Earlier quoted context omitted.
"servers" I don't think anybody actually cares, but I resent discord for this terminology.
Most of us do, I think. Then again, what would you label them as? A space? A domain?
Room.
ICQ will stop working from June 26
701–710 of 776 posts
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#702I will forever treasure my ICQ memories. The sounds it made. The moving image when it was connecting. Listening in Winamp to one of only a few dozen possible songs that I had carefully downloaded. Being able to randomly connect to people you would filter. Yes, I want to talk to someone more or less my age but in Iceland. Or any other country. But most of all, the feeling of being connected. As a teenager in the autis…
ICQ was nice but everyone moved on to Yahoo Messenger. That was the bomb. Truly unbelievable Yahoo didn't capitalize on that. Everyone used it.
MSN Messenger was like AOL/Yahoo but in Europe.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started writing an essay about this topic. I am one of those nostalgics by the old internet. I thought it was the aesthetic (geocities, etc), but after giving it a lot of thought, that wasn't. It was that your life (all of us) was "offline by default". We lived offline and then we connect to the internet for a few minutes, hours, whatever. But you lived your life offline. We attended concerts, took photos, recorded…
You also had digital freedom and autonomy. You controlled how many ICQ accounts you had. Setting one up took a minute and cost nothing. You chose the client you used to connect with. Noobs used the official ICQ adware and you used some 1337 open source client on Linux that could handle both ICQ and Jabber. But you could talk to them on the same platform. Where are the alternative WhatsApp clients? Or iMessage? Or Tel…
I use nchat for Telegram, on the terminal.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#704Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t imagine that the typical IRC user has any interest in Discord. They are wildly different in every conceivable way.
Unfortunately projects are increasingly using Discord or Slack instead of IRC.
It gets worse: for some projects I’ve been interested in, the docs are terribly incomplete and when you ask - you are told to ask in the discord
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m pretty sure IRC has continued to grow in obscurity, much like Gopher, which, last I checked, was also at an all-time peak and growing steadily but slowly.
The numbers here https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php are much lower than what I remember from twenty years ago, and the Internet Archive seems to support this: https://web.archive.org/web/20060902133725/http://irc.netspl... I don't think IRC is one of those technologies whose usage count in absolute terms is at an all-time high today. It wasn't exactly mainstream in the early 2000s, but it still had lots of users…
Thanks, that’s interesting info. I think you might be underestmating this part though:
“Here you see the 100 largest and most popular IRC networks that take part in netsplit.de's comparison, but please consider that there are still some big IRC networks that are out of competition"
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
WhatsApp is European much more than it is American. Most Americans are just using SMS like cave people.
Nope. We use iMessage because we can afford iPhones.
In Europe even iPhone users will preferentially use WhatsApp in my experience.
I have exactly one contact who prefers iMessage over WhatsApp or Signal. The majority use WhatsApp, with Signal being a growing second.
Telegram comes in third place - but mostly that’s used for following “feeds”
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
ICQ was bought by... uhh Russians? Israelis? Something like that... and was changed several times what it actually is; when I tried it recently, it was just a WhatsApp clone; they even removed all the old ICQ number accounts.
Russians, given the VK app plug in the announcement.
Yes, ICQ was bought by Russians in 2010, and it was already dying at that time.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately projects are increasingly using Discord or Slack instead of IRC.
It gets worse: for some projects I’ve been interested in, the docs are terribly incomplete and when you ask - you are told to ask in the discord
That’s horrific. I guess every generation gets to re-learn the mistakes of the past.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN MSN wasn't a worse alternative to ICQ, MSN was faster and came with Windows, making it both easier to keep running at the background on the weak hardware of the time (i remember launching ICQ and waiting waiting waiting at the splash screen with the rotating petal colors and then the main UI was a mess of buttons, icons and all sorts of bloat) and it…
At some point I had MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and irc and pidgn came to save me. There were also cool places to hang out like Yahoo Games or a few of the location based chat apps that were fun to connect to strangers and just chat. Discord is so walled garden it's awful in this respect. I also miss the VRML world builders like CyberTown https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown
Pidgin was pretty awesome, though its underlying library was so riddled with vulnerabilities…
I greatly enjoyed how with XMPP’s in-band registration you could do things like give each contact a unique XMPP address, only to be used with them. You could have unlimited (well, I never hit a limit) accounts, across a load of servers, proxies per account, unique OTR keys per account, etc.
I don’t think the UI has really been surpassed either, tbh. I really wish someone would do a modern rewrite of Pidgin in some memory safe language.
Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26
#710This makes me sad. I mean, I haven't logged in in about 20 years now, and couldn't if I wanted to (don't have the password or access to the email address). But I had a low five digit user number, and built a lot of relationships on ICQ (some of which continue today!). It was my main method of electronic communication in college. I had romantic relationships live and die on ICQ. Another reminder of how things change o…
Same for me but the day I will really cry a little will be when mIRC dies. It was my introduction to instant effortless free worldwide communication. Of course I haven't used it for decades but it calms me that it is still very alive.
IRC will never die. I met my wife on IRC ~25 years ago, it'll still be here when we're old.
Or at least it will die like USENET died: becoming only of interest to spammers and pornographers.