I’m old enough to have not only used IRC in the 90s but to have also written my own IRC client.
The problem with IRC is exactly what you described yourself. You “just” need to install a half dozen things to get a modern experience and it’s not something that either the project maintainers nor casual uses of your project are going to want to do.
I loved IRC for a decade or so and even I can’t bring myself to officially support it on my open source projects. It’s just a distraction — time that could be better spent actually writing code or supporting users and other contributors.
I don’t support Discord either, but I get why other maintainers might like the zero-effort solution. It enables them to focus on the project and not building auxiliary services.
This is the problem that people miss when they talk about “just use x”… they forget that being a project maintainer is a massive time sink and time is finite. So we sometimes have to make trade offs. If it’s a choice between configuring IRC or that highly requested new feature, then few maintainers are going to pick IRC.
Oh definitely, and if I implied otherwise I did not mean to.
I stopped developing open source software because I got tired of dealing with getting people in my email demanding things from me despite it just being a personal project to scratch an itch, so I understand that a developer may not have the time to set up infrastructure to offer a modern experience over IRC. If that's the case a project is in then I agree - actually developing the project is more important.
It's more of a lament that things aren't the way that they were, not a demand that everybody cater to my preferences.
The problem with IRC is exactly what you described yourself. You “just” need to install a half dozen things to get a modern experience and it’s not something that either the project maintainers nor casual uses of your project are going to want to do.
I loved IRC for a decade or so and even I can’t bring myself to officially support it on my open source projects. It’s just a distraction — time that could be better spent actually writing code or supporting users and other contributors.
I don’t support Discord either, but I get why other maintainers might like the zero-effort solution. It enables them to focus on the project and not building auxiliary services.
This is the problem that people miss when they talk about “just use x”… they forget that being a project maintainer is a massive time sink and time is finite. So we sometimes have to make trade offs. If it’s a choice between configuring IRC or that highly requested new feature, then few maintainers are going to pick IRC.