There is a difference between receiving purely textual content, strictly encoded as text, from third parties and consuming arbitrary binary content from arbitra

There is a difference between receiving purely textual content, strictly encoded as text, from third parties and consuming arbitrary binary content from arbitrary third parties. The worst I can receive is bile and propaganda. To this day, image and video codecs remain full of awful bugs. If you are on the receiving end a piece of data whose mime-type starts with "image/" or "video/", there's no telling what kind of malice you are up against. At best you are up against bile and propaganda. Incidentally, I find it funny that disappearing messages á la Snapchat or whatever copycat the major tech companies have come up with is considered hip. But IRC with its "you were not online, so you missed it" concept is somehow undesirable.