
Graying Out - zdw
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2019/03/11/Lights-Going-Out
======
yowlingcat
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.

~~~
safog
+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).

~~~
richardw
I'd urge you to find something to tinker with. I've lost that magic a few
times in my career but this last year I've started tinkering with machine
learning, a side web app for finding lost pets and in the last week the
ESP8266 chip for a few home experiments.

Here's why. The apps are a nice distraction. You can forget about the work
stresses and just play a bit. You loved this stuff for a reason, I think you
can get that back. You also have more control in your own projects. No
committee.

46 this month. Not super old but old enough to know what jaded feels like!

------
hprotagonist
The day AIM died, I logged in one last time.

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.

~~~
donatj
I was on AIM the day it went offline. Ran into a person who was very important
to me and my development. Reminisced for a couple hours.

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.

~~~
war1025
I've found that it's difficult to keep in touch with a lot of people that I'd
like to because Facebook chat is really the only widely used chat service at
this point, and many of the people I'd like to talk with have decided that
they don't want anything to do with Facebook.

Lost touch with quite a few past friends from that

~~~
keerthiko
facebook is in the uncanny valley of achieving its goal of universally
connecting people but disconnecting people even more because it was so close
to universally connecting people.

~~~
peteradio
its like they succeeded and then totally fucked it up. greed just gobbled that
engine up.

------
ravenstine
The internet was way more social before "social media" came along.

~~~
CydeWeys
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.

~~~
tapoxi
My issue with modern "chat apps" is they usually fail to let you know if
someone is up for a conversation. Presence is reduced from "I'm available,
let's talk!" to "last online".

If I don't know if someone is up for chatting, I'm not going to start a
conversation with them, in case I bother them.

~~~
cableshaft
Yeah. You just explained why I haven't talked to hardly anyone on Facebook
chat anymore. I don't know that they're actively wanting to chat, just that
they're on Facebook, possibly just passively browsing things. I still ping
people on Facebook chat, but only if I need to ask them something or want to
share something I discovered with them specifically. I used to chat with
several people every night in my youth. I don't have quite as much time to do
that anymore, but I do have _some_ time. I'd love to know who actively wants
to talk with people.

------
perlgod
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.

[1] [https://github.com/cullum/dank-
selfhosted/blob/master/roles/...](https://github.com/cullum/dank-
selfhosted/blob/master/roles/prosody/templates/prosody.cfg.lua.j2)

[2] [https://conversations.im/](https://conversations.im/)

[3] [https://chatsecure.org/](https://chatsecure.org/)

[4] [https://gajim.org](https://gajim.org)

~~~
sweden
"Easily" and "modern" chat experience with XMPP?

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.

~~~
pgeorgi
> it was a major pain

It demonstrated that it can overcome major pain points though: Gajim
(Desktop), Conversations (Android) and Monal (iOS) [edit to add: and
conversejs on the web] cooperate quite well these days.

Matrix? Let's see how they overcome their first major paradigm shift (such as
the introduction of mobile devices with spotty ever-changing network
environments, or E2E encryption both of which took a while for XMPP to handle
gracefully)

~~~
dasyatidprime
E2E hasn't come gracefully to _me_ yet, because my Pidgin still only has OTR
support, and so does the one one of my primary Jabber contacts uses, except
Conversations has now dropped it in favor of going all-OMEMO. My current
answer is to ignore the mobile case like I did most of the time before, but
that's not a _good_ answer.

I guess maybe I need to switch to Gajim, but this sure isn't frictionless,
mostly due to the lag-induced fragmentation.

~~~
elagost
Pidgin has OMEMO support.

[https://github.com/gkdr/lurch](https://github.com/gkdr/lurch)

This works fairly well for me.

~~~
dasyatidprime
I know you mean well, and I'm glad this exists and that you reminded me of it
(I now remember having seen it before), but this isn't enough to invalidate my
point. The installation instructions are… barely okay. AUR… okay, I guess.
What would people on Debian-based platforms, like the very popular Ubuntu, do?
Compile from source?

Let's see what the README says: “I know this is a bit clunky, but using the
command interface for interactions makes the plugin usable in clients that do
not have a GUI.”

So now I get to explain this to the _other_ people I was using Pidgin+OTR with
too, right? (Also I get to have to remember what the commands are, because I
won't be using them frequently.)

