in response to moth, who writes:
not to harp on it too much but im kind of begging people to look at bluesky, mastodon, twitter, tumblr, irc, discord, signal, and all the less enduring endeavors that have sprung up between and since and actually try to answer the question... whats next. what comes after this
i really want to see what other people think about that. a blog post, a bluesky thread, just a screenshot of a chat window, anything. thoughts on the future rather than the past (ive already been in the past)
okay. sure, ive been thinking about this for a while. lets blog.
chatboards are stroads #
ive been on the internet a while. probably since like... 2004 at the earliest? back then it was still somewhat common to see the chat/board pattern, as in: you have a chat (IRC, AIM, Skype, whatever) and then separately, you have a board (usually phpBB but Facebook and Reddit were starting to take over that space). the important thing is that chat and boards are two different things.
if you wanted to have a real-time conversation you would use the chat. you could see who's "online right now" and you could say "hi" and then nobody would answer you for like an hour because we didn't have cell phones yet so you had to wait for someone to physically be at their computer, but it was still basically instant compared to email.
if you wanted to share something then you posted it on the board, and people would see and reply to it over the course of days or weeks. if you wanted attention faster you could post on a board and then share a link in chat to let everyone know "hey, I have something new!" and, again, you'd wait an hour for people to actually see it because people were not glued to their screens quite as much as they are today.
critically, if you said something in a chat, it would be gone the next day. anyone who was there when you said it would have a copy on their computer, but anyone who showed up tomorrow wouldn't see it. but if you said something on a board, it would be there basically forever. there are boards today with 20 years of calcified history on them, an invaluable resource which is being polluted by scrapers and LLMs, but that's a rant for another time.
Twitter and Bsky and Discord and Telegram and, yes, Matrix and Stoat, have sort of broken this dynamic. they're "chatboards". they're stroads.
in brief: a stroad is a combination of a highway and a pedestrian street and it's the worst of both worlds -- bad to drive on, bad to walk on. Discord is this but for a chatroom and a bulletin board. it's not great for "posts" because they get buried under a hundred chat messages, and it's not really great for chatrooms either because they end up having way too much overhead. chats should be easy to create and easy to destroy. these are both subtle points that need their own elaboration, so... okay! let's get into that!
chats should be ephemeral #
a pattern ive noticed since the early days of IRC and Skype is that chatrooms will rot. eventually the moderators grow up and get busy, and maybe they don't appoint a new moderator or the moderator they choose is not very good at their job, and eventually you will be in a situation where there are 20-ish active regulars in a chat with no oversight. bad behavior is unpunished, so the most sensitive members leave and the most toxic members stay, and eventually the chat becomes unpleasant for all except the most irony-poisoned individuals.
the solution to this "chat rot" is of course, "chat mitosis", the effect in which the regular users of a chatroom will start their own, newer, smaller chat, a clean slate with the most toxic members removed. on irc, this is as simple as creating a new room and sending out a bunch of dms to invite people to it. on discord you can't just start a new room, you have to start a new "server" (collection of rooms) and if you had any persistent state like custom emotes or pinned posts then you have to re-create all of those (and they don't make it easy to import these from another server, either).
in addition to the room itself being "lightweight" and easy to re-create, the chatlogs should also be ephemeral. this might sound a little weird coming from me, a data hoarder, but hear me out: chatlogs should be ephemeral on the server side. if you were there when something happened, it should be logged to your computer, and that log should stick around as long as you like, but the server should forget things regularly. when you walk into a room in real life, it's not reasonable to ask for a tape record of everything that was ever said in that room! you can ask people to repeat things you missed but that should be at their own discretion -- history belongs to those who are present, basically. you should keep your own history even when you leave a room, and you shouldn't magically "gain history" when you join a room.
boards should be persistent #
this is where boards come in! because it's natural to want some messages to stick around for weeks, years, decades even! tech support forums, shared art and writing, all of these things deserve a long-term archive. as mentioned before, 10-year old boards are a valuable resource, and when someone decides to use discord to publish a game, and its mods, and all its documentation, they are dooming that valuable knowledge to vanish before its time.
i do think we need to re-think viewing permissions on these. romantically, i like the idea of boards being public, so that they can be archived and studied by future generations (xkcd 979), but in the current political environment, i also see the need for private boards, viewable only to logged-in members or even to a subset of those members. boards need to be a safe way to share things with "just certain people" that are more persistent than a chat but just as private as one. but by default i think a lot of what goes onto a message board can and should be public.
twitter (and twitter-likes, see bsky, mastodon) tend to lean towards being "boards" but for short, disorganized messages. and i think that's a valid approach, although because of their disorganized nature they don't really function as well for the "wisdom of the ancients" approach. the biggest advantage i'd like to steal from these is the ability to sort posts on tags, a feature that was wildly popular with tumblr, cohost, instagram, even boorus like e621 get this right.
my wishlist #
i'm sort of rambling at this point and i would like to revisit these ideas in the future, but to answer moth's question, here's what i think comes next:
- chat and boards as two separate applications, or at least two separate parts of an application like how Discord has "threads" now
- chat should be ephemeral on the server, persistent on the client. you get to keep any chatlogs that you were present for.
- what happens if you step out for several days and leave your client running? my instinct is 'it keeps logging until you get kicked', and the room owner should have the ability to define conditions where people get kicked automatically. i think a good default would be 'kick after 14 days of inactivity', maybe with a warning when your kick is coming up so you can hop back in and say 'yeah im still here'.
- boards should be persistent, editable, with attachments.
- boards should be less like twitter and more like wikipedia! boards are for the love of collecting and sharing knowledge.
- we need tooling to bridge this gap without making a stroad out of it. maybe each chat could have an associated board. when you post on a board it notifies the chat immediately, when you post in a chat you have a command like !clipthat which shares your post with the board.
- i don't think we need any new protocols, you guys. a lot of old protocols are perfectly extensible. irc still works. rss still works. http still works. they could use more love, maybe some better client software or extensions, but there's no need to invent activitypub or atproto or matrix.
- twitter and its clones are functionally solving the problem 'you can't reply to an rss post' and i think instead of inventing a new wheel we should extend rss! maybe each post can have a 'reply address' that you send email to and it gets automatically published under the post, or something like that. email me if you've already done this, i want to hear about it.
- a few people have commented to me now that they'd like to see privacy handled better in the future. is there an irc client that supports end-to-end encryption?
- XMPP has something called 'OMEMO' where messages get encrypted at posting-time and are only viewable by approved clients, all other listeners get gibberish. the problem with OMEMO is basically just that if you move your account to a new device later, all that history is gone forever. this could be solved if clients supported retroactively importing and viewing history from another device.