[apollo_mojave]

Super interesting, thank you for posting. Agreed with a lot of it, except for one thing:

"No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7."

That's one of the things I miss most about IRC. There was something very temporal about it -- you were logged in, or you weren't. You were present, or you weren't. More modern tools of communication like Slack or Discord basically don't have this; it's more like a long private "feed" than a "chat" as I think of it, anyway.

I miss that temporality. I miss logging in and asking the chat, "Hey, is so and so online?" "yeah, he was here about half an hour ago, went afk but should be back." It gives me the same warm rosy feeling the thought of having to use a pay phone does.

Obviously, you're right, in the commercial sense, this is unacceptable. But I personally kind of miss the days when chat / email / forum were separate things. Now we have these mutants in Slack and Discord that mish mash both. Maybe I'm old but I find it sort of difficult conceptually.