If you are anything like me, you may have a slight tendency to be a contrarian, may be incredibly thick skulled which many times comes to your benefit as you can continuously bash your head against a problem until it is resolved, and you may be a little paranoid with the way things are going right now;
Privacy is being eroded, political extremists seem to take over the world even though noone you know seems to agree with their views and then there is this terrible feeling of impending doom that sometimes creeps up on you, that pressure on your chest which is telling you “things are not going to be OK”.
In the end I tell myself that many of my ruminations are about subjects outside of my control, but really… Most of them aren’t! We can take the current landscape of our digital media as an example and how we might be able to change things for the better with small, incremental steps. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and change towards a healthier digital world certainly won’t take a day either.
Modern Media and the Commercial Web #
Do you ever stop and think about just how fucked the modern Internet actually is? I don’t mean to be cynical here, but let’s be realistic: Things aren’t looking too good. A handful of companies are the neo Absolutist emperors of the web who make the rules and decide if you even have the privilege to be shown in search results, all of this while instilling this idea that if you didn’t have their teet to suckle on, you will never find an audience of peers, be able to make it financially nor have the outreach you need to find the millions upon billions of people out there just waiting to find out about you. The likes of Amazon, Alphabet and Meta made us not only dependant on their services but also made us complacant. Everyone has to have a Twitter these days, has to have a YouTube channel and has to follow whatever trends and buzzwords that are popular at this minute and which we will never look back on happily anyways.
In a world that is only driven by infinite growth, it isn’t surprising to me that we all to an extent have fallen for this and are complacant to a certain degree. Some questions have to be asked nowadays. Here is one of the most important: “How does the company make money?”
You maybe never thought about this too deeply before, especially if you have been using services such as YouTube, Spotify or Twitter for a lifetime, but one thing those services have in common is that they have been or are still bleeding money.
The ideology of infinite growth is backwards and unsustainable.
First a service is created which has a pretty good concept but not a viable monetisation strategy from the get go. Step number two is getting as many people as possible onto the platform while keeping everything afloat with investor money. Once everyone uses your app, you can now start thinking about how you make it all viable, it is a backwards approach to how designing a platform should be and it leads to the rampant enshittification we are seeing these days. Yes, platforms were better back in the day, because while the platforms were growing the companies weren’t out to nickel and dime you at the time, they were focussed on fulfilling step 2!
And here is the kicker: The current paradigm of online content also sucks for creators! #
Money is everything after all, and with advertisement being the end all be all of almost every online platform out there, and advertisers not liking any topic which could be remotely offensive, if your YouTube video is not monetisable, you may as well just bin that motherfucker. Seriously, this sucks for not just Minecraft lets players, but also educators and artists, who want their work to speak for itself, but at the same time have to butcher it for SEO friendlyness, to be able to run ads so that the video gets around and so we can appeal to as many people as possible; After all, not just companies seek for infinite growth, but everyone in this system who seeks viewership, fame and riches plays the same game.
Consumers weren’t taught sustainability #
During the age of infinite growth consumers have become delusional. Don’t feel attacked, I am also speaking for myself here. We expect a perfect service with a staggering amount of features, harbour extremely high expectations and generally want to pay nothing for the privilege of entertaining or informing ourselves on everything. We have been incredibly spoiled, but with how the World Wide Web evolved over the last two decades, the average consumer cannot be blamed for becoming a leech, in a way we are more like “service junkies”, having become so dependent on unprofitable but ubiquitously popular technology that we do not even see a real escape from using these services, it’s almost like envisioning a life without a phone number, it seems nigh impossible.
The architects of the web we know today thought of a model that seems quite clever, a win win win scenario that should leave everyone happy; The serviceprovider, lets just take YouTube as an example, hosts videos from creators who spend a lot of time making those videos for the platform. YouTube cannot employ these users to make content for them, however they do offer a different kind of deal, the user can run advertisements on their videos in order to make themself and YouTube some money.
- The Advertiser gets their product seen by hundreds of thousands of people
- The creator can get some money out of their hobby and might have a chance at continuing to make videos as a career
- And YouTube are able to sustain themselves and keep their servers running
Win, Win and Win baby.