I mean, this can also be phrased as one of the disadvantages of being part of
the earlier installed base, but on a wider scale, buildup of legacy resistance
_is_ one of the things that you wind up having to overcome if you want to
introduce new features that aren't strictly optional—which is kind of why we
still don't really have secure email that doesn't take massive cognitive
overhead in “remembering which things people are using” and massive social
overhead in negotiating about it and being prepared for all sorts of
responses.

(Added:) And to make sure I'm not accidentally taking this into the weeds, the
_incompatibility_ was introduced AFAIK when Conversations dropped OTR. That
means any Pidgin clusters suddenly take on a big UI and polish downgrade for
their E2E if they want to stay interoperable. I'm not meaning to criticize
this specific plugin so much as to point out that there wasn't enough overall
coordination between seemingly-major clients to stop this from happening.

------
smacktoward
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...

~~~
cydonian_monk
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.

~~~
asdff
Who are you in contact with? Tech workers with enough autonomy to fall off the
map without consequence? I can't think of anyone I know who doesn't get
critical emails that require a reply. You'd fail college without checking
emails. You won't get hired if you don't check your emails. You'd get fired
from my job without checking emails. You'd fall out of touch with
collaborators in the field without checking emails. Who are these people who
refuse to check emails, and what do they possibly do that gives them this
privilege of avoiding the most basic and fundamental electronic communication?
It seems just absurd to me.

~~~
javagram
Many people get an overwhelming amount of email.

Also once you move from college into the working world you have a work email
separate from home email typically. I check my work email daily of course
since it’s critical to my job, but I can go days without checking personal
emails.

Most of the content of my personal email is hardly time sensitive and a lot of
it is advertising or news I haven’t opted out of (although I have gmail
filters and tabs). It’s not like IM where I would use to check and respond
immediately because I only ever got messages from friends.

~~~
asdff
I will admit I have a burner gmail for account signups with like 18k unread
messages, but I've resigned that email to the advertising spam dogs a decade
ago.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
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.

~~~
nvr219
where do i go to make friends on irc

~~~
jackfraser
#yospos on synirc

~~~
nvr219
that's my favorite

------
jwr
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.

Pendulums swing back.

~~~
fumar
I agree. How do we start the movement back to a more decentralized software
daily life. This is solely a feeling: I remember my youth being filled with an
ever-changing and growing amount web portals, communication tools, and methods
of of sharing data (music). Today, a few big entities control all of those
experiences. I don't think my life is any better for having a Google
controlled cloud service (gdrive) vs another open source or vendor solution. I
found it enthralling to be online and discovering new experiences as a kid.
Somehow that is gone today. Could just be my age.

~~~
jethro_tell
A big thing here is a huge chunk of the internet is getting content discovery
from just a couple places with ulterior motives. We used to seek out people
who made good content and add it to a hand managed rss feed, I used to peruse
1000 articles and posts a week from friends, people that I trusted, people
that I distrusted, scientific journals, and niche hobbies. I talked to someone
this week that wasy saying they wouldn't even know how to find new music
without youtube. 10 years younger than me and discovery is a lost art. I'm not
sure what resets this, and I fear the very idea of it will be completely lost
in the near future.

~~~
asdff
You can follow virtually anything on RSS still. Blogs, every biology journal
that I know of, pubmed or google scholar search term RSS feeds (super useful,
can be a topic, journal, even author), subreddits, HN, youtube channels,
twitter, email newsletters (kill the newsletter), the list goes on and on and
there are even services to turn things that don't have RSS feeds into an RSS
feed (like kill the newsletter). My workflow is have things categorized in
inoreader and push interesting articles to pocket (or just open the HN/reddit
thread). No paywall, and no ads. There's never been a better time to follow
RSS feeds.

Your discovery would be from either your own search engine cleverness derived
from spotting a topic in your articles, or directly shared to you by what you
follow, like good topics in HN. NYT and LA times are both really good at
sharing content from other newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other sources in
their newsletters (which I follow via an atom feed from kill the newsletter).

Facebook, twitter, youtube, and the ilk are all pretty poor at discovery, to
be honest. Discovery to the decision makers at these platforms is more towards
manipulating into more and more advertising engagement than any knowledge
dissemination.

