I absolutely agree with this, and I'm not looking forward to the near future of the internet, but it's inevitable. We will hit AOL 2.0, well a few of them. We'll have the Apple internet, the Facebook internet, the Google internet, etc. but it won't last.
The rein of aol was killed by stagnation and outside innovation, people seeing that there's more and better outside of aol, and the second round will probably die a similar death. People will start to see cool new things happening outside their silo, or get fed up with them and the silos will eventually fall. These trends seem cyclical, we go from mainframes and silos to personal computers and an open network, then back to the same mainframes, this time called the cloud, and the same silos. It's not gonna be a fun time for those of us who don't like the confines of the new internet, but the handful of us who care won't stop the inevitable.
Me, I still run an irc server because I can, because there's a million clients to choose from, and everyone can have their own interface, and the protocol is so simple a decent programmer can hash out their own in a day. Nothing has come close to it yet (xmpp was great in theory but too complex for its own good). If you want a pretty ui and emojis and images, well there's a client that can do it, if you just want text, plenty of those too.
I'll be over here riding out the inevitable with my own file sync, git server, chat server, web server, and making my internet how I want it to be, hoping that in time people will notice that you don't have to just accept your preferred silos interpretation of it.
None of my friends use IRC, 95% have never even heard of it. Most of my friends are on Facebook Messenger.
For more public conversations; a lot of that is now taking place on twitter. Twitter gets promoted by the media with hashtags at the start of TV programmes. I never see any reference to IRC or other protocols.
I'm sure people will get bored with these current silos and move on but I doubt they'll move to something more open. The financial incentive just isn't there to develop the protocols and clients for an open system, whereas there is clearly big money to be made by creating the next big silo.
Oh I don't disagree with you, I'm not delusional enough to think that people are going to move to irc, or that it'll become mainstream, it's just a bit saddening. But the thing is it doesn't really matter because irc is a protocol. I don't ever have to worry about support getting dropped because someone wants to monetize it differently. The protocols will never get closed down all of the sudden because it's not popular enough. I can keep running my server as long as I want, independently of any company's decisions. I got a few friends set up on it years ago, and new people join from time to time. It's versatile enough that I just run bitlbee and have access to a bunch of other chat services over irc, all in one client.
I think people will get tired of not being able to communicate between their silos and if they get locked in enough, won't want to leave their own service for another one. It happened with AIM/MSN/Yahoo messenger, for a little while everything was moving to xmpp. Your AIM account could talk to people on gtalk, etc. It was nice while it lasted.
I think something like Slack but aimed groups of friends rather than development teams.
I play chess and I ride a bike, I have clubs with both of those things and they currently use facebook to co-ordinate and it works well enough but slack would be considerably better I think.
IRC is awesome but it only really handles the talking to people side of things well, sharing files (well), setting events and calendars - the stuff slack does is a huge multiplier.
It's not just connecting that's the problem: How do you implement your own server for slack, without using slack?
Because if that's off the table, the rest of the discussion doesn't matter. Now, of course not everyone will write their own irc-server, or port one to a new architecture -- but without free and open source implementations, any alternative is just another dead end.
Considering slack is doing so much right, I wish they'd realize this, and just either open up slack, or publish a new free/open slack server implementation, along with protocols for federation etc.
As I understand it, many people are getting weary of having to choose between IRC -- which have a number of issues, not the least of which is its (lack of) security architecture (even with TLS bolted on), and "extensions" being limited largely to bots -- and XMPP which is over-engineered.
I suppose the natural next step is something that is to IRC/XMPP as JMAP[1] is to IMAP -- a lightweight protocol, probably json (or: capt'n'crunch)-based -- that tries to combine strengths from IRC/SILC and XMPP without being complex.
If I were running slack, I'd worry about if it was easier to "own" the new protocol, or to port slack to support it after someone else releases a Free alternative to slack.
In the mid-90s, email was offered as a selling point by ISPs. ("Sign up with us and get 1/10/unlimited email accounts!")
It's also one of the easiest online protocols to understand and an obvious benefit. So ISPs sold it to the public and business. And because all the ISPs were unique but needed to interoperate, there was no proprietary format.
