As I've said before, I run a Discord server where some ex-students keep in touch, let me know what's going on with their lives, and just shoot the breeze.

Recently, what with various social media networks doing things like AI-based age verification (requiring uploading photos of oneself, removing a sense of anonymity to which people are otherwise entitled) or, worse, having to upload government-provided ID, we've been talking about alternatives.

The most popular alternative is an IRC server so I set one up (Ergo) and bridged it to the existing Discord server with slightly-modified version of Matterbridge. All of the channels are mirrored, messages from IRC are passed to Discord and vice-versa, and … it's so great.

Going back to the simplicity of IRC (though with the affordances of IRCv3 via Ergo and my current preferred client, Birc), is such a delight. There's a certain nostalgia in just seeing names, messages, and not a lot else. A particular shout out goes to not watching my client waste gigabytes of memory doing absolutely nothing!

Of course, given there's a bridge, the Discord server isn't going anywhere (thank you, network effect), but I took the leap to rejoin some of my old servers like Freenode (well, actually LiberaChat), Undernet, and a few others I haven't touched since my teenage years. So many names still linger on them, more than half my life since.

The nearest they might hope for is joining other IRC servers, if that turns out to interest them, or otherwise the Fediverse in all its forms. Though I run my own Mastodon instance and Bluesky PDS, I know some of my ex-students lurk in corners where I haven't yet ventured such as the reddit-like Lemmy and its various instances. They are, however, a minority; in my day, all of us who were online, spread across the various little corners here and there, were the default.

Of course, we still had MSN/Yahoo/AIM/ICQ, etc. We weren't anti-social, after all!

Still, I hope that my students get to experience a similar feeling of nostalgia as I feel. A longing for a time when we didn't depend almost exclusively on big corporations to keep us connected. Memories of communities built around independently-run forums, IRC servers, message boards, and so on. Alas, for what shall they pine?