still believe that the ideal decentralized social network would look like IRC. IRC never reached mainstream for many reasons (no rich clients, UX, no mobile etc). centrally governed servers that vote to bridge w/ each other on an open protocol and fix where IRC failed above imo

Big fan of harvesting the "not fully realised" patterns from history.

Slack was IRC redone...although a different universe network topology wise to decentralisation.

But building on the (unknown) past is a super power.

"Innovate ONLY as a last resort" ← Charles Eames

🐵 ← 🙈🙉🙊 → /phil →  phil.cockfield.net, db.team →  
ƒ(🌳) →  🧫 /sys  ←  @cell <T>

repost: If a slack client was built on top of IRC back in 1996-1999, me thinks IRC would still be super relevant today. i'm no slack power user, but I'm not entirely sure you can bridge many slack servers together, where each server can moderate its own users

but yeah, imagine Slack could replace epic/ircII/BitchX/ScrollZ/mIRC and the other popular clients back when IRC reigned, the underlying principles of how it was ran are still valid, we just didn't have the capability to build rich clients like Slack or Discord yet

Totally. Yeah, I don't think you can (re server) and I don't think the corporate structure around it would make that feasible.

So totally agree ... my understanding is that what they plugged in IRC for Slack was the memory and search index (ability to retain and find context)...

Centralised co. though is non-starter!