AOL and CompuServe soon worked out that access to external email was a thing, so they built gateways which broke their users out of the walled gardens.
ISPs didn't do the same for IRC. It was always more of a nerd toy, which meant the public didn't know about it. AOL and CompuServe (etc) had proprietary chat, and there were a lot of chatalikes like ICQ, and eventually things like MS Messenger.
Without ISP promotion none of them made it to the mainstream.
I don't think Facebook and Apple can kill the web entirely. There's always an "AOL niche" for a simplified social Internet. FB lives there at the moment, but it's a vulnerable slot, and unless they break out into something new FB will be dead in a decade or so - if only because teens will grow up using something else, and will stay with that something else as they get older.
Twitter gets promoted by the media with hashtags at the start of TV programmes. I never see any reference to IRC or other protocols.
Sure, and once upon a time the media companies instead advertised their AOL keywords.
As with AOL in its heyday, though, the problem is fundamentally one of content: the silos are good at aggregating it, but terrible as platforms for producing it. And this generation of silos has shown no indication of being able to break that pattern: for back-and-forth chat or for short blurbs they work well, but otherwise people turn to sharing non-silo'd URLs.
The next generation "bellhead" crowd, with more security, tariffs on different transactions and control of the network are the folks with big $$$ behind them today.
Thanks for the article, which suggests the debate is centuries old:
"Bellheads use phrases like "rate control" or "traffic shaping" when talking about ATM. Traffic is something to be tamed, sorted, and organized. Even though hundreds of different connections end up multiplexed on a single fiber-optic pipe, every ATM connection is treated as if it has its own, narrower pipe..
Netheads, on the other hand, cheerfully admit they have no idea what traffic will look like next month. It is easier, they say, to have the packets fight it out among themselves than to try to force some kind of order on them. Traffic is unpredictable, spontaneous, liable to jump up in strange patterns..
This philosophical divide should sound familiar. It's the difference between 19th-century scientists who believed in a clockwork universe, mechanistic and predictable, and those contemporary scientists who see everything as an ecosystem, riddled with complexity. It's the difference between central and distributed control, between mainframes and workstations."
> I'll be over here riding out the inevitable with my own file sync, git server, chat server, web server, and making my internet how I want it to be
To me, this is exactly why we're not headed for an internet-solely-comprised-of-walled-gardens scenario. There will be plenty for sure, but the pathways will still be open and we netizens can connect whatever we like with them. This is why I am still excited about it, even after 20 years.
Well, it would revert to the old style "wild west" of the Internet where people who didn't understand the services - mass amounts of lay people - would simply stop using it or stay in sandboxed app/web environments.
Heh, this made me think of it as a sort of "Internet gentrification". A new hip service/site starts getting into the mainstream, the lay people move in, it becomes adapted for the lay people, and what made it hip in the first place moves out and on to other things. Doesn't fit perfectly, but I think it's an interesting way to look at it.
This is something I've noticed for a long time. Many communities have this occurrence.
usenet, 4chan, reddit, world of warcraft, the "internet" itself etc.
Any networked service can fall victim to this pattern. The original community can quickly get displaced and drown in the wake of rushing users and the powers that be will respond to the will of the majority thus betraying it's original intent.
> The rein of aol was killed by stagnation and outside innovation, people seeing that there's more and better outside of aol, and the second round will probably die a similar death.
But now things are very different. Instead of just one one AOL silo, we have many different ones. And we're communicating about them and interacting in ways that we weren't before.
The barriers to entry are much lower, and our standards/expectations are higher/different than before.
Aol as a singular silo only lasted so long. Really, there were a few back then too, AIM(and icq)/MSN/Yahoo were probably the biggest and each had a good chunk of users that refused to switch to the others, and each one fell.
I also don't think we've hit AOL 2.0 quite yet, so we still have some time to see how it all works out.
The problem with IRC is that it now lacks some features that prevent its adoption from a wider userbase.
Outside of our tech circle, there's not many people who wouldn't be turned off by having to register an account by typing custom commands. Or chatting without avatar support.