Too bad this system doesn’t really work that well for a lot of platforms.
¯\ (ツ) /¯
Big problem!
Ads keep a vast number of companies liquid, however most users cannot tolerate them, the FBI even recommends people to use ad blockers and due to the rampant blocking of ads many companies frankly are up shits creek. The struggle for a lot of companies and individuals today essentially is finding the correct monetisation strategy, which is a difficult question to answer especially since the idealist solutions in most cases will not work. Sadly.
To remedy the money problems, companies tend to either ramp up the ads, or they implement more subscription services and premium benefits, or they go bankrupt and fade into obscurity, or they do all of those things at once, the age of the free as in “I won’t pay for shit” internet is slowly dying.
While this is all extending beyond the scope of this article, (don’t worry it will be brought up in a future instalment) I am bringing this up in order to communicate that the internet isn’t a zero sum world, everything has a cost and if you don’t pay, someone else will. Like I do for this website.
Sadly everything comes back to money, the root of all problems and the reason why everyone wants free shit or force you to stop using adblockers. Consumers don’t understand how many considerations, how much work and how much cost is associated with running a website and this lack of understanding cannot be blamed on them, as Web 2.0 was built on the back of an unsustainable system that only tech goliaths can keep up. I have learned a lot through the process of administrating this very website and without getting into much detail I’m just gonna throw this at you:
Bandwidth costs are insane. Bandwidth costs may end you. You cannot compete with the Bandwidth the big boys have on offer. More on that in a future Stepping Stones!
Stepping Stones: It doesn’t have to be this way #
And this is where incremental change can break us out of just being complacant. There is a tendency to just use existing services for everything and I certainly do the same thing to an extent. I use YouTube and other Google services, Patreon and PayPal, I have a small Discord server I would like to keep as small as possible and have certainly at least thought in passing about using platforms such as Reddit for some kind of forum functionality, however my identity would still be tied to these third party services which, while offering a good service, have a tendency to become worse by the year, or may kick me off if they don’t like me enough.
This inaugural chapter of “Stepping Stones” focuses on Internet Chat, the big Wumpus in the room and alternatives which most would consider abberations from the past that still happen to exist today.
Internet Chat: Then versus Now #
How users communicate with each other has radically changed in the last 10 years alone and this evolution of communication services culminated in one popular Frankenwumpus’ monster: Discord.
Discord follows in the footsteps of other social media goliaths in the form of just doing everything all under one application, offering a hub of communication and entertainment instead of a focussed application that does one thing. Consumers do not really want focus anymore and barring some exceptions many start ups ended up failing through other tech giants replicating their novel features and thus making the original application useless, great example here being Vine. One outlier is SnapChat, which is a mostly ephemeral chat by design, meaning that anything you snap is temporary (which is why the apps mascot is a ghost) and the platform offers a form of communication and shitposting that is truly unique when compared to it’s peers.
Discord isn’t a SnapChat, it is more of an Instagram or YouTube of communication that consolidates the most popular features of a variety of services while removing one major hurdle alternatives are plagued with; The need to pay for hosting a server.
Back in 2016 I started using Discord by joining a friend’s server and chatting with them and I initially disliked it. I was used to Teamspeak, a VoIP application that was mostly tailored to gamers and voice chat, supporting big rooms of users and having limited text chatting capabilities. You connect to servers by typing out their information into a box, click connect and you enter, while on Discord you just log in and there are all the servers you joined associated to your account. Teamspeak is more friendly to anonymous use and very importantly, your data isn’t sold to advertisers. Ah yeah, that’s a downside to using Discord which I forgot to mention, they sell your data to advertisers.
Why exactly that is a problem, is because Discord is a bit of a black box when it comes to what data exactly they sell, and even if we are reassured that they dont use data from direct messages or whatnot, we cannot be entirely sure. So you sell your soul and digital identity for…
- The Convenience of hosting your very own server for 0$ a month
- In that server you can text chat with friends or community members
- Voice chatting and activities such as streaming and webcam chat is all supported
- And on top of this Discord is a feature rich social network which allows you to add friends, create DM groups and of course message people individually over private chats too
- To top this off, Discord is multiplatform and runs on anything, even accessible through the browser
If we would compare Discord to a deal with the devil it would be a great one, which is why everyone (myself included) is using it. Discord is more than just a chatting platform, or a videocalling platform, or a streaming platform; It’s a communication hub. It does everything and thus replaces everything.
