I don't know exactly why, but reading this made me extremely sad and nostalgic. The very much social world of instant messenger and plain old web pages pre like-ified and follow-ified social media seems like a quaint anachronism, now. I suppose it really is, if it was 15 years ago.
Some of you will correctly point out that those communities are still there on IRC and in the forums right where I left off, ready to be picked up, and you're not wrong. I suppose it is me that has changed and gotten older as well, and the world doesn't feel as magical as it did at that time. My internet, its media, and the people I shared it just seemed to electrify me so much more. Now, everything feels so dull and grey. But, perhaps nothing has changed so much as what and how I consume. What would younger me think of the mindless, lazy way I consume content on social media, and my corporate job?
It would be really nice to see slow content and the digital village return again as cultural norms. Until then, I'll just have to make deliberate choices to choose them as I once did. I really wish I could make a time machine and talk to my younger self to knock some sense back into me. It's painful to look at how much fun I used to have with technology and how little I do now.
+1 - You've vocalized my thoughts much more beautifully than I ever could have. Aside from the general cultural aspect of it (better content, interesting forum discussions, Adium conversations with friends at 2AM), programming as a profession lost a bit of magic for me as well.
Life just became all about getting that next refresher, the next good rating / bonus, the next promo in an almost mindless push towards higher comps.
There isn't that sheer fascination / joy in discovering what you can do with technology anymore. Maybe it's because working in a generic big-co is intensely competitive and once you've given so much there, it's hard to come back home and engage in more deep thought. Maybe it's because we just got older, had families and do what normal adults do (reading some linux driver code at 2AM in the morning to get the wifi / trackpad working doesn't sound as fun anymore).
While everything you say is true, there are other forces at play as well -- many people have much more time at younger ages. 15 years in, many of us have kids/responsibilities which are another non-tech reason for "greying out" (ironically perfect name!). It's easy to conflate these two forces, which are different but both contribute to this effect.
this reminded me so much of a post (now lost) about "first MMO games". The gist was that everyone remembers their first MMO game (regardless of how technically crap it was) with huge nostalgia, and regards every game since as sub-standard. Even though they no longer play the original game, and actually play the newer, sub-standard games.
I had this exact experience with DAoC and WoW - DAoC was a total grind, while WoW was a much better experience, but I still feel nostalgic for the experience of DAoC. I even tried going back to DAoC, but the grind was too much and the magic was gone.
I guess what we miss about "the old days" is not so much the technology, but the experience of being new at this, and the excitement of having this whole world open up to us.
I'd be interested to see if going back to before-Facebook tech will keep the magic alive? I somehow doubt it, but it's definitely a worthwhile experiment.
>The very much social world of instant messenger and plain old web pages pre like-ified and follow-ified social media seems like a quaint anachronism, now.
It is a lost concept nowadays, but it's very possible a subsequent development to be a regression compared to what was before.
Sometimes in every way, sometimes in a few important ways.
A friend of mine was actually online! So i IM'd him. I got a frantic phone call about 30 seconds later.
"how did you DO that?!"
"do what?"
"you made my PHONE play the AIM BING noise!"
"..."
He'd long ago wired SMS notifications into AIM, forgotten that he had done it a decade or more ago, and was deeply confused until we walked through the possibilities.
100% agreed. I had much better real personal conversations on the "old" Internet. Facebook and smartphones killed it. Nowadays a lot of people are only available via SMS, and I don't have the patience to type out long messages there. Calling someone up and chatting is better.
I loved the IM era and it's a huge shame it's over. I don't have as many personal connections with people now as I did then. AIM, ICQ, and later Gtalk were all amazing.
Yes, totally agree, but you have also to consider that 25+ years ago we were the only like-minded people that enjoyed to explore the possibilities of the then brand new world changing technical service called gopher... sorry I meant “internet”.
Now it’s kind of extremely inflationated.. everyone has access to it for no reason at all apart, in most of the cases, to increase its own ego.
Something that for us was just short of magic, now it’s as easy and natural as breathing.
I’m still happy about the result because now it’s trivial to learn something that you care about if you’re passionate enough. But interacting with people driven from the same passions that we experienced in the past is something that it’s very difficult to find today.
Maybe HN it’s one of the few places where sometimes you can breath a similar atmosphere.
