💾 Archived View for altesq.net › ~evenfire › posts › lets-go-back-to-irc.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:07:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Modern IMs are bloated, annoying, spyware, time wasters, often proprietary, slow to load, awful to use on bad connections, actively try to sabotage your attention. It's time we should actively reconsider on how we, as a society, communicate via our devices, and the costs imposed on upon us by the services we use, or get used by.
Why does a messaging program need typing notifications? Read receipts? Auto-playing videos? GIF avatars? Reactions? This is by no means a "hurr durr I'm living in a log cabin in the mountains, all that is new is stupid" commentary, it's just that we use a messaging program, to message. Not to waste another hour, mindlessly clicking through mentions, watching videos, and other specifically engineered "features" to make you spend as much time as possible on their program.
For a minute, we should pause and think what do we get from these, often, commercial messaging programs. They've commercialized human interaction itself, from friendships to lovers. Messaging programs should stick to their job, that is delivering messages.
I think we've all observed by now, what I like to call the "seen culture." It's impolite to see a message and take your time to respond to it. You're supposed to answer at a few minutes difference, at maximum. Why? Because almost everyone is almost egotistical nowadays, but it's not only our fault. Without read receipts, this would have never happened in the first place. For the person delivering the message, read receipts induce the anxiety to see if the message was seen, in how much time does the receiver respond, etc., while for the receiver, it puts a conscious pressure on them to know that they have to respond to the message, otherwise they might seem rude. Combined with typing indicators, this is the perfect anxiety bomb. Then we're wondering why we can't look at a person straight.
What happened with waiting whole days, not minutes, to get a reply from somebody? As the Internet speed climbed higher, we felt like we got closer and closer, distances becoming irrelevant. At the same time, this has prompted a myriad of issues, because you're expected to be always there. Always connected. Always available for others, like you're their little emotional can. Or dumpster.
I'm quite sure most people on Gemini use IRC. It's a wonderful protocol. It's simple. I can interact with it from netcat, I don't need convoluted clients. It's easily scriptable. It's easy to understand and learn. It has all the basics you need for actually communicating online. Sure, it doesn't have images, fancy GIFs, voice calls or whatever, but it's because it does one job damned well, that is delivering messages. The clients are most often not huge Electron programs that kill your computer if it's older than 5 years.
One caveat of IRC is that it isn't the most secure around. Modern server implementations use the TLS stack. The server decrypts all the requests and forwards them to recipient, so there's trust needed to be put into the server. In my case, I run IRC locally, so I trust myself. Not to mention that it's comparatively easy to get your own IRC server running, compared to other open protocols. Obviously, if you need a much higher degree of protection, use something that uses the Signal protocol, such as Matrix, XMPP or Signal itself. All of those come with their obvious downsides, I find IRC the best for my use case, at least at the moment.
Speaking of caveats, IRC works good on a slow internet connection, but not unstable. You can get frequently disconnected, messages not sending and so on. It happened to me about one time, so it's not often, but it misses the "intelligent" reconnect of some other protocols, such as XMPP.
There's been a recent project, IRCv3. It aims at adding "modern" features into IRC, such as typing indicators or read markers. I support the project, as it can help people that dislike IRC or have not heard of it, to adopt it into their daily lives. Afterwards, they can discover the beauty of the protocol, and that you can have the best chats without the modern anxiety-inducing features.