discord is shutting down or deleting old data as we all go "wow who could have seen this coming" and put our hands in the air

sorry, I'm probably being over the top. I mean what will ever happen to icq?
sorry, typo, what will ever happen to aim?
sorry, typo, what will ever happen to msn?
sorry, typo, what will ever happen to myspace?
sorry, typo again, what will ever happen to skype?
sorry, typo again, what will ever happen to discord?

@Lyude *Icq notif* UH OH!

@Lyude irc?

@Lyude We solved this problem in 1981 with SMTP. The problem is that the UIs are all designed after writing a letter instead of having a conversation. I want to create a new SMTP header called “Display-As: chat” that tells an email client to show a message in a conversation view. No subject, no CC or BCC, no formatting, no quoted replies, no cruft.

@Lyude I also want to create a mobile app that uses IMAP and SMTP to give you a messenger like UI for whatever email provider you use. Does that sound like something you’d use?

@Lyude something something shutting down our forum because we can just use Discord

...​

@Lyude it's the lazy way to do things. I get it, setting up a wiki is really confusing, but the results are much better if you go through with it.

@Lyude I feel the same about Discord as I do Telegram. Everyone uses it, yet no alternative exists where people are willing to move onto. People like their walled gardens and it friggin annoys the heck out of me. I pull the joke about "this Discord could have been a wiki", but I'm also not joking. Wikis are infinitely more resourceful than a Discord community.
We need to move beyond that platform so bad.

@hperrin @Lyude it's also kinda missing the point, email is for asynchronous communication. Mail sometimes takes multiple minutes to transmit, have no inherent order to them, etc. Completely reasonable if you use it as electronic mail but unworkable for instant messaging

@grumpasaurus @Lyude there's a reason why other services have largely replaced irc. Going back to irc would mostly be a regression to users and mods alike

@Lyude IRC is still better than Discord. It's free, decentralised, open source, and ephemeral, and has been around since the very early 1990s.

It's the protocol that Discord, Slack, and others appropriated and built their proprietary services on top of.

Give it a try. :-)

@GrahamDowns @Lyude I like IRC, one community I occasionally come back to uses IRC operationally and it leaves Discord in the dust for scripting and interoperation. But it will never work as a direct replacement for Discord because it can't do what the people who like Discord *want*. They want avatars and embeds and emojis and voice chat and probably several other things I forgot about. This is an ACTUAL "customer is always right" situation, one can't tell them that "Well, you want the wrong thing, then"

@errant @Lyude Oh yeah, no, I agree. Discord may have been based on IRC, but it's now a completely different animal.

I just mentioned it because Discord always makes me think of IRC, and one of the things that I really miss with Discord is the whole ephemeral nature: on joining a channel, there's no history to scroll back on (which is how I like to use Mastodon too, incidentally. Which is why I wouldn't want algorithms surfacing posts from hours ago). Or how ANYONE can create a channel, and how the first person to join a channel creates it (notwithstanding ChanServ, obvs), and the last person to leave a channel deletes it.

Also I have a really soft spot for IRC, because it's where I met my wife. 22 years ago now. ;-)

IRC is cool, for lots of different reasons. But you're right: it's not Discord. Not really.

@errant @GrahamDowns @Lyude honestly I think the problem with IRC is just that it's hard to get into. I've been a computers person my whole life but never really understood what I was doing when I tried IRC. The advantage of slack and discord is that you just click a link and log in and bam, there's everything you need all set up already. Any proposed replacement that makes onboarding markedly harder than that will always fail to capture the average user.

@andrewt @errant @Lyude Yeah. IRC is not designed to run over HTTP. There are HTTP ports, but I don't know how well any of them work.

IRC was never meant to run in a web browser -- which, incidentally, is another thing I like about it, because I'd rather have a dedicated, native desktop app than have to use a web browser any day of the week (I'm communicating right now using the installed @sengi_app on my desktop PC).

You have to have a dedicated IRC client installed, you have to know a bit about how to configure it and which server you want to connect to (not all that dissimilar to Mastodon, incidentally), and ideally, you should know a little bit about network ports.

