With all the garbage happening privacy-wise - breaches, data farming, ads, e2ee removal - with all well-known messengers, I've decided to take messaging into my own hands. The solution turned out to be a 25 year old system called XMPP. Like you say, XMPP isn't as flashy (some desktop clients still look like AOL) but is solid.

Well no, it doesn't keep a history of chats for once. You don't have a record of conversations if your client wasn't running at that time. There's a few other limitations that I'm not familiar with, that prompted many people and orgs to switch to things like rocket chat or matrix

It's not just text anymore.

I use TheLounge as a client. It's web based and can show previews of images and videos. So my friends and I can upload images and videos to the server and watch them in the channel.

Convos also does this.

Twitch, at least did, have a IRC version of their chat. So you could stream the video with like mpv and have irssi to avoid the browser, and basically have the full experience

where are some good servers?

Yep I run my own 'The Lounge' instance now instead of using xchat or mirc or something, it gives me persistance and availability on my mobile devices.

It still has its perks.

I mean, other ways of transferring are faster, but I do like it still existing, even though it's not secure at all.

That's usually the case, sure, but you realize in this instance they don't mean boomer as actual boomer, but as anyone and everyone over 30?

And we prefer it that way.

gen x fucking made it before the housing crash and pandemic, they can sit over there with the boomers

Anyone from 28 and above will be easly called a boomer by 14 years old

I'm sure there's some kind of meme to describe this. Or maybe they're all TikTok dances now, idk.

All I know is that the damned kids today need to get off my lawn.

I also met your wife on IRC. Nice person, good choice. I'd say neither of you are the reacher in your relationship. Well done.

Easy - IRC worked way better and was way less miserable

The only good thing with Slack/Discord is the feature the branch off threads. I don't recall IRC having anything like that, but I guess it would be easy to implement

Back in the day I used direct connect, we had 100mbit internet (at my university), that was extremely fast back in the day.

Reminds me of waiting for a porn image to load one row of pixels at a time on dial up. Teenage boys desperate for porn lol!

IRC came out in 1988, so an Internet chat service that predates it must have been exceptionally early.

Hilarious, cool story bro

The issue with the friend group on discord is that if you start a call it starts ringing everyone, even people who are obviously offline (at least thats my experience, though I haven't used that feature in about a year). That's why it ends up everyone having their own server

It's been a good 3rd place replacement for me. I've made so many new offline friends through discord. At first I just play online games with voice on, and then I met some party who enjoyed playing with me and they invited me to their discord and so on.

Some friend group has been going strong for 10 years now.

Has it failed? Or have you failed at being loyal?

IRC is still around. I have no data but would guess more people use it now than in the “heyday” (mainly just because there are a lot more people online)

It has usability problems (can't even fucking write a newline

, no voice chat, file uploads only with third party links, no screen sharing, no end to end encryption). As a zoomer, I'm not surprised it didn't catch on with younger generations compared to easy messengers.

It's still kinda cool tho.

Not to mention that you don't get messages from when you were offline and that by default no login system exists without a bot to handle that stuff.

Correct me where I'm wrong, I'd be happy if irc is actually amazing.

I think when you entered a channel you didn't get any of its history.

Hosting a chat room meant you had to self host or trust someone else's server.

There is no concept of groups. So you had to create several channels with some kind of naming scheme. There is no way to see them in a group. You just need to know about them as a chatter.

History is not saved by default. Most used a 3rd party server to host a history log, which is more work.

There is no audio, video, screen sharing.

You can't reply to a chat with an emoji. You can't edit your previous chats.

You can't reply to a specific chat unless you get specific like copying the original chat.

Don't get me wrong. I hated that discord owns most of the communication online.

I wish there was a simple and easy to use open source tool that did all of that in a single package.

I don't mind self-hosting but if I have to self-host several interacting services that I need to update manually, it becomes a pain.

Dalnet fucked up

From https://xkcd.com/1782/

Apparently the answer is yes as people in this thread are saying. That’s pretty cool.

Yes

Yes, every day.