It really was. ICQ, MSN, and even Skype had this feature of finding people by their profiles (country, age, interests, etc.). What’s more important, people were open to talking to complete strangers back then, and it felt like magic to talk to someone from the other end of the world. And it was nice to be contacted randomly by new people.
Some modern social networks have similar features, but I can’t imagine doing this in this age. And in the last 5 years I’ve never been contacted randomly by anyone either.
I agree. That being said, and all caveats about Apple software, privacy, etc aside, using iMessages to text people from my laptop feels a little like the old AIM days.
Errant Signal has done some good videos on this in the context of video games- both online video games and video games set in the era before social media.
Depends. It had smaller communities, so it felt more personal and closely knit. Nowadays it's much more of a soapbox platform, especially Twitter which is shouting into the void. Facebook felt like a more closed community - I checked it out at some point and felt like hey, this doesn't feel like there's billions of people on here. Low on ads too at the time. Since then though the noise has drowned out whatever signal was there, and adding more people only increases said noise. I had a realization the other day that two thirds of the posts my friends on there make are also ads - posts about movies they watched, shared trailers, games they played, etc. Intersperse that with the regular ads and it's an ad stream. I glaze over every time I try and visit it now.
Although most of my friends prefer Matrix these days, XMPP is still my favorite way of chatting. You can easily run your own Prosody instance [1] on a $5/month VPS and have a very modern chat experience - offline messages, syncing between devices, OMEMO end-to-end encryption, group chats, push notifications, HTTP file upload, etc. My wife and I use it for all our communications.
There are some great clients for Android [2], iOS [3] and Linux/Windows [4] that support all the modern XEPs. Sadly, there aren't any mature, actively developed clients for OS X that I've found. Adium is pretty much abandoned. Monal is in active development though and seems promising.
It's so nice to use an open protocol with native clients. Most other self-hosted chat solutions require electron apps, which can be painful to use unless you have top of the line hardware.
I used to run my own Prosody server for some years before switching out to Matrix and there was nothing "easy" and "modern" with XMPP. Sure, I could get the fancy features such as end-to-end encryption, push notifications and file sharing... with Conversation for Android. But I could never properly sync my messages and conversations with a PC client.
I'm glad I don't have to deal with XMPP anymore, I know that the HN crowd likes to dream with it but the reality is that it was a major pain.
I feel this myself. I used to run an ejabberd server on the same domain as my email address; that, along with a multi-network client like Pidgin, let me chat seamlessly with just about anyone. The number of people I could contact through those two tools eventually became so small that I turned them both off.
Nowadays the first conversation I get to have upon meeting a new person is a long negotiation about what baroque, proprietary messaging app I will have to use to reach them. Sigh. At least we still have email...
I wish we still had email, but an increasing number of folks in my circles are refusing to use it too. And you can forget trying to call anybody - nobody answers because every phone call is a robocall or a scam.
The balkanization of communications is real. I've become some sort of middleman/organizer in one of my hobby circles because I'm the only one who uses all of these disparate services; many of which I only use to connect to two or three folks.
Trillian used to be my goto for combining everyone's communication preferences. Worked great for the time. Sad none of those things work like they used to.
My social circle on IRC has been consistently growing for years. IRC is not trying to monetize you. It's just trying to connect people. That, more than anything else, is why my friends and I still use it. It's been around for 30 years and I'm confident that it isn't going away any time soon. What other technology has remained relevant for 30 years? IRC is older than HTTP, and only slightly younger than GNU. Only Unix has it beat by more than a year or two.
Is it easy to set up a secure (i.e. encrypted) channel through IRC?
I've been thinking of learning how to use it, but the fact that it's not encrypted by default is off-putting. It's not IRC's fault though, considering when it was designed.
I hope that as people notice that the centralized data-gathering walled-gardens that track our every move are not all they are cracked up to be, we will head back to decentralized solutions which do more of what we actually want. This applies not only to messaging, but also to blog postings and RSS.
> now everybody needs to use a mix of iMessage, WhatsApp, and Slack
It's funny whenever I see someone list the chat systems that "everybody needs to use" because they're always different.
The top chat systems that I need to use to communicate with my friends/colleagues are Messenger, Hangouts, and Threema. I haven't used Slack in years, since I left tech. I've never seen anyone use WhatsApp in real life, or heard anyone ask that I install it. I occasionally use the Messages app but usually just for SMS.
