miscommunication

Shortly after I started blogging back in the dark ages of 2003, one of my blog friends would talk about her group on IRC, which is short for Internet Relay Chat. There were hundreds of text-based, IRC chat rooms.

One evening, I decided to try her group and found the natives very friendly, for they kept sending me lots of love. Not being totally stupid, I did soon come to realize that they were, in point of fact, laughing out loud. I couldn't hear them, but that is what they were telling me although I didn't think that I was being terribly funny. I guess it was better than roflmao, but can't even say for sure if that was yet an acronym in those early years. 

Now, I am somewhat surprised to learn than IRC still exists for it is the internet browsers that became the only internet program that most of us have ever used, at least for about two decades now.

As of June 2021, there are 481 different IRC networks known to be operating, of which the open source Libera Chat, founded in May 2021, has the most users, with 20,374 channels on 26 servers; between them, the top 100 IRC networks share over 100 thousand channels operating on about one thousand servers.

As I understand it, you still require a special client/program to access IRC, and it exists outside of where browsers go. A program called mIRC was the one that I used then, and I have learned that it still exists.

There was also Usenet, which, if I recall correctly, did not involve chat rooms but was where one could follow chat topics. I didn't use that one much either, but, like IRC, somewhat surprisingly to me, it still exists.

Usenet is a set of protocols for generating, storing and retrieving news "articles" (which resemble Internet mail messages) and for exchanging them among a readership which is potentially widely distributed.

The Internet Browser became the only online app that most of us need or want. In other words, we have lots of love for it.