The nostalgia is partly for centralized reasons. It's undeniably convenient when everyone uses one thing (or ICQ).

And every one of them needs a separate client, with a separate list of friends and handles, a separate program to check and monitor, ensuring that they are well-behaving. The current generation of software has no equivalent of Trillian or Pidgin, which could interact across any protocol. Heck, the current generation has no concept of "protocols" at all, instead treating the network communication as something entirely internal and subservient to the program running it.

I don't see any difference in those compared to ICQ of 1996. I have a 6-digit ICQ number btw.

Nope, here's why.

* single chat client (not a plethora on many platforms these days)

* ability to set online, offline, away, invisible (basically if you're available or not, whereas Facebook/Instagram/Slack don't really have that same separation and even the ones that do tend to not be as popular)

* Single-purpose platform, no other social media needed to carry it. i.e. Instagram's DM's are tucked away. Discord is technically single-purpose, but it's also at its core a social media platform, you need to join servers/Discords for all the separate things you're into, etc. so it's also not a single-purpose platform).

Nah not really. For normal users maybe, but if you were into programming you own utilities bots, scripts etc, today most platforms are very limited.

Out of all of them I like discord the most, but it's not hard to find problems even there. (weird scrolling, nearly useless search). I miss custom clients.

Plus, while I like the integration gifs images and some emojis, I generally find it overused in almost all servers I am on.