Graying Out

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.

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.

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

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/...

[2] https://conversations.im/

[3] https://chatsecure.org/

[4] https://gajim.org

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

"...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.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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....). Maybe we’ll see less “graying out” if we link up our twitter accounts to Adium.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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

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

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.

I felt sad...

Hey, there is twitter

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