i am only partially sarcastic here.
The current Internet is a monoculture
People want their own fluffy & safe social bubbles, not open, distributed networks.
Also, why are we pretending that Bing, Yandex and Baidu don't exist?
I looked at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_Relay_C...
mIRC is the only familiar one. Then again, this was back when I was a kid. Vaguely related, AIM was my jam. I was a script kiddy and needed IRC to talk to all the l337 h4ck3r5.
bitchx - an IRC client: http://www.bitchx.com/
efnet - one of the oldest IRC networks, founded in 1990
> I do miss the mad west of the IRC/NNTP days
Plus, a lot of new people on there have described it like that. https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25WJZGMingRgdlOTrZJjOz7GHnS1D9...
Social networks are nothing more than a reflection of our society. Blaming Facebook and Twitter is easy but the hard part is dealing with the polarisation in politics, the intransingence of Russia, the inability of people to know who to trust and what is real or not and the slow disintegration of our institutions.
The real question is how do you fix society ?
"We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
Dr. King, Beyond Vietnam (1967)
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...
People ask for tools and then the tools shape them.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_node_controller
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys...
[5]https://www.winlink.org/content/ardop_overview
[6]https://rosmodem.wordpress.com/