Hacker news is a good example of this that's persisted, actually.
But I'm hopeful we get some social networks that are more like the old web in their architecture.
The magic was due to the friction involved. Getting into a chatroom required effort. Getting the necessary programs via CD or floppy disk. Getting your modem working with the computer, dialling up, the godawful screeching. Navigating the weird interfaces and novel programs. Then boom, you'd be chatting with people from the other side of the world, like meeting aliens from across the galaxy. They would be (mostly) nice, mature and interesting, having also navigated the friction to be there.
I remember sitting with my elder brother in a quiz chat room, full of knowledgable and intelligent people. He was using an encyclopedia book (imagine!) as a source of questions, trying to appear intelligent. They had none of it and quickly called out our ruse! Then I asked a question about NURBS which I'd been studying, and received praise for a great question.
It all demanded effort, but rewarded it at the same time.
I don't know how you can collectively go back to that.
We might get some of that friction back if remote attestation succeeds in ruining the Internet for those of us who rely on free software. Connecting with any community will be trickier over mesh networking or whatever else we're left with.
also they're ruining the experience with attempts to monetize constantly in your face
Gone are the days when the "owner" of a channel or name was the person who got there first (or the person who was friends with a server admin), and DCC chats and file transfers, clever customizable scripts that would alter the entire interface to be closer to one's liking, a wide choice of clients, alternate nicks to use today because someone else was using yours (maybe deliberately, maybe not), and with netsplits just adding an element of chaos to the mix, and a seemingly-universal avoidance of getting money involved in the game at all.
(And maybe we're better without some of those aspects, but it's still not the same.)
for now matrix seems to be the closest to this experience (but still not quite)
That’s exactly how discord servers are made
> clever customizable scripts that would alter the entire interface to be closer to one's liking, a wide choice of clients
While not official, discord has several third party clients. The discord client is an electron app, so it’s just using discords api.
Not to say discord is perfect or the be all end all, but it shows a strong trend back towards real time interaction and away from posts. I hope matrix picks up when discord starts playing ads.
But Discord "servers" are completely different things compared to either IRC servers or IRC channels.
"Apples and oranges have similarities" is a cool story and all, but they're still apples and they're still oranges.
>While not official, discord has several third party clients. The discord client is an electron app, so it’s just using discords api.
IRC never really had this "official" or "first-party" problem to contend with at all. After it escaped the University of Oulu, people all over were creating their own incarnations of both clients and servers -- and running them independently, without centralized control. (This happened over the span of only a few months.)
>Not to say discord is perfect or the be all end all, but it shows a strong trend back towards [...]
...something that is useful and fun, and that is not like IRC.
Socially it's OK, as a piece of software it's dire.