Seeing hexchat always gives me a pang of nostalgia for hours spent as a teen on various IRC channels. I know that even if I went back to some of those servers I wouldn't be able to recapture the same "magic" since it was primarily the people there (and besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days), but I do miss the simplicity of IRC as a protocol and the massive variety of clients and interfaces.
Maybe matrix will recapture some of that platform-agnosticism? I haven't used it in a while and the general sentiment around the protocol seems vaguely negative these days (at least in channels like HN).
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