Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

I don’t think we can go back to some things like ircd or mud talkers because they are too “chatty” to users. People like simplified centralized services with on screen discovery in the form of popups. The small internet will have to stay small

That'd be more than fine with me, except the small internet competes for attention with the rest of the internet and gets slaughtered by their attention-sucking applications with shiny animations, spammy push notifications, gamification and manipulative FOMO-inducing tricks. This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet.

User retention aside... Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore. (I can tell from search analytics!) So aside from a struggle to keep users engaged in small communities, there's also not very many users entering smaller communities either, certainly not enough to counteract the bleed.

Sounds like someone just hasn't come up with the right app to act as an abstraction layer over the protocol.

The other big problem with IRC is that if you have a connection interruption you miss messages.

>This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet.

This has been my lived experience with a few places the past couple of years, and I love it. It's a completely different experience from the "pop web" that most people use and it's amazing.

>Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore.

I know that my example can't speak for most/many other places, but the regional hiking forums I frequent (same places I alluded to above) come up a lot on search engines. Whether you're looking for "[region] hiking", or looking up "[name of] trail", or anything related to it, the pages pop up towards the top quite frequently. It's how I found them, and there does seem to be a steady number of new users joining.

We don't always need to know everything that happened all the time, whether it's online or meatspace happenings. If my IRC connection dropped back in the day, and there was something that happened in that timeframe that was truly worth hearing about, I'd find out eventually.

There's something to be said, at least in my opinion, about keeping a healthy dose of ephemerality in our lives.

Maybe it actually can be alright for a niche as relatively large as hiking, but I think it has done some real damage to smaller niches, which seem to struggle to maintain active forums.

Phones interrupt the connection every time you close the app, and if there's even a way to avoid this (yes on Android, no on iPhone) the user sees a notification that something is running in the background (fine) and their battery life is 80% less (not fine). The way IRC works is just inherently incompatible with the way mobile devices work, since IRC assumes stable endpoints. And because it's a protocol not a product, this can't be fixed.

Even if a new protocol was created which fixed this, the necessary design change would bring so much baggage that it would become Matrix. To solve the unstable endpoint problem, servers need to store messages until all endpoints retrieve them (which is never, for channels of non-trivial size, since at least one client isn't coming back) or time out (how long do you set that? a week? If you're holding all messages permanently, you might as well never time out clients).

The obvious storage design will hold each channel's messages once, not once per client connection buffer. Which means a lot of things: you might as well send it to new clients when they join; each message will have an ID so you might as well support replies and emoji reactions; you have to moderate it for illegal content; since messages have IDs, you might as well retract moderated messages on clients. At the end of the design process, what you have is nothing like IRC any more.

That's a fair point. WATMM, for instance, is finally calling it quits.

https://forum.watmm.com/

Regarding my comment, IRC was just a quick little example - to focus on that is to miss the forest for the trees.

The lack of connection is the point.

IRC means relay, so it makes sense to drop messages unless the service runs a pop mail server for out of band messages. Protocol means little to the user

... I know this. Again[1], not the point of my comment.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687028

Traditionally, on a desktop computer, you'd only appear on IRC when you were logged into your computer. With phones, this doesn't make sense any more.

I know - I was a longtime IRC user way back when. You're still not quite groking my point. Lemme try and make it a bit more clear:

OP lamented that things like IRC meant that if you weren't always connected, you'd miss messages.

I simply posited, from a philosophical perspective rather than the technical perspective you are focused on, that it's OK for us to not be connected all the time. That not everything we miss is as important as we feel it might be when we think about missing out. That the truly important details will make their way to us one way or another.

No, OP lamented that a "connection interruption" means you miss messages. You were participating in a conversation, but you don't receive the whole conversation because your connection was interrupted. It's much worse on phones, because your connection is interrupted every time you look something up on the web, check the weather, send a message on another app, or anything else.

>No, OP lamented that a "connection interruption" means you "lose" messages. You were participating in a conversation, but you don't receive the whole conversation because your connection was interrupted.

Again, I know this. And please don't mis-quote OP, they clearly said "miss", just like I said.

I've told you twice, now, that you're focusing so much on the technical aspect of a connection that you are completely missing the philosophical idea I have very clearly, also twice, suggested. How IRC works, on mobile and on desktop, is not the point. I don't know how else to explain myself, so I'm gonna move on. Hope you have a pleasant day.

Edit: For posterity's sake, OP's quote at the time of this this post is...

>... if you have a connection interruption you miss messages.

How is that any different than when you actually use an IRC client? You leave the chat, you leave the chat. If you're at a social gather or kick back or whatevs, if you leave the convo, the rest of the people in the group do not enter a freeze state until your return. The conversation keeps going. There's no history or log for you to scroll to catch up. You just re-enter the conversation. How you handle yourself at that point easily shows if you're nice or an asshole. Just like in IRC.