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in the 90s, there was microsoft messenger. real time, point to point (and maybe ptmp) chat, audio, and video. What replaced it? I have to run a coturn (STUN) se

in the 90s, there was microsoft messenger. real time, point to point (and maybe ptmp) chat, audio, and video. What replaced it? I have to run a coturn (STUN) server just to be able to talk to my friend in a private way, which means now i gotta deal with some provider for hosting both coturn and, say, Matrix (Synapse). I also run a PBX, just in case coturn decides to stop working from lack of use. Now i gotta make sure i start the PBX app (3cx) once a week otherwise android helpfully removes notifications for me! AIM, ICQ, etc were great - and i'm discounting "presence", because that was a small part of it. realtime communication for "free". I've been running chat servers for over a decade, and right now, there's three people on my matrix server, me, wife, and my best friend. there's five people on my PBX, same three plus my youngest child without a SIM card, and grandma, so grandma can call kid and vice versa. I've run ircd, matrix, rocket.chat, mattermost, a couple of the jabber systems, ventrilo, teamspeak, hand-rolled garbage. we've had people sign up and chat once, but as soon as notifications stop working we never see them again. Heck, i have 3 PUSH accounts just to make sure that notifications go through everywhere. Meanwhile, 20-25 years ago, load up trillian or AIM/ICQ and there was everyone, literally everyone. I know facebook ate that lunch, but i refuse to have any facebook apps on my phone, and most people i know refuse as well, so that's a non-starter. Texting is still spotty, because VoWiFi tends to just magically stop working if you leave the wifi area a couple times in a day, so texts will sit in limbo until you realize. Phone calls are the same way (except via PBX, those always seem to work for some reason...) running out of IPv4 and the ubiquitousness of CGNAT have killed what the internet was. And that's sad; "nostalgia" isn't necessarily a negative thing. It used to be better, at least in the West. Maybe wechat and signal and telegram and whatever work better for the rest of the world now than any of our stuff from 25 years ago, i wouldn't know, because i know exactly zero people on any of those services - i've checked, once every couple of years.

zamnos 4y ago
But have you tried to move any users over to, "wechat and signal and telegram and whatever"? Getting users onto your own system wasn't trivial. If you want to move to a more supported system like, say, Signal, then you have to pay the platform switching costs, which includes moving your group of people. Which involves having the social capital to do so, which is unfortunate for the less social of us. There are many things that killed what the Internet was in the 20-30 years hence. IPv4 exhaustion is regrettable, but entirely predicted, and for those in the west, not a huge deal. I can pay any number of cloud providers a small fee to host me a box with a publicly routable IPv4 address. CGNAT is annoying, but the number of libraries which will punch a hole in that NAT has also expanded by a huge margin since the 90's. So those up things are unfortunate, but I think there are many other things that changed the Internet, some for the better, some for the worse.
- genewitch 4y ago
  > But have you tried to move any users over to, "wechat and signal and telegram and whatever"? no, because everyone uses something different and there's no "trillian" or meebo for all the shiny-tech. If we're going to play "encrypted chat", that no one can agree what that means, or what service to use, may as well use my own. Hopefully matrix becomes more popular (it probably won't, unfortunately*), but if not, i still won't use the likes of telegram or FB messenger or tiktok DMs or anything of that nature. there's not a good IRC client for phones, last few times i checked over the past 15 years. * Matrix has the curse of being good enough on the client side, but kind of a PITA on the server side. Synapse, the reference implementation is in python, which is single threaded, so joining a large room "as-is" out-of-the-box is not feasible. You have to split each of the synapse elements into a microservice that gets its own python instance, but the documentation was (and probably still is) quite sparse. I'm sure there's a discord where i can get help.

zamnos 4y ago

But have you tried to move any users over to, "wechat and signal and telegram and whatever"? Getting users onto your own system wasn't trivial. If you want to move to a more supported system like, say, Signal, then you have to pay the platform switching costs, which includes moving your group of people. Which involves having the social capital to do so, which is unfortunate for the less social of us. There are many things that killed what the Internet was in the 20-30 years hence. IPv4 exhaustion is regrettable, but entirely predicted, and for those in the west, not a huge deal. I can pay any number of cloud providers a small fee to host me a box with a publicly routable IPv4 address. CGNAT is annoying, but the number of libraries which will punch a hole in that NAT has also expanded by a huge margin since the 90's. So those up things are unfortunate, but I think there are many other things that changed the Internet, some for the better, some for the worse.

genewitch 4y ago
> But have you tried to move any users over to, "wechat and signal and telegram and whatever"? no, because everyone uses something different and there's no "trillian" or meebo for all the shiny-tech. If we're going to play "encrypted chat", that no one can agree what that means, or what service to use, may as well use my own. Hopefully matrix becomes more popular (it probably won't, unfortunately*), but if not, i still won't use the likes of telegram or FB messenger or tiktok DMs or anything of that nature. there's not a good IRC client for phones, last few times i checked over the past 15 years. * Matrix has the curse of being good enough on the client side, but kind of a PITA on the server side. Synapse, the reference implementation is in python, which is single threaded, so joining a large room "as-is" out-of-the-box is not feasible. You have to split each of the synapse elements into a microservice that gets its own python instance, but the documentation was (and probably still is) quite sparse. I'm sure there's a discord where i can get help.