It may seem silly, but I think many people are turned off by this.
Yeah, but that can easily be implemented in a client, have the client issue commands to nickserv. Same with avatars, just have a url in your VERSION to the avatar or something. All the features of eg. slack could be implemented client side on top of irc. I even run slack via their irc gateway. I handle file/image uploads with my tiny daemon running on http://paste.click and it's easier (for me) with keybindings than just dragging a file onto the screen, although it wouldn't be difficult to implement it.
And it's not silly at all, I understand it, I just wish it wasn't the case. I don't like it but I get it and I don't expect that irc will ever hit the mainstream. Maybe something similar will in the future.
That can indeed be done, although I fear that many clients and servers would implement these additional features differently, thus losing all the good that comes from IRC being an open standard.
I don't know if it's been attempted before... but I think it would be interesting to see something open and community-centered like IRC, but with all these little features people now expect.
It might well bee that the best idea going forward is actually to form up a couple of RFCs regarding nickserv and other bots (eg: channel loggers, nickname registration, what are they called, how do they work -- eg: /invite ChanLog -- /who #mychannel -> ChanLog in list -> indicate messages are archived for this channel -- that kind of thing), mandate TLs only connections -- and then have clients implement on top of that.
Perhaps some RFCs dealing with SRV-records (where is the web UI with channel logs?) -- or maybe even RFCs on how to mirror some functions (nickserv, logs) via REST-apis.
It's not critical at all, but it's something people have come to expect from an instant messaging program.
If our 'open' alternatives don't get those little details right, then it'll be harder for people to transition from whatever closed, proprietary service they're using to something that values their freedom.
> It's not critical at all, but it's something people have come to expect from an instant messaging program.
I still don't know what "it" is though.
> If our 'open' alternatives don't get those little details right, then it'll be harder for people to transition from whatever closed, proprietary service they're using to something that values their freedom.
I also doubt a feature-perfect clone would attract that many users. There needs to be some advantage to using the system, otherwise network effect prevail. (yes, that's a bit oversimplified, but I think it's valid none-the-less).
This is exactly why so many of us like IRC. It (mostly) separates the wheat from the chaff. Chances are you're not going to take the effort to get onto IRC to spend 30 seconds spouting a worthless opinion.
At the time, how much was really happening outside of AOL when it started to decline? My family and nearly everyone I knew had AOL in the beginning but what caused everyone to start moving away from AOL was always connected high speed internet. The keyword content at the time was still more interactive than a lot of websites, but the websites were good enough.
> The rein of aol was killed by stagnation and outside innovation, people seeing that there's more and better outside of aol, and the second round will probably die a similar death.
AOL was also a US-only thing, so when Internet started reaching other countries, they had no adoption.
Heck, living in south america I only even heard about what AOL was less than 8 years ago!
> AOL was also a US-only thing, so when Internet started reaching other countries, they had no adoption.
AOL was quite popular in the 90s/beginning of the 00s in Germany. What killed AOL there was the emerging availability of fast internet connections (say, DSL and later cable).
The rein of aol was killed by stagnation and outside innovation, people seeing that there's more and better outside of aol, and the second round will probably die a similar death. People will start to see cool new things happening outside their silo, or get fed up with them and the silos will eventually fall. These trends seem cyclical, we go from mainframes and silos to personal computers and an open network, then back to the same mainframes, this time called the cloud, and the same silos. It's not gonna be a fun time for those of us who don't like the confines of the new internet, but the handful of us who care won't stop the inevitable.
Me, I still run an irc server because I can, because there's a million clients to choose from, and everyone can have their own interface, and the protocol is so simple a decent programmer can hash out their own in a day. Nothing has come close to it yet (xmpp was great in theory but too complex for its own good). If you want a pretty ui and emojis and images, well there's a client that can do it, if you just want text, plenty of those too.
I'll be over here riding out the inevitable with my own file sync, git server, chat server, web server, and making my internet how I want it to be, hoping that in time people will notice that you don't have to just accept your preferred silos interpretation of it.