------
ken
The first comment there:

> _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.

~~~
qwerty9876
WhatsApp is a non-US thing. In Europe, it has de facto replaced SMS

~~~
noobermin
Ditto in Asia. In Singapore, no one texts and hardly use fb messenger but
whatsapp use is prevalent.

~~~
OnlyLys
Same thing in neighbouring Malaysia. Everyone operates under the assumption
that you are contactable via WhatsApp. Recently I even had doctor and car
service appointments booked through WhatsApp.

------
orliesaurus
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.

~~~
Macha
Twitch uses IRC (which you can connect to with a regular IRC client, but you
have to authenticate with a code somewhere from their website), which is nice
as a occasional small streamer as it's the only way to see chat and the user
list active in chat at the same time.

~~~
mfkp
Check out Chatty: [https://chatty.github.io](https://chatty.github.io)

------
dewey
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.

------
ggm
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)

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
Signal is a closed network, and doesn't permit people to build clients that
run on their network.

You can fork Signal, but your fork won't be able to talk with any Signal
users. [https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/](https://lwn.net/Articles/687294/)

------
drankula3
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.

~~~
PaulHoule
For all of the despair that people are expressing I think quite a few people
are going back to Gopher, XMPP and other open and efficient (e.g. not
"blockchain") protocols.

~~~
jethro_tell
I run a gopher site/hole. but like, the users for that would be a small
percentage even on a site like HN. In the wild, I'm going to guess it hasn't
cracked a point.

Not exactly a renascence.

------
sbov
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.

------
rcarmo
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](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.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
Slack is so hard for me to follow. Some friends of mine use it and every time
I open it there’s 50+ new messages and I just don’t know how to participate.

~~~
tra3
Just jump in, whenever. I have a private whatsapp chat with a set of friends
from highschool/university and sometimes I come back to hundreds of unread
messages. Just skip to the end. It's like a conversation at a party, you're
not supposed to follow every single thread.

It's certainly better than seeing them every few months (kids, etc).

------
jifu
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.

------
josteink
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.

------
nicoburns
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.

~~~
josteink
That was true a few years ago, but definitely not anymore.

Especially the teens are gone, but increasingly so is the 20-40 segment.

~~~
lucb1e
Right, people hate it for a hundred other reasons. But I have a Facebook name
that I can give to a stranger on the street and then negotiate which chat to
use. That everyone has it and you see their rough location and such, is where
it has some value even for a FOSS and self-host nut as I.

~~~
akeck
I'm still an FB "monthly active user", in that I use it about once a month. As
people have dropped off in my circles, one-per-month has become more than
enough to catch up.

~~~
asdff
I'm in the same boat. Hardly using the site really shows how poor it has
become. I'll pop in once a month to 50+ 'notifications,' only to find 48 of
them will be "Josh posted a photo" or "Jake liked a post" despite that setting
to turn off friend activity notifications turned off. I don't even bother with
scrolling through the feed. Why should I? It is in no particular sort, I
frequently scroll over the same five posts, and somehow every third post is an
advertisement now. It would take hours now to 'catch up' just from all the
pollution you have to sift through to see actual original content posted by
your friends directly.

I used to be able to run through the news feed in like 5-10 minutes back when
it was chronological and sponsored content was not passed around the site like
a venereal disease. Why even bother now?

------
z3t4
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.

~~~
agumonkey
That's true ... I remember now how I didn't want a hotmail account at first
but gradually other chat systems became silent so I migrated.

------
fossuser
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.

~~~
rubyn00bie
A lot of people didn’t understand it then.

Text messaging, in the pre-iPhone era, is what killed IM... and then it “came
back” so to speak as a contentious feature of mobile phones (iMessage,
Hangouts).

Text messaging won because everyone had a phone number and smart-phones/data
services were seen by the masses as unnecessary or a luxury. When most people
send a “text” they’re sending an IM be it over WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal,
Hangouts (or whatever google’s is these days), Slack, etc so it really does
suck we’ve gone full circle ended up where we started.

From the sounds of it, looks like it’s time for some work on making XMPP sexy.

~~~
chrisfinazzo
That's true and certainly the "global protocol" for lack of a better term on
iOS is iMessage. Either using a phone # or email it doesn't matter, and they
managed to get 95% of the people all talking to each other.

<Insert speculation about the total # of iMessage users being more than
possibly either Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn>

That said, although people might be wary of the dominant messaging platform
coming from the OS vendor, I don't see how Google can really connect everyone
unless they are the ones who do it.

If only their messaging strategy was consistent - and not half assed, they
might get somewhere.