OK… but why IRC? #
IRC is simple, cheap to host and you can chat with it. It also is extensible and many servers come with plugin support, which is why I decided to host relay.entropicdomain.net for people to connect and chat easily without the need of using Discord. The idea is to have a place I can call mine and that others can connect to and chat through without needing to “sell their soul” to advertisers.
After a few days of troubleshooting I finally got my server hosted and that using valid TLS certificates too! I learned a lot about the administrative side of setting up a relay chat and I was very pleased with the experience when first testing it out with a friend. You chat, someone else chats, that’s that. It’s a simple experience and the way I set my server up, made the experience completely ephemeral, which on Discord you can only really achieve with regular message wipes.
Then there is an element to IRC being a specific place for a specific purpose. While Discord is a platform in which you conduct job interviews, chat with friends during leisure time, chat with your boss during work hours and where you watch movies, play games with and scroll memes while taking a dump for 20 minutes on the loo; There is no point where you turn off Discord and go about the rest of your day. It is always on. For me it is open on the right side of my screen while writing this article in VS Code as an example.
For a relay chat things don’t have to be this way, and depending on the client you can set things up to be as close to your preferences as possible. To notify or not to notify, what colours do you want and do you care about accessing old chatlogs? With automatic command execution once you join a server to save you some time on top of the many settings you can adjust to your preference, IRC gives a lot of power on the client side to the point where you can use entirely different clients or even ones you wrote yourself.
The Chatting Experience over IRC #
When it comes to the general use of this form of web chat, I can only describe it as fairly laid back. Choose a nickname and connect to a server, then you can create a channel or join into an existing one by typing /JOIN #channelname, append a topic if you really want to and peers may join in and have a little chit chat with you and once everyone left the channel, the channel dies.
This temporary form of chat is of course completely configurable on the server side; I decided to forego using databases alltogether as I like the idea of a temporary congregation, instead of having a perpetual closeness to your friends. Additionally, no data can realistically be requested from users because the server doesn’t collect any, minimising the risk of becoming a victim of GDPR trolls.
In a way Discord has this problem as it is a hub application. If you enter your server to voice chat, text, do whatever you do in a server and then quit out of, you may get assaulted with more texts from friends, aqcuaintances and random strangers which makes the application a perpetual distraction and you never really get a break from it, especially since you likely have Discord always with you on your phone aswell. You never truly disconnect from it.
While for many there may not be any issues in regards to executive function, I do have these issues since I am easily distractible which makes IRC an appealing protocol for it’s minimalism, but it could also come to your benefit for other reasons!
Lightweight as hell #
There is an incredible difference between IRC and Discord in terms of memory usage and for me it has been necessary at times to free up as much RAM as possible on my computer for tough video renders especially. When Discord is open it takes up a significant chunk of memory and it has sometimes been just enough resources taken for an especially tough rendering job to fail.
In contrast when we check out the memory usage of an IRC client, in this case I am using KDE’s “Konversation”, the client is much lighter, only using up 18 MB of RAM.
This of course depends on the clients you are using, however when using IRC, you will likely never use up to 500 MB of your memory. In Discord’s defence, it is an Electron web-app which makes it cross compatible with a vast array of systems, no matter what hardware or operating system it runs on, kind of. The tradeoff is that Discord isn’t really a bespoke Desktop application, it rather relies on a Chromium instance, and if you use a Chromium browser, you know well enough how much of a RAM slut Chromium browsers are. IRC has more hurdles, for instance the client I am using only works on Linux distributions, while a client like HexChat also works on Windows and MacOS. For Discord, while alternative clients exist, you don’t have to pick favourites or weigh options as much as for considering which IRC client to download. When in doubt, just use the standard Discord version.
Anyhow, point being; You do not need high end hardware to chat over IRC, while for Discord you need to sacrifice a hefty chunk of your RAM just to run it alone. This may be less of a problem on a powerful laptop, or a midrange computer, but if you are using old hardware you may not even be able to install Discord, or the browsers it is accessible through could not be supported. For IRC it doesn’t (really) matter what client you use in order to connect to a server, you will be able to connect, unless there are special requirements you need to fulfill, such as connecting to a server that requires a secure connection, some clients may not support that.
