Back in the day I was in the IRC book piracy scene. "Ebooks" weren't out yet. So someone would scan a book page by page. Then they would hand it off for editing basically. First revision was the straight OCR (Optical Character Reader), then usually someone would do a pass through to take out any weird characters and what not. That second revision would then be handed off to someone like myself who would read the actual book and correct any typos the OCR created. I read books on a Palm Pilot.

Just one time I want someone to write a love letter to some old technology and for it to just be an actual love letter and just like some psycho who is literally in love with some protocol and they're like talking about how hot the protocol is and how they wish they could just fuck it. Is that too much to ask?

I'm looking forward to IRC v3. It will bring modern chat features like threads and emoji reactions, and it might be time for a resurgence in its popularity

I <3 IRC

I still run my own server. My friends and I hang out and play with chat bots and send memes and comics back and forth. It's a pretty chill place to hang out, and it's super easy to self-host.

Go take back the web that was taken from you.

IRC rules! I just made a new channel to discuss degoogling -- come by and say hi! https://web.libera.chat/##degoogle

IRC is still awesome and I am have come back to it every time whatever new platform we try becomes shitty. I think I'll just stay put this time.

IRC continues to demonstrate the superiority of protocols over platforms. Unfortunately, the modern internet is entirely dominated by centralized platforms and that doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.

I still follow my early IRC friends on social media. It feels like most of them went on to be successful in the tech world. That wasn’t my path tho.

I'm still using IRC but the population there was reduced significantly when discord got popular. it's unfortunate

Shit provided me a social life in my teens. I still think of those guys sometimes.