~~~
asdff
iMessage is only popular because it functions exactly the same as SMS on an
iphone aside from the color of your chat bubble, and the software defaults to
it over SMS. If Apple separated iMessage and SMS into two apps, it would have
failed.

~~~
jethro_tell
What's crazy, is google is still trying to figure out how to get
sms/chat/video call into a single app like 7 years later. How can this be so
hard to see as adding massive value? my iFriends have had iMessage for half a
decade, and I've seen so many chat apps from google I've given up and gone
with something else in the mean time.

~~~
fossuser
The saddest part of this to me is that Google had a huge head start with
Google Voice which they let languish for years. When I realized I was being
silently dropped from group messages because they were MMS and voice couldn't
support it (which lead to people thinking I was ignoring them) I moved
everything to Apple.

Since then they've released and killed a bunch of chat applications that have
all been pretty poor - as an outsider it seems like something is pretty wrong
with how they're handling that strategy.

~~~
jethro_tell
And what's crazy, is it's so obvious, and so easy that every other chat app
out there has basically converged on exactly the same fucking thing.

------
cabalamat
> There was a time when commercial chat services supported XMPP because it was
> felt to be the right thing to do.

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.

------
jedberg
The only reason my Adium still has anyone at all is because a lot of people
sign into Google Talk automatically when they open Gmail and don't realize it.
Otherwise my list would be mostly barren.

~~~
pvorb
I thought Google had retired GTalk sometime in their move to Google+,
Hangouts, etc.? Is it still working via XMPP?

------
golemotron
> once you get past Global Warming and deranged chiefs of state, the
> atomization of the social fabric is high, high on the list. I haven’t fought
> hard enough to stay connected (not alone in that). And time grows short.

Predicted in 'Atomised', by Michel Houellebecq

~~~
icebraining
The increasing atomization of society has been discussed since at least _The
Lonely Crowd_ (1950).

------
jillesvangurp
It's a generational thing; growing old and inflexible means that the
enthusiasm that caused you to adopt tools 10-20 years ago is gone and you no
longer jump onto new platforms and tools like you used to.

The number of programmers doubles every 5 years. So, people (mostly techies,
lets be honest) using stuff like xmpp ten years ago are outnumbered by
millenials dominating the scene today that never used that. They use other
stuff and are chatting more than ever. Stubbornly hanging on to IRC, Adium, or
other ancient shit simply means you are not part of the conversation anymore.

I uninstalled Adium half a decade ago.

~~~
klohto
> The number of programmers doubles every 5 years.

Source? This might have been true few years ago but there seems to be an
opposite trend.

~~~
jillesvangurp
[http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-
bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html](http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-
bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html)

Uncle bob. This is five years ago, so if you have numbers that prove the
opposite, now would be a good time to point that out.

------
newsgremlin
To me it feels like many of the relationships/groups you have and people you
meet in life is temporary, and the amount of effort you make to keep in touch
can sometimes never be enough to keep in touch with people that just naturally
drift away.

I think with IM the issue is that you don't necessarily "cross paths" with
people you know unless intentional. It requires some openness, sincerity and a
bit of humility to make that contact, which I feel is more stigmatized, even
though that kind of approach would mean people would _want_ to talk to each
other.

It's the type of thing you don't get with modern internet walled gardens and
I've put more appreciation and effort to the face-to-face interactions than
the ones I do with a screen. But I do miss having interactions with people
that had all the same interests as myself, perhaps that's the real difference,
restrictions of the real world mean people with the same interests and world
view are limited in number and availability by virtue of proximity. Comparing
these experiences can warp your view of the world and make you question what
you actually value.

------
gumby
I find it weird that email started as an open protocol; various companies
tried to make their own private communities but those eventually dwindled and
transferred to SMTP.

Why did realtime chat fail to take the same path? I assumed it would.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Technically, it did: Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has been an RFC for over a
quarter of a century. To me, at least, it's an interesting question why IRC
never really broke out of "only nerds need apply" status.