We also have to consider mobile data and fun factor; Instant messaging on Discord is not just text, it can also include a buttload of images, video files and gifs, which may be a problem for you if you need to be careful with data usage. If you hop into a voice call, someone may turn on their webcam too, which could drain more mobile data. IRC (for the most part) is text only, which makes it considerably data friendlier than some modern applications. The limited bandwidth needs could also be significant for lower spec users, or for a potential junkyard PC that compared to a powerhouse has modest specs, or if you are unlucky enough to live in an area with terrible internet infrastructure.
You may think “Bandwidth isn’t THAT important nowadays, everyone got fast enough internet these days!”… Anyone living in the German countryside or in any areas which haven’t been blessed with good internet infrastructure would disagree.
An Anecdote: The first community I have ever interacted with online via text and voicechat was a group of German gamers who played a variety of titles, mainly Team Fortress 2 and a variety of other online games. The server they used was a Teamspeak one, which is a VoIP application and similar to IRC it has a significant advantage over Discord, that being low bandwidth requirements. The group eventually tried switching over to Discord to continue their virtual meetups and gaming sessions on a more whole encompassing service, however some of the players from the countryside noticed significant package loss and would have connection issues while playing games or watching YouTube videos together. As context, that one guy’s internet was so bad that if his father watched a video, his voice started gargling. For him Discord was nigh unusable and him being a pillar of that tight knit community was reason enough for a mass exodus back to Teamspeak.
Really, while such technologies may seem outdated or even useless today, not everyone is blessed with good internet accessibility and even if you do have a great internet connection, you may want to save some bandwidth for file uploads and downloads regardless.
It also is fun! #
Another reason to use technologies such as IRC: It’s just fun and satisfying to extend the functionality of hardware you already own!
A great example would be jailbroken gaming consoles, which I am personally a big fan of and I try to modify every console I own to make it do things the original manufacturer didn’t allow. It turns out that quite a few consoles can be outfitted with IRC clients which can interface with servers and thus connect users on unusual hardware to people using phones and computers!
While Discord is cross platform with the asterisk being “only on the correct browsers and modern hardware”, IRC is cross platform with the asterisk meaning “that nearly any device that sports a CPU and an internet connection is capable of connecting to a relay chat”.
I checked before what consoles support IRC applications and I have found clients for the Playstation 2 and 3, the handheld Playstations, a client for the original XBOX and various Nintendo consoles also have homebrew clients up for download.
You may think something again, maybe now something along the lines of “Who would ever use something like that on a videogame console?”
It’s cool. It’s fun. It can be quite convenient. Maybe for some communities it just feels right to chat on a console. Why hold yourself back from doing something redundant, just because others don’t see the value in it?
Finally; It’s personalized #
And that is the value IRC really brings to you, it is a technology that can be used in any way you would like. It enables you to revive old hardware and give it purpose, extend the usability of tech that you already possess and it is a genuinely great lightweight alternative to resource hogging modern software equivalents and in a way it’s as anarchical as the ideal internet should be.
Depending on what server you are going for you can set it up in ephemeral or permanent ways, you can use it on almost any platform new and old and you can even forego using a GUI with terminal based clients if you are a nerd or just appreciate simplicity and you can customize your experience to the point of even loading custom sound files for notifications if you really wanted to and if your client allowed it. It really is a tremendously good alternative to centralized platforms which enables anonymity and is inclusive for a vast array of users who may or may not be unfortunate enough to have shitty internet. Hell, you can even access IRC servers with a good range of “dumb phones” and Blackberries, which are becoming a little more popular as of late for people who prefer the offline life a majority of the time.
If you aren’t quite sure what to think about IRC or if you would ever enjoy it or like using it, there is only one way to know for sure: Just try it out man! You can connect to my server and say hi, check this post below for some details or click on the IRC item in the menu navigation above!
But this is all just one idea of many, one technology from many which could help you cradle a little community, just one of many Stepping Stones!
