Comment by someonebaggy
5 days ago
Torrents?
I think most of these things still exist, but as a tiny proportion of traffic, because total traffic grew so much while these old protocols shrank somewhat, but they are certainly still there.
The focus is now on applications rather than protocols, that's the bigger difference. One uses Discord, or Slack, not IRC, because their centralised nature enables them to iterate much more rapidly (IRC has barely changed in 30 years while Slack has emojis) and this leads to them simply being much better products. Email still isn't reliably encrypted.
Back in the 80s you didn't have a choice - you couldn't create a worldwide app network, so you had to design a distributed protocol that could be operated independently by the sysadmin at each site. In 2026 (really 2005+) we can do global centralised systems and we mostly don't have independent sites (as in locations) with sysadmins, so it worked out differently. There are a few "digital cooperatives" that try to bring the old model back - nonprofits that host services for their members - but there aren't many and there isn't really a good reason for a layperson to join a digital cooperative and use IRC instead of using Discord, which is where all their friends are anyway.
IRC should support emoji, it's just text and emoji are pretty much just text transformed in software the same way your computer turns the unicode of the text into into whatever glyph it represents
I meant emoji reactions
No. You meant provisions for simplified automated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis
That aside, does it really matter if one can attach reactions to one text, spanning just one, or several lines, instead of 'reacting' sequentially in the following lines?
Discord, Slack etc. are just conveniences for lazy smombies which find IRC too hardcore, or smth. Like irremovable training wheels on a bicycle. Or mistaking a 'bumper car' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_cars ) for something highway capable.
All of that complaining is equal to the ppl moving into so called gentrified places, only to mourn that the character which made that place interesting has been lost. By too much uptight twats moving in there.
Use it, or lose it!
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