There's probably 10 or 12 different incompatible chat systems in common use today, and which 3-4 you use on a daily basis depends on your geography and culture and industry. And that's kind of awful.
I remember using Adium with Growl on Mac for MSN, IRC and AIM all in one - good ol' days :-) I think in the online gaming industry XMPP is still quite adopted - sadly it's not easy/straightforward to find out what server and port and auth to use, because game companies don't want to have another "bot" problem to deal with. AFAIK Twitch.tv uses a slightly customized IRC for their sidebar chat while Blizzard (WoW, Overwatch, Diablo etc) XMPP.
Adium was / is such a fantastic piece of software. Connect to every relevant chat service from one native app. Infinite ways of customization, plugins and themes to install and all accounts under one unified contact list.
The post made me feel sad—realizing what we had, and lost. Back when MSN (Was the de facto standard in Austria when the IM services got popular) a large chunk of my waking hours and nights were spend chatting with friends on Adium and later IRC.
I just started Adium that I keep migrating from computer to computer to keep my custom icon even though I don't use it (Nostalgia I guess) and the apart from nobody being online the only message that greeted me was the ICQ message that it was turned off.
Reuben Hersh has written about something to one side of this in mathematics: if you drive your specialisation narrow enough, you wind up in a room where perhaps only 2-3 people can talk to you cogently. Maybe this is part of things?
I overlapped with you on at least two people on that list, because of IETF but I maintain functional overlap with them on the margins. The rest have absolutely no contextual reason to know I exist and vice-versa.
(Of course there are several everyone knows exist, but it is a highly a-symmetrical relationship because a time when I would have need to speak to TBL and he have need to reply has long since passed, back in the 1990s and it never happened at the time)
So the author raises three points. One, is the death of open bus methods like XMPP. iMessage, Google Hangouts, use the underlying protocol but in a way which excludes exterior binding easily (Apple is a closed garden looking out)
WhatsApp uses signal, but anchors in a keypair nobody else can use. Signal is about as open as it gets. These protocols improve on XMPP because they implement things like key exchange and Forward security in ways I believe work. I have no doubt XMPP encompasses this, but the client implementations seem a bit fuzzy. Adium's 'deniable chat' thing never really took off did it?
Secondly, Adium is functionally orphanware. I use it, but it doesn't seem to get love and attention.
Lastly, there is an age effect. I had a circle of 40-50 people I held close, I now hold very few people close and I don't feel a grumpy curmudgeon, its just hard to maintain tenuous links. S/W can only mediate so much. (I'm 57 btw and I used BSD 'talk' and UNIX 'write' for years in the eighties and nineties on ARPAnet and JANET to do this, before chat protocols emerged from the BBS world)
It's funny this post is being created now. Google Hangouts was the primary method that my wife and I used to chat. I could talk to my wife while she was at work, even if I had no idea where my phone was. Its shutdown prompted me to look for an alternative. We ended up switching to an XMPP client, and we plan on creating an XMPP server for ourselves on a cloud instance so we know the conversation won't be intercepted by non-state actors.
I don't know if it will ever reach the popularity it once had, but XMPP is useful to us at least.
It's amazing to me how many online friends I've lost contact with due people moving on from ICQ and AIM.
Back in the early 2000s, due to online gaming and hobby software development, Trillian would regularly have around 50 people online. These were not people I "collected", they were people I actively talked to for a variety of reasons: gaming, side projects, etc.
But then I got a job. Got a girlfriend. Got married. I got busy. I stopped logging in for about 4-5 years.
Around 2010 I was reminiscing a bit about the old times, and I reinstalled everything. There were only 3 people on AIM. Zero on ICQ. Oh well.
Most of my long-time friends are in a private Slack we are all logged onto 365 days a year. Of course, Tim's connections span a wider relationship gradient, and I just don't have any equivalent to it other than LinkedIn chat (which has its own share of problems, since not everyone I worked with actually uses it - or cares about it).
(I also used to work at a place which maintained its own XMPP client - we open-sourced it on GitHub, but apparently new management decided to retire the repo... here's a fork for posterity: https://github.com/yaye729125/sapo-messenger-for-mac)
However, he does raise an interesting point - the Internet is less social these days, either due to baloonning growth or lack of depth, and it diminishes us somewhat. I swapped some e-mails with Tim, and Aaron, and a few other greats (a couple on Tim's list, too), but those interactions were always fundamentally different from "open" chat.
