Just yesterday i was working on my game engine for the original Xbox using the open source NXDK kit (which is much lower level than the official XDK) and i finally, after literal years, managed to find and fix a couple of bugs that caused flickering (much more obscure than you'd expect and didn't show up even in the emulator).

So i decided to share it with a couple friends and retro enthusiast communities on Discord. I took a video capture of my engine working, showing the 3d rendering, audio, video, etc with an Xbox->HDMI->USB capture chain. Then attached the file on Discord's input field and posted it (i have a tab with the web UI pretty much constantly open in Firefox). People weren't around at the time but some saw it today and commented while i was sleeping (with my computer off).

Last time i checked, this wouldn't be possible with IRC because:

1. There is no video (or any other file) host on IRC servers.

2. IRC discussions are ephemeral, you either need to be online all the time or setup some sort of proxy that keeps the discussions around while you or others are away (or do what i used to do 15+ years ago - run a terminal-based irc client in a screen session in a VPS :-P).

AFAIK #1 is still impossible and #2 is an optional extension (that i've never seen in real life). Meanwhile i can now connect to a new Discord community and not only not worry about losing any messages while i do other stuff (i often check what people have talk about in Discord since my previous "visit" to be up to date) but also search what people talked about previously - e.g. did anyone brought up some XYZ topic i want to talk about?

IME the above two (also add images and audio to the mix - in two of the communities i'm in there are people who post WIP music they make) are basically 90% of how i see people use Discord: they post something (very often media-based) and very often others see/respond to it in their own leisure much later (in some channels people even live on different timezones so they can't do otherwise).

TBH nowadays if i wanted to set up some community in a self-hosted manned and wanted to stick with open stuff, i'd probably use RocketChat or something like that (Godot uses a self-hosted RocketChat instance that while a bit more janky than Discord, it seems to provide pretty much the same features i mentioned above).

You can use a bouncer on IRC to retain messages while you were offline. In reality, it's the same with every other network: you need a server which receives and retains messages while you're offline.

With WhatsApp, Discord, etc, that server is provided by Facebook, Discard respectively. With XMPP, Matrix, that server is the instance in which you have an account or where the channel is hosted.

With IRC, you use a bouncer. What makes IRC unique is that a bouncer is _optional_. You can even join a channel without an account and without a server which keeps logs while you're offline. This ephemeral level of joining doesn't exist in WhatsApp, Discord, XMPP, Matrix, etc.

And, btw, this is not a new thing: I first saw bouncers 15 years ago and they weren't even new back then.

Concord channels on Nostr (https://concordprotocol.org/clients/) are handy for avoiding the centralization and privacy issues of Discord while also avoiding the reduction in asynchronous and media-enhanced functionality you'd get with IRC.

That said I can't say it's hard to just run irssi inside of tmux and attach/detach as necessary remotely. Nor is it hard to throw my media I'm sharing onto a web server. But yes, you do need to mix and match your utilities, rather than have an all in one package.

I do often enough find this to be more of a feature than a bug -- being stuck with Discord's UI is gross, but the network effect does have me continuing to use it for some groups.

There are draft specs to fix both of these but they haven't been worked on recently because nobody has the time or energy to work on it.

This is fundamentally the main problem with IRC development nowadays. People want IRC to have features but are unwilling to support IRC developers to actually implement them and as a result pretty much every single IRC developer (myself included) who isn't churning out slop is burned out because its a thankless job.

The way some of us operated back in the day was to link to a forum post with a video upload or a chan board with a video upload from IRC. IRC was ephemeral, light-weight, fast and forums, chan boards were the semi-persistence, long enough for the majority of the intended audience to download. Some still do this today. [1]

[1] - https://altchan.org/sh/8

> they post something (very often media-based) and very often others see/respond to it in their own leisure much later

who pays for the storage to keep the file on a computer somewhere, and the network to serve the file to the internet indefinitely? in Discord's case, it's the users

usenet iirc tried to do a sort of "torrent" the data across enthusiasts' / participants' computers?

What you are describing here is microblogging like Twitter or Instagram, not using a chat to do chatting. Chatting, by design, is ephemeral and text only.

> There is no video (or any other file) host on IRC servers.

Ircv3, the thread title, supports file sharing