~~~
dcbadacd
Because:

* No clients support multimedia - animated GIFs, videos, audio, images, video/audio calls - only Quassel has web previews and that's about it

* E2E encryption doesn't exist properly

* Signing up to protect usernames is a pain in the ass, especially if people span networks and assuming networks even have something like NickServ

* Users are require to have a bouncer to have some chat persistence

* No clients offer convenience features such as search

* It's a pain in the ass to manage channels to __just chat __

* Clients can 't handle mobile connections well

I'm sure I've forgotten other problems the protocol has.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I'm not sure any of those are issues that couldn't have been addressed by now
through a new version of the protocol, though; what I'm trying to get it is
that it's sort of weird to me that IRC in 2019 isn't materially different than
IRC in 1994. IRCv3 addresses a whole lot of those problems, for instance, and
there's nothing that technically could have prevented it from addressing them
10 years ago.

~~~
dcbadacd
IRCv3 brings a bunch of really nice features I'm so happy to have, but it's
really the clients that need a lot of work in addition to just IRCv3 features.
Image, video and audio inlining is still something that no client does and the
standard can't help with and that's a huge con for most users.

What the standard could help with is standardizing markdown formatting, some
method of E2E encryption, better SASL (with registration, key rollover/update
and distribution between your clients).

------
3pt14159
The reason this happened is very simple. Notifications on platforms like iOS
are only possible with installed apps and a server somewhere that's capable of
sending notifications.

XMPP was great, it even had polling options for people behind shitty
firewalls, but at the end of the day it wasn't possible to drop in a XMPP
client and have it receive notifications without server support. This
inherently balkanized messaging to each individual app. Further, the browser
made installing applications locally a lesser-done thing, and since browsers
weren't complex enough when the transition was happening (they didn't have
notifications or LocalStorage at the time) an XMPP client in the browser alone
(ie, sans coordinating server) wasn't possible.

There will be a solution one day though. Some entity always figures out a way
to aggregate the things people want aggregated. If I had to guess I'd put my
money on the OS, since there is no way to hide from it. In a fight between
Apple and FaceBook I know who wins. The future looks like Her (2014).

------
kuon
I lost contact with many people since the death of ICQ, AIM, MSN and google
chat. But I was able to find some of them on discord.

I like discord, but it saddens me greatly that it's not an open service. I
wish matrix would have taken off earlier, now that everybody is on discord, I
have a hard time getting them on matrix.

------
sizzle
I think my friend cohort has just grown up and stopped prioritizing online
connections for starting a family. Even if AIM was still on today, I doubt I'd
have an away message and be on like I was in highschool living under my
parent's roof with no car or anything else to do besides homework.

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
I think this is the real source of nostalgia. Kids these days are presumably
still chatting to each other all day on the AIM of the era. Snapchat perhaps?

~~~
sizzle
Agreed. I've seen Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook messenger, and WhatsApp being
used regularly by younger people.

I don't know how I would navigate having so many chat platform options if I
was growing up today...

~~~
pvorb
AIM, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, Skype. There were as many options when I grew up.

~~~
icebraining
You forgot Yahoo! Messenger :)

------
_bxg1
"...because if chatterers can just go ahead and talk to anyone anywhere, then
your service probably won’t go viral and how are you going to monetize?"

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think the problem is
engineers, but capitalists. Specifically, grow-at-all-costs venture-
capitalists (and those at FAANG, of course). Engineers, for the most part,
just want to improve things. Increasing openness is one way of doing that. But
right now they're getting paid tons and tons of money to do the opposite.

~~~
ken
"Engineer" and "capitalist" aren't mutually exclusive categories. You can wave
money around all day but ultimately somebody with technical skills has to
write these applications and maintain these servers.

I don't know what RMS or Knuth are up to these days but I'm positive they're
not working at Slack.

~~~
_bxg1
The difference is in where someone's primary goal lies. I'd bet that the
majority of engineers in The Valley wish the tech industry was less
monopolized, more open, and had better privacy standards. Just look at the
sentiment of your average HN comment section. But those engineers also want to
have jobs doing what they like and to make a living, and while they could
arguably do more to put their ideals into action, they aren't the driving
force behind unbounded growth and corporate conquest; they just get paid by
it. Engineers can certainly become capitalists when power goes to their head -
just look at Mark Zuckerberg - but I don't think most of them are in it
primarily for the amassing of wealth and power.

~~~
ken
> But those engineers also want to have jobs doing what they like and to make
> a living

In the US, the average software engineer's salary is more than double the
average person's salary. Nobody who chooses to be a software engineer at any
of these companies has any trouble making a living. They could literally work
only half the year and still do just fine.

The fact that they're doing this all year tells me that either they are indeed
capitalists and wish to maximize their income, or building these proprietary
systems is in fact what they like to spend all their time doing.

> they aren't the driving force behind unbounded growth and corporate
> conquest; they just get paid by it

There's plenty of people in this world who have the skills to get paid far
more than they do, yet spend their time and energy doing something they find
more worthwhile. "We just get paid" is a dangerous slope to stand on.

How do you reconcile them as idealists who want less monopolization and more
openness and better privacy, yet at the same time aren't doing it for amassing
wealth? What other reason could there be for doing a job one doesn't want to
do?

> Just look at the sentiment of your average HN comment section.

People are notoriously bad at accurately explaining their own behavior.