This reminds me of my time at the university. Everyone there was using IRC, and not just somehow using it, everyone had an instance of irssi running inside screen on the university's unix servers. When you were done chatting, you'd simply detach from the screen and irssi would keep on running on the background making sure you were always up to date.
The first thing that freshmen learnt was how to do just that. Windows users would install PuTTy and others, like me, would learn how to install and run Linux. Every community had its own channel, private or public, and life was good.
During my exchange year I was shocked to discover that this wasn't a standard practice in every university. The people at the other (non-technical) university were using a mixture of Skype and Facebook to communicate, but non of the feeling of being one big community was there.
I helped start a independent IRC network more than a decade ago, for a closed group of people/geeks.
It’s still going, but we’ve been able to observe other services draw some of those original people away. Or maybe family or real life did.
Either way, few of the original servers are still are around, same with the oppers.
The net is still there though, and so are many of our old users. Or should I say friends?
God knows how long I’ve known them now.
It's all pseudonyms or handles like the internet originally was, but it certainly feels more real than Facebook despite their "real name" policy and all that nonsense.
IMO this is one of the key value propositions of Facebook. Almost everyone has it, it doesn't change or get lost when you lose your phone (like a phone number can), and it's likely to be around for a long time. It's excellent for remaining in touch with the long tail of friends that you might otherwise lose contact with.
While this is very much true now, it's worth remembering that this isn't some kind of Facebook secret sauce. You found all your friends on Facebook. You could find them again, yes even the long-lost ones, on whatever the hip new thing is.
ICQ/AIM died when Microsoft made Window come with their own default IM. Then people somehow moved over to Skype, then Microsoft bought skype, but screwed up, so people moved elsewhere. And Facebook happened. And smartphones happened. I think you can still reach most people via Facebook. IRC is also going strong! Gaming communities use VoIp services so they can talk in real time while playing games, there are a bunch of services targeting gamers exclusively. Old people still use mailing lists. Young people no longer use e-mail. XMPP is too damn complicated. We need something more simple, that use mostly direct connections (P2P) so public servers only are needed for discovery and NAT punching. The ID could be a public key hash, you just give the public key hash an alias on the client. Then the public key could also be used to encrypt messages. If you lose your private key you just make a new one, and tell your friends to add your new one.
Other services can then use the universal ID and peer discovery services to build functionality like sending files, sharing photo albums only accessible by a set of public keys that has to decrypt a challenge to gain access, etc.
I wonder if part of what caused this was poor mobile support for the existing standards. It makes sense that the companies would be incentivized to make chat applications that were not interoperable, but I think the really bad state of existing standards allowed this door to be more open than it would have been otherwise.
[+] [-] yowlingcat|7 years ago|reply
Some of you will correctly point out that those communities are still there on IRC and in the forums right where I left off, ready to be picked up, and you're not wrong. I suppose it is me that has changed and gotten older as well, and the world doesn't feel as magical as it did at that time. My internet, its media, and the people I shared it just seemed to electrify me so much more. Now, everything feels so dull and grey. But, perhaps nothing has changed so much as what and how I consume. What would younger me think of the mindless, lazy way I consume content on social media, and my corporate job?
It would be really nice to see slow content and the digital village return again as cultural norms. Until then, I'll just have to make deliberate choices to choose them as I once did. I really wish I could make a time machine and talk to my younger self to knock some sense back into me. It's painful to look at how much fun I used to have with technology and how little I do now.
[+] [-] safog|7 years ago|reply
Life just became all about getting that next refresher, the next good rating / bonus, the next promo in an almost mindless push towards higher comps.
There isn't that sheer fascination / joy in discovering what you can do with technology anymore. Maybe it's because working in a generic big-co is intensely competitive and once you've given so much there, it's hard to come back home and engage in more deep thought. Maybe it's because we just got older, had families and do what normal adults do (reading some linux driver code at 2AM in the morning to get the wifi / trackpad working doesn't sound as fun anymore).
[+] [-] ekanes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|7 years ago|reply
I had this exact experience with DAoC and WoW - DAoC was a total grind, while WoW was a much better experience, but I still feel nostalgic for the experience of DAoC. I even tried going back to DAoC, but the grind was too much and the magic was gone.