So yeah, not at all for everyone. But it kinda makes those of us who can connect and use it feel... elite, in a way (which is exactly what 1337 culture is all about, come to think of it) :-D

@GrahamDowns @errant @Lyude @sengi_app I like a dedicated app too, but I think what Discord and Slack get really right is that you *can* use it without the app — you can get set up in a minute and then later, if you want, if you're getting value out of it, you can put a bit of time in to set up the app. (That their apps are also really web browsers isn't really relevant here.) It's like how the harderst thing fedi asks you to do (choose an instance) is also the *first* thing it asks you to do — it's hardly insurmountable but it does require a certain amount of determination to push through the barrier to get to the good bits, and casual users will bounce off it.

Honestly if IRC servers just exposed a good web interface on port 443 so you had the option of defering the installation and configuration of an application until after you got chatting for a bit, I think the platform would be way more popular.

@andrewt @errant @Lyude @sengi_app Yip. I hear you. And I've often thought about that.

Yes, IRC and Discord/Slack are two diffierent animals and they provide different things and thre are pros and cons to both. So this isn't about wanting people to use IRC as a REPLACEMENT to Discord (despite my original, somewhat tongue-in-cheek comment). But IRC is still a valid platform, still very good for its purpose, and it could probably stand to be a bit easier for new users to get into. :)

@andrewt @errant @Lyude The thing with IRC is that IRC was invented (or at least, was "a thing") *before* the WWW, and hence before port 80. Certainly before port 443 and SSL.

But it shouldn't be that difficult to just expose it on port 80/443, surely?

@GrahamDowns @errant @Lyude Yeah, I get the same thing with vim/emacs — I don't feel any need to redesign them to include a bunch of conventions and models that were invented decades after the first versions were released, but it does seem rather silly that Linux distros don't *also* bundle a terminal editor with a modern interface to sit alongside them.

Keeping the old thing around doesn't mean you can't also embrace the good aspects of modernity!

@andrewt @errant @Lyude The first thing I do after installing a new Linux distro is to install nano and set it to be the default text editor. :D

@grumpasaurus @Lyude Now that I could get behind! IRC FTW!

@charlotte @hperrin @Lyude Mail sometimes taking multiple minutes to transmit is an issue with how people configure their mail servers.
Greylisting is a problem rather than a solution for a lot of people, especially when it comes to effective communication.
If someone configured their Mastodon or other Fediverse instance to delay every single incoming message/API request by five minutes you wouldn't blame the protocol either, would you?

On the other hand UIs for synchronous chat-like communication via SMTP (including E2E encryption) exist, for instance Delta Chat is a thing.

@benaryorg @hperrin @Lyude

Greylisting is a problem rather than a solution for a lot of people, especially when it comes to effective communication.

It works fine if your system uses emails for asynchronous conversations, aka their intended purpose. Either way it is far more instant than the asynchronous communication options it displaced

If someone configured their Mastodon or other Fediverse instance to delay every single incoming message/API request by five minutes you wouldn’t blame the protocol either, would you?

Mastodon does delay incoming messages by however long it takes to fetch the profile info and to reupload attached media. This can definitely take multiple minutes on slow connections. However I found it to not be an issue because, like email, mastodon is not a synchronous communication medium like a chat.

On the other hand UIs for synchronous chat-like communication via SMTP (including E2E encryption) exist, for instance Delta Chat is a thing.

Of course you can squeeze a round peg into a square hole that is large enough, but I don’t think you should. Asynchronous communication is meant for longer form exchanges with potentially hours or days between messages, not for short form messages where a response often occurs within seconds (during an active conversation) Personally I even think that mail+e2ee is a poor fit just due to the absolutely ludicrous amount of metadata that is transmitted with every message, even if e2e-encrypted

@benaryorg @Lyude @hperrin But like coming back to your original argument, yes SMTP technically allows low latency communications. Real world systems shouldn’t be treated as such however, and there are much better options for synchronous messaging, like xmpp or matrix

@charlotte @hperrin @Lyude

It works fine if your system uses emails for asynchronous conversations

Assumption: No mail system has ever been used for an urgent password reset.
Assumption: Greylisting is more reliable in spam detection than other, faster, methods (properly configured rspamd).
Caveat: Greylisting is not easy to configure properly either.

Mastodon does delay incoming messages […]

Replace "Mastodon" in my original reply with "Matrix", "XMPP", "Discord", or any other system, because I was arguing about protocol-level issues, not about your average corporate business mailbox.

Asynchronous communication is meant for longer form exchanges with potentially hours or days between messages, not for short form messages where a response often occurs within seconds

Point in question, SMTP can fit both.

