@pluralistic I just listened to the 8 minute audio teaser, signed up for libro.fm, and joined your kickstarter. I feel like I am trapped in Apple’s walled garden, but I am at least looking for a window to open!
@pluralistic Scorchio! Backed Cory's latest book on kickstarter immediately. The value I get from his every post meant I was compelled to support the latest endeavour
@pluralistic just backed Cory Doctorow's book on Kickstarter, because every single thing I've seen from him about #enshittification has been a jaw dropping read. Basically the exact vibe of why I'm on mastodon now
@pluralistic I just ordered the signed hardcover combo for this kickstarter. Who knows, I might finally get into audiobooks, but I'm sure I'll want to read the book.
It is time we took the bloody internet back. Twitter is dead, Facebook's expiration date passed years ago, and reddit no longer feels like a welcoming place either.
Who could have expected that we'd be missing usenet and irc 25 years later?
@wouterla@pluralistic Honestly, I'm not sure why people left IRC in the first place. It didn't get flooded with spam like Usenet, it didn't get bought out by Russian interests like LiveJournal, it wasn't the center of a scandal, it didn't enshittify because it's not structured such that it can... Really, the worst that happened to it was that its most popular Windows client became grossly insecure, and that just calls for using a different client, doesn't it?
From what I remember is that MSN Messenger thrived on a synergy with Hotmail (which Microsoft bought in 1997).
Of course IRC wasn't just one network but multiple while Messenger was unified. My network suffered from "takeovers" of channels and you could never be sure if your nick was available when you logged on which also meant that you could start chatting with strangers who were using your friends' nicks.
@oligneisti@wouterla@pluralistic I tended to hang out on DALnet and its derivatives, where the networks included "services" which were basically mod-run bots for administrative purposes. They included things like NickServ that let you register a nick, and ChanServ which let someone with a registered nick maintain settings and a perpetual op list and ban list for channels.
@pteryx@oligneisti@wouterla@pluralistic now explain nickserv to my relatives. IRC faded because the technical elite (like me) that used it had no incentive to think about good UX. So people who aren't hardcore devs went elsewhere and we followed them.
There's probably already a dozen good decentralised IRC alternatives that are easy to use and embody the good old web ways of the blogosphere, but they probably all use different protocols.
@bracken@oligneisti@wouterla@pluralistic The crowds I ran in weren't that technical. It was primarily roleplayers (both freeform and tabletop) and console gamers who liked Squaresoft games — not hardcore devs.
As for decentralized alternatives, I've only heard about Matrix as far as that goes, and I haven't put in the effort to figure that out yet.
@pteryx@bracken@oligneisti@wouterla@pluralistic matrix is hilarious. pretty much everyone I know who has been trying to use it has been having constant problems with message keys not getting synced so it can't decrypt messages at random, and other stuff like leaving a group but then still being in the group but if you try to click leave group it says you're not in the group. incredible design.
@mwop The Freenode scandal is something that happened only a decade after people started disappearing, though. I hadn't even heard of it until today. And a lot of other things people are naming are things that never stopped people from using IRC before.
The only answer so far that really rings true is the complaint about it not being a particularly mobile-friendly protocol.
@pteryx I think it really depends on the channels you frequent, and the audience it attracts. I got to a point in some busy channels that the signal to noise ratio made it unusable. In others, our moderation teams (all volunteer, because OSS) had to work around the clock to bounce trolls, analyze where they were coming from, and issue IP range blocks. And women were constantly targets of harassment.
Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there.
@mwop Not just channel-by-channel, but network-by-network as well. My own IRC experience hasn't involved sexist harassment... but then, my FFXI experience didn't either until I tried going to the Asura server, so your point stands.
Though the "I got harassed!" answer strikes me as less answering "why did people in general stop using IRC" and more "why did you, personally, never care for IRC in the first place".
@pteryx Fair enough. For me, it feels like so much of everything these days - almost nothing has good safety and health protocols in place. IRC was just the first place I experienced and observed that; the trend continues everywhere still today, though. Walling off services can help - but it also prevents cross-pollination of communities.
@pluralistic as someone who is a bit involved in #Freifunk I'm wondering if this book is mainly about internet platforms / services. Or is it also about internet infrastructure itself? #WirelessCommunityNetworks
@pluralistic Libro.fm doesn't seem like #FreeSoftware to me. As someone who knows nothing about #audiobooks, what's the current free way way to read them that isn't 'just use VLC'?
Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it: "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" comes out from Verso on Sept 5.
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
If you're a @medium subscriber, you can read these essays - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.
My latest Medium column is "Microincentives and Enshittification: How the Curse of Bigness wrecked Google Search"
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is also ad- and tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🧖🏿♀️". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
@lgvs Kickstarter would be great - the totals from these campaigns are really helpful in convincing my publisher to take this seriously (as well as other authors)
@pluralistic Wow, I totally had that model of a naval cannon when I was a kid. I'm not sure if it was my dad's before me, or if I am just really old now.
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