One and a half year ago, I built an (unofficial) bot, Ragebot [0], that would function as spam protection for the many bot accounts joining public Kik groups. The project took off and was added to hundreds of thousands of groups by Kik users.
Two days ago, Ted Livingston announced the closure and Kik has been chaos throughout ever since, with people adopting Discord and Telegram to retain their online friend circles.
One way in which Kik stood out from other popular chat clients was the ability to search for public groups. Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness, people could easily find peers with common interests and make friends.
It's a real shame that this platform has to go. At the moment not much information is available beyond Ted's original blog post, I hope more clarification will follow soon.
Searchable groups are an antifeature to me. They encourage random strangers to come and go which prevents ever building any sense of community. One of the things I like about the group chats I am in are that the same people are there from years ago.
I don't know... It's sometimes nice to be able to meet random strangers instead of remaining in your own filtered little bubble. My formative years were spent on IRC like a few of the other commenters here and I would judge that as a strictly positive experience.
Searchable (history) and notifiable. Really that's all IRC would need right now to catch up. And a dead simple app, kik was actually pretty close, groups were even named #groups. All other features are gimmicks.
I'm not sure that response is as helpful as you think it is. I'm pretty sure irc has searchable public groups fwiw. Pretty sure irc is text based group chat.
If there's something that kik gets you beyond irc it's completely unclear from this discussion what that might be. Whether or not I'm delusional, and I sure I am as delusional as anyone about certain things, your response isn't useful, informative, helpful or kind. But YMMV.
I mean, they had a shiny app, marketing, and I'd guess similar features the young target group appreciated. A lot of things are like IRC but preferred by the new generation. People don't often select apps based on their backend stack.
Two days ago, Ted Livingston announced the closure and Kik has been chaos throughout ever since, with people adopting Discord and Telegram to retain their online friend circles.
One way in which Kik stood out from other popular chat clients was the ability to search for public groups. Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness, people could easily find peers with common interests and make friends.
It's a real shame that this platform has to go. At the moment not much information is available beyond Ted's original blog post, I hope more clarification will follow soon.
[0] https://ragebot.net