I guess what we miss about "the old days" is not so much the technology, but the experience of being new at this, and the excitement of having this whole world open up to us.
I'd be interested to see if going back to before-Facebook tech will keep the magic alive? I somehow doubt it, but it's definitely a worthwhile experiment.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
It is a lost concept nowadays, but it's very possible a subsequent development to be a regression compared to what was before.
Sometimes in every way, sometimes in a few important ways.
[+] [-] brightball|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hprotagonist|7 years ago|reply
A friend of mine was actually online! So i IM'd him. I got a frantic phone call about 30 seconds later.
He'd long ago wired SMS notifications into AIM, forgotten that he had done it a decade or more ago, and was deeply confused until we walked through the possibilities.[+] [-] donatj|7 years ago|reply
They added me on Facebook. I was hopeful to keep in touch, but they've since disappeared off Facebook like a lot of my friends in the recent trend.
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CydeWeys|7 years ago|reply
I loved the IM era and it's a huge shame it's over. I don't have as many personal connections with people now as I did then. AIM, ICQ, and later Gtalk were all amazing.
[+] [-] pcurve|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tigershark|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meddlepal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nbaksalyar|7 years ago|reply
Some modern social networks have similar features, but I can’t imagine doing this in this age. And in the last 5 years I’ve never been contacted randomly by anyone either.
[+] [-] overthemoon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dharmab|7 years ago|reply
"Social Spaces and Payload Races" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hj1haLcdI0
"Secret Little Haven" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzHFRfOVOuQ
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
AIM/MSN days were so stupidly simple. Forced integration with real life made everything into pain and didn't improve relationships.
[+] [-] sodosopa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|7 years ago|reply
First half is definitely true :)
[+] [-] laumars|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umeshunni|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlgod|7 years ago|reply
There are some great clients for Android [2], iOS [3] and Linux/Windows [4] that support all the modern XEPs. Sadly, there aren't any mature, actively developed clients for OS X that I've found. Adium is pretty much abandoned. Monal is in active development though and seems promising.
It's so nice to use an open protocol with native clients. Most other self-hosted chat solutions require electron apps, which can be painful to use unless you have top of the line hardware.
[1] https://github.com/cullum/dank-selfhosted/blob/master/roles/...
[2] https://conversations.im/
[3] https://chatsecure.org/
[4] https://gajim.org
[+] [-] sweden|7 years ago|reply
I used to run my own Prosody server for some years before switching out to Matrix and there was nothing "easy" and "modern" with XMPP. Sure, I could get the fancy features such as end-to-end encryption, push notifications and file sharing... with Conversation for Android. But I could never properly sync my messages and conversations with a PC client.
I'm glad I don't have to deal with XMPP anymore, I know that the HN crowd likes to dream with it but the reality is that it was a major pain.
[+] [-] edhelas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|7 years ago|reply
Nowadays the first conversation I get to have upon meeting a new person is a long negotiation about what baroque, proprietary messaging app I will have to use to reach them. Sigh. At least we still have email...
[+] [-] cydonian_monk|7 years ago|reply
The balkanization of communications is real. I've become some sort of middleman/organizer in one of my hobby circles because I'm the only one who uses all of these disparate services; many of which I only use to connect to two or three folks.
[+] [-] JohnFen|7 years ago|reply
I skip that negotiation entirely by letting them know that if they want to talk to me, the options are SMS and email.
[+] [-] massivecali|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sir_Cmpwn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandov|7 years ago|reply
I've been thinking of learning how to use it, but the fact that it's not encrypted by default is off-putting. It's not IRC's fault though, considering when it was designed.
[+] [-] jwr|7 years ago|reply
Pendulums swing back.
[+] [-] ken|7 years ago|reply
> now everybody needs to use a mix of iMessage, WhatsApp, and Slack
It's funny whenever I see someone list the chat systems that "everybody needs to use" because they're always different.
The top chat systems that I need to use to communicate with my friends/colleagues are Messenger, Hangouts, and Threema. I haven't used Slack in years, since I left tech. I've never seen anyone use WhatsApp in real life, or heard anyone ask that I install it. I occasionally use the Messages app but usually just for SMS.
There's probably 10 or 12 different incompatible chat systems in common use today, and which 3-4 you use on a daily basis depends on your geography and culture and industry. And that's kind of awful.
