Isn't this the same problem IRC had but IRC was (still is?) fairly widely used? (Wikipedia says its peak was about 10mil in 2004/2005 - which makes it 1% according to here: https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm)
Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's not a failure by any stretch.
How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed to intuition or speculation?
I actually don't think IRC is doing that well. I used to have a bouncer but I shut it down a few months ago because most of my communities had moved over to Discord. But I think the reason why Discord and Slack took over was not because IRC was decentralized, but because the protocol was never designed for mobile devices where you might not always be connected to a server.
It didn't help that the protocol evolved at an absolutely glacial pace with very uneven support across various networks, and doing anything but the most trivial sorts of channel management had to be done through a bot. Matrix seems like the obvious IRC successor due to its seamless two-way interoperability with IRC networks, but I suspect that it won't hit critical mass until Discord starts causing problems for its userbase.
Maybe the DCC transfer and easy scriptabilty thanks to Khaled Mardam-Bey's mIRC might be a valid claim.
Perhaps also the impermanence of the history of the channels afforded certain types of interactions that you wouldn't do with you know, theoretically forever scrollbacks.
I guess this brings us back to classical marketing about how you can't have a sustainable differentiated product based on negatives. (as in, this is not the bad guy). You need to have something in the affirmative
1988 versus 1996 and 1997, respectively. AOL proper was an IRC competitor, as was CompuServe, but their definitions of working weren't different from IRC's.
That's not a useful comparison. The fact that IRC existed in 1988 does not bring a user onboard in 2004.
That same argument didn't save WAIS, Fido, or Gopher. Nor did it keep Tymnet or Bitnet around and didn't give Compuserve and The Well a seat at the winners table.
It also wasn't a saving grace for Friendster, MySpace, or LiveJournal.
Magnavox putting out the first home gaming console in 1972 hasn't made them a gaming juggernaut nor does Xerox run the desktop. Neither Palm, Go or IBM makes my smartphone nor is my laptop by Grid Compass, desktop by MITS, spreadsheet by VisiOn or my pants from Arnold Constable. I don't fly Western Air Express, drive a Rickett, subscribe to RealNetworks Rhapsody for music nor am I posting this on slashdot.org.
Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy here.
The real question here is why didn't it die like everything else. Why is it one of the few legacy survivors?
> Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy here
Separate problems: getting off the ground versus surviving.
IRC got off the ground because it didn't have centralized competition with a capability advantage. Why it persisted is a deeper story. Lemmy is still trying to get off the ground. It, unlike IRC, does have such competition. As such, the old playbook is obsolete.
I'm going to disagree. The old playbook is to empower users in unique ways that at the time feel almost forbidden and magical and to competently execute that.
You could claim all those avenues have been explored but I disagree there as well. The surrounding context and possibilities are always on the move so the underlying potential is always changing.
That's why say, YouTube, the 40th or so on-demand video company, which happened to launch when digital cameras and broadband internet were becoming widely used, was the first successful execution or why smartphones didn't take off until the rollout of 3G or, looking into the future, VR might finally take off at attempt 50 after some related thing changes.
Text only, transient/short life data, is a lot cheaper to process and serve than images, permanent posts, etc.
It won the initial buy-in of us geeks/nerds/hackers/whateverthephraseofthedayis who gave it a rather solid base.
It’s a very personal type of communication. Real-time, immediate, and to a lot smaller audience (more intimate) compared to web forums, Reddit etc.
And finally, I would posit that it did actually die. What remains now is small, compared to how popular the likes of Reddit Twitter etc are, vs how popular IRC was in its heyday.
This is an interesting question. Wikipedia claims 230,000 users at peak times which is still quite a bit more than say, gopher. A 98% drop is real but you'll still see IRC occasionally for software purposes (like say, Debian)
Maybe it was a coalition of people there for different purposes and some of those groups have fallen away for different places.
For instance, people were doing dating and sextalk on irc back in the day along with file-sharing. Those applications have been superseded by many other places. I don't expect to see anyone sincerely asking "a/s/l?" in modern IRC chatrooms.
You can join an XMPP MUC today to bring back that feeling and the server options are light enough to self-host on a home network unlike some other FOSS decentralized chat options.
I'm on a sort of global village irc server I found a link to in HN comments, and I keep in touch with a couple other sets of friends through efnet and private irc (with discord relay). It's dead relative to its hay day, but protocols never really die.
Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's not a failure by any stretch.
How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed to intuition or speculation?