~~~
_bxg1
> How do you reconcile them as idealists who want less monopolization and more
> openness and better privacy, yet at the same time aren't doing it for
> amassing wealth?

I never said they were all idealists. I'm saying being complacent to negative
change is different from actively driving it.

> What other reason could there be for doing a job one doesn't want to do?

I never said they didn't want to do the job, just that if it were up to them
they might do it differently. They're still building and improving systems,
just not in all of the ways they may want to.

I'm not painting people as angels and demons. I'm just tracing this phenomenon
down to its baseline driver.

------
dmitriid
I'm surprised he could keep the list for so long. I remember every time I
changed my computer or reinstalled the OS, only ICQ would diligently
repopulate the contacts list. Everyone else would have to be re-added
manually.

------
broabprobe
A big difference I see between the IM days and today is that there are no more
away/status messages. That’s something that really prevents me from chatting
with people over SMS/iMessage (the only universal ‘chat’ apps left in my
life). I think even though we’re all ‘always online’ these days, I would still
set my status to ‘available’ if I was online and wanted to chat. Just leave it
on ‘away’ or ‘busy’ for most of the day and then when you’re online and
wanting some real-time chat, open up your status and see who’s online. _sigh_

------
b3b0p
I completely forgot about Adium. If I remember, there was an iOS app too at
one point? Or there was a way to have it push messages to you phone when you
weren't at your computer?

Slack, Discord, Messenger, ... should have made Adium clients as alternative
to a full blown Electron App. That would have been pretty rad.

I clicked on the source link and development tab only to be greeted by an
expired security certificate error and broken Trac. I take that as it's not
maintained any more. Sigh, so sad.

------
Causality1
"These days, more and more are always grayed out, because they were on some
other service that’s no longer connected."

More likely people just stopped using instant messaging. Ubiquitous mobile
email, Facebook, and text messaging has not only replaced I stant messaging
but have shoved our social circle into a much narrower geographic circle. Back
in the day there might have been one person out of ten I talked to online that
I knew in person. Now it's just the opposite.

~~~
lucb1e
But.. facebook and sms _are_ instant messaging? I'm not sure what one you're
drawing.

~~~
Causality1
Different usage profile. Instant messaging was typically used for real time
conversations. Facebook messenger, Twitter DMs, etc are typically used for
delayed messaging, where the messages are longer and the sender may not expect
a reply for hours.

~~~
hombre_fatal
I grew up through AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, etc. and Facebook Messenger is used
the same exact way except that it has "offline receiving" which expands its
usefulness.

Maybe you are over-extrapolating from the fact that you stopped instant
messaging as you got older.

------
JustSomeNobody
I thought this was going to be another article about ageism in tech. It may
still be, but in another way, I suppose.

Good article. I liked it.

~~~
jimmcslim
I had the same fear myself... I thought if Tim Bray can’t find a job as an
older tech worker, what chance do the rest of us have?

------
rapfaria
So, anyone knows what happened to Mark Pilgrim after all these years?

~~~
almost_usual
Believe he works for Brave now

[https://github.com/pilgrim-brave](https://github.com/pilgrim-brave)

~~~
r_klancer
Interestingly, just yesterday I was wondering what happened to Jon Udell (whom
I used to read for his thoughtful perspective back in the aughts, but haven't
followed in a long time.)

Inspired by this post (he is listed among tbray's "grays") I checked him out.
Turns out he works for Brave too.

