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ICQ will stop working from June 26

icq.com

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Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#721

Post by kazinator »

scooke wrote: post #649
kazinator wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ICQ was the chat tool of the democratic internet 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 A…

You missed the point. The point wasn't the nature of the tool itself. Anyone could join, and one could chat with anyone. It was used "by the people" and not curated by corps.

ICQ was not "curated" by a corporation; it was produced and operated by one from scratch.

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.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#722

Post by SeriousM »

peteforde wrote: post #553

101919 here. My account got hacked in 1999 and so it's been 25 years since I've been able to login, and yet I remember my UIN the way most people remember their first phone number. My friend at the time, 101449 was in the first 1500 users; I was late to the game and joined later that afternoon. I met three people by randomly searching by criteria who are still friends to this day. Erin from Niagara Falls was the firs…

65005229 instant recall. Good bye ICQ ;/

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#723

Post by 101008 »

hoyd wrote: post #455
101008 wrote: post #290

Earlier 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…

Is the essay somewhere online?

No, sorry, I never wrote it.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#725

Post by Karrot_Kream »

h0l0cube wrote: post #648
dkga wrote: post #470

I 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…

> Most people don’t get it when I say this, maybe someone here will, but to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN. It wasn't so much the platform that set ICQ apart, it was the time in which it was born into. In the late 90s and early 00s, the internet was still an unchartered 'No Man's Land'. Internet access was difficult and scarce, and people approached i…

It's just a scale thing. Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile. With mobile the internet became huge, absolutely massive, and the idea of a shared culture on the internet basically broke down. I'm pretty sure the average Discord server is bigger than the top 5 ICQ chatrooms combined. The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person (or someone who was on their way to becoming a Western upper-middle class college-educated person) as that was the only person who had the money, time, and education to afford the peripherals (home PCs, modems, telecoms costs, internet plans.)

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#726

Post by Fuzzwah »

hxii wrote: post #660
RulerOf wrote: post #591

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?

In the API they're referred to as a `guild`

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#727

Post by h0l0cube »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #725
h0l0cube wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people don’t get it when I say this, maybe someone here will, but to me it all started going downhill when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN. It wasn't so much the platform that set ICQ apart, it was the time in which it was born into. In the late 90s and early 00s, the internet was still an unchartered 'No Man's Land'. Internet access was difficult and scarce, and people approached i…

It's just a scale thing. Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile. With mobile the internet became huge, absolutely massive, and the idea of a shared culture on the internet basically broke down. I'm pretty sure the average Discord server is bigger than the top 5 ICQ chatrooms combined. The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person (or someone who was…

> 5 ICQ chatrooms combined

Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms. It was purely chat with the ability to discover other users around the world. It was one to one, not many to many, and there was no server bubble to restrict to a particular special interest.

> The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person

Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end. A lot of the people I talked to on ICQ were from ‘poorer’ countries. Chat wasn’t really demanding on bandwidth

> Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile.

The first smart phones were definitely more expensive than the cheapest PCs, but when they did get affordable in the global south around the early-mid 2010s, ICQ was long dead

> It's just a scale thing.

More and more people are born into a world with ubiquitous internet devoid of cultural scarcity, and I think this has really devalued the way we relate to one another. It’s this lack of cultural scarcity that is one of my points.

‘Social media’ was also a change in mode from relating to strangers to connecting to people we already know. But I don’t ascribe causation to Facebook specifically, it was just with enough time and enough scale (as you mention) that ‘social media’ was inevitable. Prior to Facebook I’d used services like MySpace, Bebo, and Quickdot, that have all since faded from view. We were searching for what Facebook came to be – a low effort way to share our experience with people we already know

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#728

Post by Karrot_Kream »

h0l0cube wrote: post #727
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a scale thing. Around the rise of Facebook came the rise of mobile. With mobile the internet became huge, absolutely massive, and the idea of a shared culture on the internet basically broke down. I'm pretty sure the average Discord server is bigger than the top 5 ICQ chatrooms combined. The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person (or someone who was…

> 5 ICQ chatrooms combined Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms. It was purely chat with the ability to discover other users around the world. It was one to one, not many to many, and there was no server bubble to restrict to a particular special interest. > The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person Maybe middle class, though m…

> Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms.

