For many years I’ve interacted with my fellow humans, I think perhaps more than any other way, via the medium of Internet chat. But in my chat window, they’re fading, one by one. This problem is technical and personal and I felt it ought not to go unrecognized.
What a bittersweet story. Definitely worth a read.
“I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine.” -Lou Reed
Instant messenging is alive, burgeoning even, but not well. Sell your soul to Facebook and you can once again connect to most of the world. At the small price of having your life dissected as advertising fodder.
The dream of a federated internet died a long time ago. It is now in the hands of a few mildly evil behemoths to connect us. I’ve given up on alternatives. Back when alternatives were still a possibly viable option, I was met with indifference when asking to switch to a more open service. Why switch? Closed service X just works. Now there are still some ghost town hold outs, but asking anyone to go there will probably be met with laughter.
At the end of the day, I care about connecting with the people I care about more than lofty ideals. I could be ideologically pure, but I’d never speak with anyone I care about ever again online during my life time. IMO that is just not worth it.
I felt this same thing quite a few years ago. MSN was our network of choice when at uni, friends and acquaintances slowly moved off onto the various chat apps or social networks until the service itself died.
When I look back, MSN did then what Slack/Teams/Whatsapp/FB Messenger do now, and More.
Now, instead of meeting up with people and learning their news and stories, you follow them on facebook for a sanitised version.
I don’t even bother installing Pidgin on my desktop any more, there is nobody there to chat with.
nicubunu,
That’s life. But you don’t need anybody else other than us here on osnews anyways 🙂
It would be interesting to see all the osnews users who’ve been “graying out” as well. Some of us could die and the rest of us wouldn’t even know it. Terry Davis got a goodbye mention, but most of us will just disappear one day without a trace and we’ll never really know why.
You have a large digital footprint, so I think people could reach you outside osnews pretty easily if they search.
http://photoblog.nicubunu.ro/
http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/
Others don’t leave as many clues. Adurbe, did you attend the University of Padova?
Zima, I thought it was strange that you and Adurbe have the exact same registration date: 2005-07-06. But apparently that’s the day osnews version 3 came out, so a lot of the old accounts have that date. You guys are old-school, haha.
https://www.osnews.com/story/11102/how-to-use-osnews-version-3/
On a serious note though, I kind of wish there’d be a map of our approximate locations so those of us near each other might meet up some day. It’d be nice to chat over beers 🙂
Yeah, apparently I registered the day ver.3 came out, as quite a lot of other folks (IIRC I had on old OSNews user number 568?). And I suppose I’m old-school, I hung out around here since BeOS days… 🙂 (would be cool to have a list also of older than ver.3 comments, I suppose I also associated them with my email/gravatar or zima nickname)
PS.
And relatively recently I was away from OSNews for 2+ years. But I guess nobody even noticed… 🙁
I’ve almost completely stopped using the old chat systems — I used to have lots of online friends I chatted to through MSN, Yahoo and then Google Talk but most of them have migrated to Facebook and others I’ve lost contact or fallen out with. Even five years ago I had friends I was connected with on FB but preferred to use GT for chat. Nowadays, besides FB for chat, I use WhatsApp for family and work chat. Some might say it’s a shame, but the old systems were run by companies just as commercial and ‘evil’ as FB.
Matthew Smith,
Yeah, that opinion is understandable, but in many of those cases older networks could be accessed through 3rd party clients. This was important because it meant that we had an easy way to collaborate across multiple services, we weren’t pressured into using the most popular ones. What’s happening now is that dominant services are so big they want to become (or already are) an exclusive provider and so they block 3rd party clients in order to deliberately make other networks even less viable. In these terms, I think we are worse off than in the past.
At least with how GT is integrated into Gmail, it’s easy to continue using it with other Gmail users…
So glad to see someone mention Dianne Hackborn’s contributions… it always makes me smile when I see a Be, Inc. employee having an impact somewhere.
The thing that freaked me out about the story is how he completely exposes his friends list. Some of them are relatively famous people, others aren’t. But it felt completely unnecessary to go through so many personal details. Just mentioning that some of the people on his list were ” open internet advocates” and that even they were moving off open services would have made his story just as strong. Now I just feel that he was more of a privacy issue than the services that others are using now