Also the late 90's were such a different time aesthetically. You'd probably be lounging in your room on a blow up chair that strangely matched your iMac G3, writing in your paper journal, before you set up your LiveJournal in the evening and hung out on ICQ avoiding your physics homework. Oh to date oneself.
There were exceptions though. I unironically think the transparent graphite iMac and the transparent Apple Studio Display CRT still look good today in 2020.
I miss the y2k aesthetic, it was interesting and hopeful and weird. Right now all of our future leaning things feel more like despair than hope (cyberpunk as a genre is full of things to be avoided not things to hope for).
Yup, the future is looking pretty sinister these days. It’s all about tech being used to surveil and control people and parasitic companies commodifying the data they produce.
The free and open internet died when Facebook and social media became ubiquitous...it’s very much degraded since its heyday in the late-90s and early 2000’s. And who knew that the government would compel YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to censor content on their behalf.
Companies like Palintir are working with LEAs to develop pre-crime algorithms and there was a financial institution that recently floated the idea of using a person’s internet search history to rate their credit worthiness.
The tech “revolution” was a bait and switch scam. The internet, smart phones, social media etc. were sold as tools to complement life and make doing certain things easier and more convenient. Instead we got a system of control that makes us dependent on technology that has effectively replaced life with a degraded digital facsimile so that a bunch of parasitic middlemen can make a lot of money. Just look at Twitter, a platform that brings out the worst in people or Facebook, which openly manipulates its users psychologically.
We were promised a utopia but a dystopia is what we got. And now we’re stuck in it with no easy way out.
It's not at all surprising to see i2net and Tor growing, and people even putting Gopher servers and proxies back online.
Then again, I'm all about people putting information out there because they have something to share, not because their primary focus is "how can I monetize this?"
I can spend less on a VPS for a month than I can at a morning of Starbucks. I can do a whole lot more (and share a lot more) with the VPS. No expectation of making money from it either.
I still have mine. Well, it’s stuck in the office of a company I am no longer on good terms with. This made me start thinking about ways I could extract it!
LiveJournal wasn't actually launched until the spring of 1999, by which time ICQ was fading fast as the instant messenger of choice. Adoption of AIM and MSN Messenger was widespread, and many people used multi-protocol clients. (It was actually a golden age of instant messaging free of platforms and chat rooms.)
But yes, absolutely, all the chairs were inflatable. None of them survive. Actually that's how the standing desk was discovered.
There is hope! Matrix and its bridge ecosystem are growing and improving. Nova chat (no affiliation) are building their charged service on top of it. IIRC they also contribute to/sponsor the development of them.
The vast majority of the bridge work and maintenance is done single-handedly by tulir. It'd be awesome to see more capable individuals contributing :)
My bet is that having the French and German governments as paying clients will be a game-changer for Matrix. We've moved over to it internally, and I'm federating onto a couple of social channels; using Slack feels like chewing glass now, and if I could interact with my remaining Slack obligations from Element, I would.
Slack can be as hostile as they want, I welcome it in fact, because I want them to be unprofitable, hemorrhaging users, and eventually shut down. Best of all, there's only so much they can do in that department, while keeping all the bot integrations which are their only remaining (and fast eroding) edge.
Multiprotocol clients are a dead end. For a developers, it's a never-ending catch-up game against hostile adversary (original service is never happy with being used via third-party clients)
This is why I like the idea of plan 9 and file servers which provide a standard system wide interface to a thing such as a chat protocol. There is/was (cat and mouse) a discord file server which allows you to use any text handling interface such as a shell window or text editor as a chat client. There is also an IRC file server which does the same and acts as a bouncer giving you a persistent connection. So you can have a single acme window open writing code, chatting on irc and discord while checking email and composing an email. It's all text so treat is as such. Wild stuff.
I think most people would have better luck getting their friends on board with Matrix. Personally, I like XMPP more, but so far I've not found a client that gets as close to the discord experience as nearly all Matrix clients get.
I went back to IRC. Though there are channels which bridge IRC with matrix and/or discord (gross). That alows cantankerous users such as myself to interact with careless lusers ;-)
And eventually some of those lusers hop over, either out of necessity or because huge, featureful clients like Discord become distasteful to them. Of course, the real killer for me is voice/video and not text chat, and that I need something a bit more user friendly than Mumble for most of the people I talk to.
