There was once a dream of a decentralised web.

As recently as a decade ago we had a still very active blogosphere, connected via blogrolls and RSS. Specialised web forums were still mainstream and messenger apps could largely interoperate.

Centralised social media slowly ate that dream. It had plenty of positives, but it pulled more and more people away from the open web and into corporate walled gardens.

Some people kept the dream of decentralisation alive. And now you are here.

@tomw am I old for remembering MiRC?
@cammac I was going to mention IRC in this but it feels like it belongs earlier! I did still use it in that time period (a decade ago) but very rarely. I learned whole chunks of the protocol in the early 2000s because Napster was basically a hacked up IRC client
@tomw @cammac I still use IRC daily and our 100person IRC community is still really strong. There's also things like thelounge that aim to modernize IRC https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge
GitHub - thelounge/thelounge: 💬 ‎ Modern, responsive, cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client

💬 ‎ Modern, responsive, cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client - thelounge/thelounge

GitHub