Also, TIL about Brave.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I think he works for Hypothesis, not Brave:

[https://web.hypothes.is/team/](https://web.hypothes.is/team/)

Hypothesis recently made their plugin compatible with Brave and Udell wrote a
blog post about that, as he appears to be a Brave user -- but I don't think he
works for them.

~~~
r_klancer
Oh, you're right. I was misled by the Brave post -- sad to say I'm _mostly_
unfamiliar with either project.

------
noobermin
An aside to the discussion about open standards and all that: As someone who
watch most of you from far away but was too young to join in, it always felt
like tech was this small group of people who all knew each other. Nowadays, it
seems rather crowded field, I'm surprised any of you keep track of each other.

------
terrywang
Haven't touched Pidgin or Adium for ages, although I've got them installed on
Linux and/or macOS (really liked them). The way of IM has changed, so many
social features added into IM making it more like a social chat profile
presence... As we leap into the mobile age, also, over the last few years,
services like Google Talk (XMPP).

IM services used on a daily basis: Slack, WhatsApp/WeChat, Keybase chat (for
serious stuff). Sometimes I still use IRC, very rare though.

~~~
jethro_tell
Wait a second, all of that social stuff can be in pidgin as well. It's been
added to every proprietary client, usually as a repeat, but platforms all have
the idea of sharing a photo, liking/loving/laughing at a comment, video chats.
What am I missing that is creating lock in other than the creators themselves
creating lock in?

------
wazoox
I've made so many real-life friends on Usenet. I miss that. I meet them IRL
from time to time, but we don't have any online community to match anymore.

~~~
jethro_tell
I'm still in 3 IRC rooms, I meet up with a few of the people a couple
times/year. It's nice, it's still out there, but it's not quite the same any
longer.

------
ctruelson
I remember a friend of mine using Adium to send me Twitter DMs. Looks like
they still have some type of support for it
([https://adium.im/help/pgs/ServiceInformation-
TwitterSupport....](https://adium.im/help/pgs/ServiceInformation-
TwitterSupport.html)). Maybe we’ll see less “graying out” if we link up our
twitter accounts to Adium.

------
beatpanda
I learned to write code because of a very different internet, and I feel like
if I'd grown up with the internet we have today I never would have bothered.
Interoperability and disintermediation were such powerful, intoxicating
concepts that I turned my entire life around and started writing software for
a living. These days, except for the money, it feels like a mistake.

------
lqet
ICQ recently disabled the OSCAR protocol, which means I am not able to use it
with Pidgin anymore (well, at least until someone writes a working plugin).

I really have to completely switch back to IRC, which is sort of protected
against this sort of thing because it is an RFC standard.

~~~
yxhuvud
> ICQ recently disabled the OSCAR protocol, which means I am not able to use
> it with Pidgin anymore

Which is a strange claim, as it seems to work for me. Got the message they
were turning it off, and then it just continued to work. _shrug_

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
From what I heard, you can still log in, but now if you try to send a message,
it'll tell you that it's no longer supported. I imagine this behavior will
eventually change.

~~~
yxhuvud
Message sending also works.

------
ptman
Matrix + bridges should help us technically oriented people connect with
friends regardless of what they use. There are bridges for slack, IRC,
facebook messenger, whatsapp, xmpp, gitter and many more.

------
idbentley
Makes me think about the stratification issues I have on my phone these days -
some conversations in What'sApp, Telegram, Signal, Riot.im not to mention text
messages, email etc.

Becomes exhausting.

------
lifeisstillgood
Wow - how did he ever get in touch with so many people, let alone stay in
touch and then be able to remember who they are and their potted histories

That is why I am bad at networking ...

------
sampleinajar
Interesting. I haven't used any chat clients in my personal life for 7 years
or so. I still have to use whatever my job prescribes, which is currently
Skype.

------
fierro
Not sure why, but this idea of reminiscing on the "old" internet reminds me of
old Runescape. If you know, you know.

------
JohnFen
The death of XMPP was what made me give up on chat applications entirely.

------
theoh
This just seems self-aggrandizing. There's always been something a bit off
about Tim Bray's self-presentation online. Not sure how self-aware the guy is.

------
elesbao
I felt sad...

~~~
woodrowbarlow
they're like digital avatar tombstones with greyed-out names and touching
pithy eulogies

------
buboard
Hey, there is twitter

(at least many of the ppl in the least have accounts there)

~~~
smacktoward
Oh good, just what I wanted, all my private conversations made public so that
dumb things I say to my friends can come back to haunt me years later and
hordes of howling idiots can shower me with death threats because I don't
agree with their deeply held opinions about the latest McMarvel movie.

Progress!

~~~
5874-4b22-a4e0
Just have everyone make a new account everyday. Help boost up the subscription
count to help existing shareholders. Two birds with one stone.