My wires crossed a bit with AIM chat which I used around the same time. I only got on IRC later because I was too young to be interested in the things folks talked about on IRC at that age.

> Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end.

Basically someone with the ability to pay for Internet and pay for the phone time. Obviously the class lines weren't exact and depending on where in the era (e.g. 1996 it was expensive, 2001 it was a lot more affordable) prices differed but it was definitely not something people in the hood or from Asian countries outside Japan and Taiwan could justify spending money on.

> More and more people are born into a world with ubiquitous internet devoid of cultural scarcity, and I think this has really devalued the way we relate to one another. It’s this lack of cultural scarcity that is one of my points.

100%. I wonder if something similar happened around the start of the telephone and telegraph when the ability to contact anyone "anywhere" in the wealthy world became a lot easier and professional communications stopped being optimistic and instead expected.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#729

Post by h0l0cube »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #728
h0l0cube wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5 ICQ chatrooms combined Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms. It was purely chat with the ability to discover other users around the world. It was one to one, not many to many, and there was no server bubble to restrict to a particular special interest. > The early internet strongly self-selected for a Western, upper middle class, college educated person Maybe middle class, though m…

> Perhaps you’re thinking of IRC? I don’t recall ICQ having chat rooms. My wires crossed a bit with AIM chat which I used around the same time. I only got on IRC later because I was too young to be interested in the things folks talked about on IRC at that age. > Maybe middle class, though my family was on the lower end. Basically someone with the ability to pay for Internet and pay for the phone time. Obviously the…

> Obviously the class lines weren't exact and depending on where in the era (e.g. 1996 it was expensive, 2001 it was a lot more affordable)

Facebook era was late 00s, and didn't hit full stride globally until early 10s. By this point internet access was available to 1 in 4 people. Scale—in meaningful distinction to 'the old web'—had well and truly already arrived. The average Joe and Jane were using the internet.

https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users

> I wonder if something similar happened around the start of the telephone and telegraph

As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote "The medium is the message". He also coined the term 'information overload' in the 60s when talking about the uptake of radio and television. Ever since the printing press, regular people have been gaining access to information at increasing volume, and not only those of means. However, the particular medium of the internet changed the means of accessing, generating and interacting with information and communicating other people. What McLuhan was pointing out by "The medium is the message" is that every medium has its own flavor, and it's own particular impact on society.

And for the internet it hasn't just been one impact: the rise of email and mailing lists, chat applications, internet-wide keyword search, social media, smartphones and apps, dating apps, AirBnB, Uber.. the fabric of social order is being disrupted again and again by the internet in a manner exceptional to other media. Sometimes it's even hard to see what changes have taken place. To take one example, the rise of dating apps has had a real impact on the profits and kinds of late night venues.

So, to bring back to my earlier point, social media had an impact that changed how we communicate. It was certainly very visible to me at the time. I think in particular with ICQ, it provided a means for strangers to meet and fostered connections outside of our respective bubbles, and for that I remember it fondly, and also worry a bit more about our world as it becomes more fragmented and isolated along social borders.

Re: ICQ will stop working from June 26

#730

Post by 0x5FC3 »

huxflux wrote: post #164
dewey wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few weeks ago I shut down my self hosted znc bouncer that I still logged in every few weeks to download logs, see if I got pinged somewhere and catch up with some low traffic channels. I then switched over to https://www.irccloud.com and it's such a improvement as I can use it on my phone, now I'm pretty active again and I kinda missed it.

Are there any self-hosted alternatives?

I'm surprised nobody mentioned TheLounge: https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge
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