IRC, and being intentionally online

I have a lot of avenues to reach me. Arguably too many – I struggle to keep track of (much less reply to) everything. Some friends are on Matrix, some are on Telegram, a couple are on Discord. Sometimes I'll even get an odd notification from FB Messenger, or Instagram chat, or an SMS, or a call. And that's just friends — my public profiles have separate IM inboxes on the Fediverse, or Twitter, or even *gags* Bluesky. It's a lot for my stupid, ditzy-ass brain to keep track of. And it never really stops. All this trash is constantly in my fucking pocket, buzzing my phone like a very unsexy magic wand.

I shouldn't be trying more messaging apps. I already have enough on my plate. But I'm not known for making good, sensible decisions, so I'd ended up dipping my toes into IRC either way. And I'd rediscovered something really cool?

Most messaging apps treat you as being online by default – your client is always online, always throwing messages at you, you are assumed to always be reachable; some folks will get mad and think you're ignoring them if you don't reply within a couple hours. It's fucking ridiculous. Meanwhile, IRC makes being online a conscious choice. By default, you're offline and unreachable, and you get to choose when you decide to go online. In a world where we are constantly being bombarded with an incessant barrage of stuff, having the power of choice handed back to you like this feels amazing. This is how social media should feel.

Okay, admittedly, these are not an IRC feature, but they were a thing in the times of IRC and AIM. Yeah, can we have those back please??

I'd recently gone on a little vacation of sorts that had me offline and busy most of the week. The AIM-era messaging app GG made informing all my contacts that I'll be AFK piss-easy — I just had to set my status and... there, everyone knows.

Literally every other messenger I use made it near impossible. With the exception of Facebook's apps (which do have statuses, but they disappear after 24h), every other app either had no way to publish a status, or had it paywalled (Durov is a fucking hack). fjkkdhfjkdfgd.