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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

you ssh into your own trusted openbsd system, run bitchx and connect to efnet, just like the good lord intended back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

i am only partially sarcastic here.

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I do miss the mad west of the IRC/NNTP days. I also miss multiple search engines. Yahoo/Lycos/Hotbot/Dogpile/AltaVista all give you different results and you could have fun searching around.

The current Internet is a monoculture

You do realize that DDG is the modern incarnation of Dogpile?

Also, why are we pretending that Bing, Yandex and Baidu don't exist?

Because Yandex and Baidu give your data to some of the worst governments in the world.

NNTP, so awesome until 95% of its resources were consumed by its abuse as a file sharing platform for (naughty to nasty) images and pirated software and until power-hungry local group moderators started abusive banning/deleting practices against people who disagreed with their opinions on politics etc.

People want their own fluffy & safe social bubbles, not open, distributed networks.

IRC, so awesome, until local server admins began k-lining people for disagreeing with them.

An aside and coincidentally, WhatsApp runs on FreeBSD.

you can afford a dedicated openbsd system?! i'd have to use a friend's free shell account and hope i don't get klined (again)

you lost me after openbsd.

Definitions:

bitchx - an IRC client: http://www.bitchx.com/

efnet - one of the oldest IRC networks, founded in 1990

IRC baby, and efnet is an old network you can connect to. Bitchx is an irc client, free last I checked. To GP, are eggdrop bots still a thing?

I believe they are, though I haven't checked in a long time. Seems to be semi actively maintained.

https://github.com/eggheads/eggdrop

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

ahhh, Yes... I remember IRC. I used a different client though.

I looked at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_Relay_C...

mIRC is the only familiar one. Then again, this was back when I was a kid. Vaguely related, AIM was my jam. I was a script kiddy and needed IRC to talk to all the l337 h4ck3r5.

irssi

Back in my day we walked uphill to the vt100 terminal both ways, used ircII, and irssi didn't exist yet.

lol touche

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