[+] [-] orliesaurus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dewey|7 years ago|reply
The post made me feel sad—realizing what we had, and lost. Back when MSN (Was the de facto standard in Austria when the IM services got popular) a large chunk of my waking hours and nights were spend chatting with friends on Adium and later IRC.
I just started Adium that I keep migrating from computer to computer to keep my custom icon even though I don't use it (Nostalgia I guess) and the apart from nobody being online the only message that greeted me was the ICQ message that it was turned off.
[+] [-] ggm|7 years ago|reply
I overlapped with you on at least two people on that list, because of IETF but I maintain functional overlap with them on the margins. The rest have absolutely no contextual reason to know I exist and vice-versa.
(Of course there are several everyone knows exist, but it is a highly a-symmetrical relationship because a time when I would have need to speak to TBL and he have need to reply has long since passed, back in the 1990s and it never happened at the time)
So the author raises three points. One, is the death of open bus methods like XMPP. iMessage, Google Hangouts, use the underlying protocol but in a way which excludes exterior binding easily (Apple is a closed garden looking out)
WhatsApp uses signal, but anchors in a keypair nobody else can use. Signal is about as open as it gets. These protocols improve on XMPP because they implement things like key exchange and Forward security in ways I believe work. I have no doubt XMPP encompasses this, but the client implementations seem a bit fuzzy. Adium's 'deniable chat' thing never really took off did it?
Secondly, Adium is functionally orphanware. I use it, but it doesn't seem to get love and attention.
Lastly, there is an age effect. I had a circle of 40-50 people I held close, I now hold very few people close and I don't feel a grumpy curmudgeon, its just hard to maintain tenuous links. S/W can only mediate so much. (I'm 57 btw and I used BSD 'talk' and UNIX 'write' for years in the eighties and nineties on ARPAnet and JANET to do this, before chat protocols emerged from the BBS world)
[+] [-] drankula3|7 years ago|reply
I don't know if it will ever reach the popularity it once had, but XMPP is useful to us at least.
[+] [-] sbov|7 years ago|reply
Back in the early 2000s, due to online gaming and hobby software development, Trillian would regularly have around 50 people online. These were not people I "collected", they were people I actively talked to for a variety of reasons: gaming, side projects, etc.
But then I got a job. Got a girlfriend. Got married. I got busy. I stopped logging in for about 4-5 years.
Around 2010 I was reminiscing a bit about the old times, and I reinstalled everything. There were only 3 people on AIM. Zero on ICQ. Oh well.
[+] [-] rcarmo|7 years ago|reply
(I also used to work at a place which maintained its own XMPP client - we open-sourced it on GitHub, but apparently new management decided to retire the repo... here's a fork for posterity: https://github.com/yaye729125/sapo-messenger-for-mac)
However, he does raise an interesting point - the Internet is less social these days, either due to baloonning growth or lack of depth, and it diminishes us somewhat. I swapped some e-mails with Tim, and Aaron, and a few other greats (a couple on Tim's list, too), but those interactions were always fundamentally different from "open" chat.
[+] [-] jifu|7 years ago|reply
The first thing that freshmen learnt was how to do just that. Windows users would install PuTTy and others, like me, would learn how to install and run Linux. Every community had its own channel, private or public, and life was good.
During my exchange year I was shocked to discover that this wasn't a standard practice in every university. The people at the other (non-technical) university were using a mixture of Skype and Facebook to communicate, but non of the feeling of being one big community was there.
[+] [-] josteink|7 years ago|reply
It’s still going, but we’ve been able to observe other services draw some of those original people away. Or maybe family or real life did.
Either way, few of the original servers are still are around, same with the oppers.
The net is still there though, and so are many of our old users. Or should I say friends?
God knows how long I’ve known them now.
It's all pseudonyms or handles like the internet originally was, but it certainly feels more real than Facebook despite their "real name" policy and all that nonsense.
[+] [-] nicoburns|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianwawok|7 years ago|reply
https://gizmodo.com/1-in-4-americans-really-have-deleted-fac...
[+] [-] dTal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josteink|7 years ago|reply
Especially the teens are gone, but increasingly so is the 20-40 segment.
[+] [-] z3t4|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cabalamat|7 years ago|reply
There was also a time when services supported RSS for similar reasons.
Sadly the web became dominated by a few big players who want to make everything their own walled gardens to keep competition out.