Human interaction has taken many forms since the dawn of the internet. From the humble beginnings of electronic mails, we now live in an era of instant messaging where the experience of communication afforded by platforms like Whatsapp or Telegram is nothing short of seamless. Provided that you have an account in these services, they allow you to call, text and even share any kind of multimedia content to another person using the same service. There are also other platforms like X (formerly Twitter) or Reddit where the structure of interaction is of a different kind. Instead of talking with people you already know, these platforms widen your exposure by allowing you to follow whoever you want, serving content based on your interests and preferences. Reddit, in particular, allows a user to subscribe and follow a “subreddit” where people come together to talk about a specific area of interest.

Of course, it would be rather naive to assume that this is all there is to the picture. The recent decisions taken by some of these platforms is a testament to how they have come to corrupt regular user experience. Either by aggressively pushing ads or censoring posts under the pretense of dubious regulations, such platforms have come to serve content that has little to no relevance to actual user preferences. I feel that most of these digital places which now connect billions of users all over the world have entirely forgotten the purpose of their existence. Their contemporary allure consists entirely of the sheer quantity of users they host, rendering meaningful exchange of ideas into a distant memory.

Before my hiatus from these digital hubs of socialization, I used many of these platforms as a means to connect with people. Growing profoundly dissatisfied with Instagram, I temporarily found respite in a few subreddits where communication, fortunately, was not contingent upon how popular you were. However, even Reddit eventually succumbed to the demands of corporate greed. Despite my sour experience with online interaction through social media, I remained confident that there must be alternatives. A place where the spirit of the old internet still endures.

Due to my abiding interest with the GNU/Linux operating system, I stumbled upon many old and alternative protocols used by people for communication. Internet Relay Chat or (IRC) is one such protocol that grew to popularity in the mid 1990s. It is essentially a text based chat system where users joined various channels that were hosted on IRC servers. Many open source projects have a channel on the Libera network in order to offer assistance to new users. Despite the evident lack of features offered by IRC such as image sharing or storing messages when a client is disconnected, it still seemed to me a better alternative than its modern counterparts. Although you could still share images or files by uploading them to null pointers (a server that temporarily hosts files for sharing), what caught my attention was how there was enough room to pause and gather your thoughts.

There were no read markers and users in a channel always took time to respond to your queries. But despite the lack of “spontaneity” you see in modern applications, IRC still appeared to be more alive than its novel replacements. I think this was mainly because the protocol and the plethora of client side applications that leveraged it existed solely to fulfill their purpose and nothing more. There were no ads or companies motivated by vested interests. The entire infrastructure was predicated upon free and open code, effectively precluding any form of centralization that characterizes contemporary social media.

There’s a plethora of IRC networks with hundreds of channels where users discuss, debate or simply just lurk in the shadows. These networks seem to have also birthed their own subculture with netiquettes and common practices. Users login only when they want to engage or discuss, replacing spontaneity and instant responses with more enduring and thought provoking conversations. IRC channels encompass a wide array of subjects from technology to philosophy. And the lack of a rigid structure gives each channel a distinct flavour of its own. Although the protocol is text based, the words shared by users in these channels truly come alive.

The IRC protocol is just one instance of the many alternatives that exist that serve as viable replacements for popular messaging or social media platforms. There’s mastodon which I have started using recently that is part of the fediverse, a collection of federated networks enabling communication and sharing of information. A blogging platform called write.as has also recently caught my eye, although I still prefer to publish in my own site. So underneath the seething mass of advertisements and AI generated or SEO optimized content, the spirit of the old internet still lingers, patiently waiting to be discovered by those tired of being confined by programs that are meant to serve and not undermine user interest.