After companies started dominating the internet, it was never be the same. We thought that any company would play by our rules, but they poisoned us with their research, gamification, single way information flow, and walled gardens.
This is why I moved to small web.
I miss the old internet dearly.
It was proprietary client software released in 1996 and bought by AOL two years later.
It relies on a service operated by a single party, which is now sunsetting it.
According to the Wikipedia article, when ICQ was under AOL's stewardship, "AOL pursued an aggressive policy regarding alternative ("unauthorized") ICQ clients."
The article details all the tactics that AOL implemented in the service to break unofficial clients.
I don't see where the word "democratic" connects with ICQ.
Pidgin, Miranda, Adium are the things I was referring to - would be cool if I could use them for whatsapp, signal, gmail chat/hangouts but I don‘ think thats possible. Happy to get corrected here.
The present-day, mainstream, proprietary chat systems are open to anyone to join and chat with anyone.
Most of whatever restrictions they have are necessitated by spam. Allowing new members to immediately post unlimited amounts of material into any chat room or any other member's inbox is a bad idea, even in an open-source, federated chat system.
Nicely coined.
That's IRC.
IRC is the other one, not the only one. However, Discord is eating its lunch in these days, sadly.
Guess what? Most of them are abandoned and have similar bugs that are entirely down to some shit being completely undocumented :)
I strongly agree.
I think there are a few steps the community could take.
• Promote awareness of this, put it in licence agreements or contributor guidelines.
• Document how to find and how to use FOSS comms tools.
• Pidgin is the best we have for now. It needs an update, so the package includes as many protocol connectors as possible as standard, together with docs how to enable and use them. Getting away from crappy web apps embedded in Electron is pretty important, especially for bringing xBSD and so on on board.
• A corresponding update for Adium would be good, too.
A few years ago I worked for a major Linux vendor and I had Pidgin talking to IRC, Rocket.chat, Slack, Telegram, Skype, Google $CHAT_NAME_OF_THE_MONTH, and all my other services... but it took considerable manual effort.
The result was working multiprotocol chat in about 10% of the RAM usage of the Franz Electron client.
On Pidgin? Cool. I am surprised but I managed to get Pidgin working on macOS via Brew yesterday, which automatically installed a recent version of WINE, to my considerable surprise.
It wouldn't connect to anything and I couldn't find where, in one OS's emulated filesystem on top of my real OS's rather complex filesystem, I could put plugins, but hey, it started and ran and that's quite impressive.
Given that Gtk apps such as Geany manage to run on macOS, I thought a native Unix port of Pidgin would be an easier effort than the Windows one, but hey.
Another related term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieWeb
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) (NOT web, but similar in spirit - an extended "Gopher"-like protocol)
But. I think it's fair to say it felt more free, it had a high barrier of technical entry, which filtered out most of the public, and there was no craven race to monetize and enshitify absolutely every single of our interactions.
Mostly because corporations were in the process of figuring out how to do all that with this new Internet thing.