2026-02-11 Discord features to emulate ====================================== > I mean, like, IRC people are looking at Discord or whatever and > trying to shoehorn in features from those platforms that don't > particularly make sense. -- acdw, on IRC I was talking to my friend acdw about Discord and IRC because dozens had posted the link to New And Upcoming IRCv3 Features for Libera.chat, on Linkbudz. When I see descriptions of IRCv3 features I always wonder how they might be useful. The explanations I see never seem all that compelling to me. I feel like software developers are working on features that I don't understand and everybody else is looking at Discord and saying: "like that!" At the same time, people are criticising Discord online, warning people, hating it. So what's going on? Both positions seem valid, but the reasons are different. So in this blog post I want to think about the answers to these two questions: * What is compelling about Discord? * What's to avoid about Discord? When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, my gaming stopped. My face-to-face group failed to migrated online and I didn't know anybody else playing online. It took me about two years to join Discord. There's more about that on 2022-08-16 Discord. I found more gaming opportunities than I could handle. So something was working about Discord! Here are some of the things: * Persistent messages. When you log off and log back on again, you can catch up. There’s a backlog of the things people talked about in your absence. Sure, you don’t need this history going back for thousands of lines, but a few hundred lines is nice. * Editable messages. Don’t you hate making typos? I do! Some of them are just typos, but sometimes they are embarrassing typos, offensive typos. It would be better if we could edit them. * Media uploads. We like to share pictures. Maps, portraits, artwork, screenshots, memes, tracks, videos, documents, everything. Some of these we don’t care about but we cannot agree on the media that we definitely hate the most. So it’s all good. * Pinned messages per channel. Admin stuff and important stuff gets pinned. The fediverse also allows every account to pin messages. It’s great. * Channel grouping into categories, per community. * Muting of channels, channel categories and servers, for various time spans or “until you change it”. * Custom emojis per community. People love it. I do, too. I made two myself: an orc emoji and a party-vomit fusion emoji. The fediverse also allows custom emojis per server. It’s great. * Emoji reactions. People love reacting to things without having to type words and they love it even more their reactions are not limited to “like”. And when combined with custom emojis, it’s even better. * Fine grained permission controls and a fine grained API for bots. If you run a “server” you get to determine the bots that get added and the bots have permissions. Some bots can see what everybody is saying but other bots cannot. Some bots can use admin commands, others cannot. This is great because now bots can be used to hand out and remove permissions. Whole admin interfaces can be built on emoji reactions to pinned messages. * Roles per community. People can get multiple roles. Permissions can be tied to roles. Channels can be limited to roles. As you can see, there’s a great richness here. A richness to build a community with admins and moderators, admin tools based on bots, both flimsy and serious stuff is there. Sadly, Discord also has drawbacks. Things that might have helped them grow but I don’t love them: * No other clients. Other clients exist but using them can get you banned. The benefit is that there is no standards process to bog you down. The fediverse showed us the drawbacks of a primary implementation (Mastodon) pressing ahead with some features and ignoring other feature requests. It caused a lot of animosity but they managed to navigate that line. Chapeau! * Ads. They need money and so there is tracking and ads and sponsorship. I hate ads but I like how monetisation is built into it. Fediverse admins still have to beg and fundraise and have to rely on external tools to manage all that. It would be nice to get some built-in support for that. But ads and tracking? Not so much. * One stop solution. Some communities see the features Discord has and like it so much, like it so much better than the fediverse or forums or wikis or mailing lists, they decide to do everything on Discord. And now all the community knowledge disappears into the maelstrom of time. Sure, the same can happen with wikis and mailing lists and news groups. So I don’t know whether all these complaints all amount to just “write better documentation y’all!!” and I’d have to agree with that. But anyway, this explains some of the aversion. Documentation and support is only available if you sign up to a proprietary, user-tracking, privacy-invading, ad-filled space? Yikes. * Single point of failure. Once you've put all the eggs in one basket, you're basically a captured audience. Step one of enshittification. How will you move if the service gets worse and worse as the investors try to wring money out of both users and advertisers? That's why the fediverse is better. On Discord, you cannot change to a different management. And there you have it. Discord. Love it. Hate it. If you want to build a better tool for all of us, learn from its strengths. If you’re working on IRCv3, help promote the features that can get us the good stuff we liked about Discord. I run an IRC server with The Lounge as my IRC client. It's a web app that's always online. Here's how it compares: * Persistent messages. 👍 * Editable messages. 💤 * Media uploads. 👍 * Pinned messages. 💤 * Channel grouping. 💤 * Muting of channels, channel categories and servers … 👍 * … for various time spans. 💤 * Custom emojis per community. 💤 * Emoji reactions. 💤 * Fine grained permission controls and a fine grained API for bots … 👍 * … that is easy to manage. 💤 * Roles per community … 👍 * … that are easy to manage. 💤 * Allow other clients. 👍 * Avoid Ads. 👍 * Avoid being a one stop solution. 🤔 * No single point of failure. 👍 Perhaps what I need is a nice web app that handles management. You sign in using your nick credentials. You can see the list of users and channels. It somehow translates all the modes of our IRC server to reasonable menu items. #Discord #IRC #Social_Media 2026-02-12. @soatok@furry.engineer concludes the only secure alternative is Signal. > Asking anyone to recommend a one-size-fits-all replacement for > every use case (which may have wildly different user experience > requirements) is setting yourself up for disappointment. – On > Discord Alternatives, by Soatok 2026-02-13. A reader mentioned the similarity of IRC’s channel topic to Discord’s pinned messages – but I disagree. Discord has a channel description which is the same thing as the IRC channel topic. In addition to that, Discord users have the option of pinning any number of posts from any user to the channel and there’s a menu to show just the pinned messages so you can build up a collection of a dozen important messages and you can keep editing them and so they turn into a whole community managed repository. Discord’s pinned messages are so much more powerful than the IRC channel topic.