The other reply goes to airplanes but there are much more common ways to get disconnected. Locking my phone or closing my laptop lid disconnects me from IRC. A lot of Discord users have desktops that are always on (since Discord originally advertised to gamers), but a lot of Discord users don’t.
Discord is fundamentally a very versatile platform. If you lose one seemingly unimportant, you lose a lot of versatility. Maybe I’ll write a blog post just with examples of how I’ve used it. It replaces IRC, but it also replaces Facebook groups, Skype, a lot of group texts, and a lot of email for me.
It does alter the meaning of chat tremendously. In discord, often things become heavy, because we're not talking, we're accumulating information, and you have to stay on purpose so data is manageable and seekable.
The few times I join IRC I know we're only here to chat, it's semi-transient (a little bit more if logs are stored) and I feel lighter.
Is it really that much of a jump to say "I would like to see the chat that has happened between my friends between the time I got on a plane and then got back off"? Does that sound odd?
Imagine if you couldn't receive e-mail while you were offline!
This isn't to disparage IRC and friends too much, obviously there's huge value in it existing as a synchronous chat room. Just... async chat is a thing that totally happens for most people.
a non-technical person wouldn't consider the implications of a history log with regards to security or data hoarding, they just see it work and think of it as a convenience.
this value sell shifts in the mind of the non-technical person once they're told that the feature they want implies non-ephemeral data that will be systematically sifted through either for legal or financial benefit by a third party.
in other words : the reason why 'async chat is a thing that totally happens for most people.' is because a vast majority of people are simply unqualified to even see the problem, much less seek alternatives or solutions to the data hoarding that they must comply with.
this creates a social effect and pulls everyone into Discord, regardless of their beliefs on the matter, simply because it has become 'the only game in town'.
regardless of personal preference, centralization of these kind of things is BAD for the user in nearly all circumstances aside from convenience.
Please stop pretending that "data hording" didn't / doesn't happen on IRC. There's nothing inherently friendly to security or privacy in the protocol; if anything, it's quite the opposite.
That you can, with augmentation and diligent op-sec, get something a bit better than Discord isn't a great selling point unless you have the time and resources and buy-in already, not just for yourself but from everyone in your group. At which point, there are still better options than IRC.
For decades now, the main draw of IRC has remained a fetish for conspicuous configuration, as it embodies a sort of brutalist architecture of communication software. The excuses change every few years, but the love for cobbling together a barely workable system from parts remains core.
Sure, the advantages of async communication are obvious but the crucial difference is that in that case vendor has to store your data somewhere in the data center. Reusing that data for unsolicited purposes is what many people will have a concern with.
But logs are stored on IRC as well. It’s not a part of standard protocol, but a lot of ir c-servers can do that automatically and there are boys which do that not to mention personal archives.
The difference is that end-users don’t have easy access to this logs. And on discord they do (because it is a part of protocol)
How about a secure async chat where the vendor simply stores a list of message IDs, and then the client requests if anyone has a copy of any message you haven't received yet from the other users in chat when you log on
Such vendor would have a hard time finding a business model since plenty of chat-services are already existing on the market and all of them have access to the data of their users in one way or another. Thus I don't know what other type of leverage they would be able to pull off to sustain their business.
