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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

But the problem is that some of your friends went to Threads. Some of them went to Bluesky. Some went to Mastodon. Some went to T2.

I don't think multiple social networks is a problem. I don't want one network that everyone is on. Let them be split up by interest or age or whatever. It's natural.

What I post on HN isn't what I would post on "Social Network X" anyway, there's no need for syndication. The only people that need to care about having their comments go everywhere are influencers and marketers - and who cares what they want.

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Back in the day I had accounts on AIM and MSN Messenger, accounts on at least half a dozen various forums powered by Invision and phpBB, accounts on half a dozen IRC networks, and it felt perfectly fine to go from one to the other as the situation demanded. I'm not even including MMORPGs, which were as much communities as they were games.

Nowadays I still use IRC like I used to before, but I miss the rest of the good old days.

What’s the scene like on IRC these days?

Not anywhere as populated as before, but the old guard is still there and the atmosphere itself hasn't really changed (which is a good thing).

I credit the fundamentally command line interface for filtering out the "normies", so to speak.

It is if they target the same use case. I resent having to use WhatsApp alongside Signal. And iMessage and SMS. Want to review the conversation you had with so-and-so the other day ? You have to check multiple apps if you forgot where.

I miss Trillian. I miss standards.

Few of the protocols that Trillian spoke were standardized; most were reverse engineered. It was an era of adversarial interoperability, not standards.

I miss it too, though.

That's ironic. At least in the brief time I used Windows, Trillian had the worst dumpster fire of a UI. I can't say I really liked Windows UI, but they didn't even attempt to conform to it to make it half-usable.

That's funny because the UI is one thing I think stood out positively about Trillian but that might be my rose-tinted glasses and youthful tastes talking.

Nah, I used Trillian (Lifetime licence) until just a few years ago when I realized that everyone is siloed in Signal, WA, etc. The UI was still great.

But that might be related to me hating the UI of WA, Signal, Telegram etc. Even Gajim switched to this shitty UI style (sidenote: Any usable Windows XMPP/Jabber client that still looks good, with good = "userlist, plus chats in separate windows"?), so I’m starting to think it might be possible that most people don’t hate it ;)

edit: There’s AstraChat which looks nice and apparently supports WA, alas, it’s commercial, and they don’t seem interested in selling to non-enterprise users.

I wish I could remember the details of why I thought it was so awful. I mean, not even the title bar and minimize/maximize icon conformed to the Windows standards. There were other things that didn't work right-- standard windows keyboard shortcuts-- but I forget which. This would have been in 2006-2010 or thereabouts.

I remember it was non-standard too, but that's why I liked it; Windows didn't look nice to begin with.

IIRC it had skins and plugins so you could customize the UI.

Imagine a 20th century where people with telephones from GE couldn't phone people with telephones from RCA. That's obviously ridiculous and regulations prevented it.

How the hell did we went up here?

End up where? Phones from different manufacturers can still contact each other.

You can send data from any device to any device.

That will will be fixed Q1 next year thanks to the EU

A fractured microblogging ecosystem doesn’t bother me at all because I never use any of them directly. Like many here, I assume, I use link aggregators (like HN, Reddit, and many others).

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