Personally I even think that mail+e2ee is a poor fit just due to the absolutely ludicrous amount of metadata that is transmitted with every message, even if e2e-encrypted

When it comes to privacy issues: Sender and recipient are used at SMTP level between the two responsible mail servers, I don't see an issue there. On the next level we have the mandatory fields of Subject, Date, From, and To IIRC. None other are required if I'm not mistaken, and replacing date and subject with placeholders is not that problematic if the clients handle it properly. The content can then be encrypted, which if you don't use HTML should be rather small.

Leading us to the size issues; the content itself is not the issue, never has been. The problems are bad clients, HTML mail, and headers upon headers. Most headers however are either for spam detection or debugging reasons. The latter is really nice to have (have fun debugging any other tech stack like that) and it's just a few hundred bytes of plaintext added on the server-side so it only affects download anyway. The spam detection stuff doesn't even need to be added for most part. The other parts are something like DKIM which actually does serve a pretty good purpose and does its job well, so I think it's worth keeping.

@charlotte @hperrin @Lyude The problem some of us are arguing is that it's superfluous to build additional infrastructure.

much better options for synchronous messaging

I am using XMPP primarily. It doesn't come without its share of problems but more importantly it's yet another service to host and maintain.
Same goes for matrix.

My mail-server hasn't done greylisting ever and I can use something like Delta Chat just fine to communicate with people, why would I want yet another service for this?

People are already deterred by the amount of effort it takes to self-host, which is WHY they go back to using Discord, as posed by OP. Why would we want to increase the burden even more?
It's not like the email ecosystem has matured to a point of stability that no other system will ever come even close to achieving.

If you won't use it, fine, but if you want to message me on Matrix (which I won't set up yet another service for), I'd like not to be blamed please.

@charlotte @Lyude Emails have an inherent order to them. Every email is required to have a “Date” header that says when it was created down to the second. They can also have “Reply-To” and “References” headers that link them to specific other messages.

@benaryorg @hperrin @Lyude Yeah, the ability to maintain infra is important to consider and, as an email admin myself, I don’t think that SMTP is good for that either. The server applications I use for mail have a large amount of time invested in just creating something that works without being blocked by blocklists that are worth caring about. And even that still has issues which i do not have the energy to fix (my web management ui is broken for who knows how long, I’m pretty sure my sieve scripts for training rspamd no longer work). Other services I run are far more plug&play, where the maintenance is mostly just updating the system regularly and that’s it

@charlotte @benaryorg @Lyude Any centralized service will almost always be easier to implement and maintain than any decentralized/federated service, because you have to play nice with other servers. That’s not unique to email and it’s not a deal breaker for me. What makes email perfectly suited as a messenger (in my mind) is that everyone everywhere already has it. It may not be _as_ instant as XMPP, but it’s got many orders of magnitude more users.

@hperrin @benaryorg @Lyude Yes but it doesn’t have to be nearly as difficult as it is with email. For example, federated services I am currently or have previously self-hosted where the setup and maintenance wasn’t significantly more difficult compared to an unfederated service:

• synapse
• mastodon
• peertube
• akkoma
• nextcloud

@hperrin @Lyude @benaryorg and honestly it does matter since it greatly increases the barriers of entry. So you end up with a few large email services that end up sending most mail (including spam mail) controlled by the richest companies on the planet. These can effectively single-handedly decide how email is going to work tomorrow, since an email server that can’t deliver to gmail is effectively useless.

@charlotte @benaryorg @Lyude Considering I’m currently building an email service that will compete with Gmail, I definitely feel what you mean.

@Lyude Discord is okay for chatting but THAT'S IT.

@zorinlynx @Lyude for things that don't need long term durability and search outside of the group.

But search only for ease of recall and not for investigation.

@Lyude Unfortunately, Discord actually does not work💔
I can't use a search engine to find an answer if it's only on Discord. Discord is an instant messenger, not a media platform.

@indrora @Lyude I really boggle at people trying to use it as a replacement for websites, forums, etc... NO it doesn't work well for that!

@Lyude Hi, I'm Apollo, just ignore this dodgeball I'm holding, don't mind me I'm just biding my time

@Lyude as long as capable people / programmers work on improving Matrix (or XMPP) and clients instead of insisting on inventing / programming Yet Another Instant Messaging service from scratch...