irc. It's still used by geeks, but all the modern alternatives like Slack and friends lock the data away from the users, are costly in both money and resources

irc. It's still used by geeks, but all the modern alternatives like Slack and friends lock the data away from the users, are costly in both money and resources (Electron apps instead of irc chat apps that can run on a C-64). Like nntp/usenet in my other post, one of the big problems is security, control and management especially with respect to bad actors. Perhaps there's a common way to solve this theme without ceding control of the data, but I'm not aware of it (and ... based on modern email spam, there is no simple effective way).