Back in the day, lots of 'normal people' used irc too.

I like things with open standards, so that people can use the tools that work for them. Bob can use the Gmail web interface to send and receive email, and Sally can use gnus in Emacs to send and receive email on her own local server.

Only for Google to spam-hole anything sally sends...

It really boggles my mind that a few actors were able to essentially lock down a federated protocol.

Exactly. That actually causes me anger. Email is so decentralized as a protocol and implementation and yet Google, Yahoo, etc now control email and then made it hard to send email using SPAM as an excuse.

Back in the day, the IRC crowd had a lot more 'normal people' than Usenet, which was the other social outlet on the Internet.

> Back in the day, lots of 'normal people' used irc too.

"Back in the day" they had no choice or little other choice but.

And even then "normal people" would prefer things like AIM and ICQ for reasons obvious to anyone except the self-proclaimed not-normal above-average über-men.

But mIRC was (is?) also easy to use.

AIM, Discord etc. have the 'word-processor problem': the protocol and the interface are inexorably intertwined. You're stuck with whatever user interface they provide.

And this 'word-processor problem' is compounded by the 'normal people' issue, or, even worse than that, the 'lowest common user' problem. It's optimisation not for the best or the most powerful or even the prettiest interface, but rather optimisation for ease-of-immediate-use. (I.e. the interface for word-processors, whether LibreOffice or Word, are miserable environments for actually creating in, because they're tailored to not even 'average users' but to 'inexperienced and lazy users' - those who want to be able to sit down and use it without any training.)

With an open standard, you can have good interfaces for 'normal people' and an interface for 'lowest common users' and interfaces for other types of users, and this enables all of these types to be able to interact.

> With an open standard, you can have good interfaces for 'normal people' and an interface for 'lowest common users' and interfaces for other types of users

Please show me a cross-platform good interface for "normal people" for either IRC or XMPP: that supports all the latest standards and is on par with, say, Slack. Where cross-platform isn't Windows-Linus-Mac, but desktop-mobile.

For IRC I'm aware of none (except the ... closed-source web/electron-based irccloud, the irony). For XMPP there's just Conversations for Android, and that's it.

I also like the tech bro considers "normal users" to be bad, be cause there's "even worse than that, the lowest common user". There is a reason why people don't use the crappy half-baked barely usable crap that tech-bro non-normal above-average über men produce.

thelounge works great on both desktop and mobile.

Strange that you mention XMPP as you can have all that (including mobile - Conversations) plus end-to-end encryption (OTR, OMEMO, PGP - take your pick), message carbon copies and a server-side message archive that synchronizes all your clients.

But hey, XMPP is passé so everyone prefers a vendor lock-in.

It's not strange. Because Conversations exists only on Android (and the server you connect to has to support all the dozens of XEPs many of which are still in experimental stage).

So, with Conversations I'm locked into a single client on a single platform. Yay, XMPP :-/ (There's no desktop client I'm aware of that supports Conversations' features).

Oh, and I can have that only if I go through the trouble of setting up all the moving pieces myself. Because I really really really want to spend my time picking which flavour of end-to-end encryption to use (in which clients?) and how to make sure that a server-side searchable archive exists (accessible through which client??) or that media and files reach even offline clients (which clients???) etc.

You make it sound harder than it is.

Server-wise you want either ejabberd or prosody for the latest features. Yes, you need to set up a server once and read some docs, as with every self-hosted service. And if you don't care about encryption enough to read about it you can just enforce TLS for client-to-server and server-to-server connections. On the desktop, Gajim (win/linux/bsd/mac) supports all of the XEPs I mentioned. There are clients for iOS too but I don't know how they work as I don't own any Apple products.

Of course, if you'd rather spend money than time hoping that your provider won't have your conversations stolen, misused or disappear with them that's your prerogative too.

I don't understand why you pretend to be obtuse but it's clear you've already made your mind why.

The only ones being obtuse here are the delusional tech bros who are oh so sure that they are better than the "average" "normal" people.

> I'm an average person (with 17 years of professional programming career behind me).

I sense a contradiction in this statement...

You only sense the contradiction because you share a common HN delusion: that you are above average unique non-normal tech bro über man.

This delusion is what stops such people from understanding why Slack/Viber/WhatsApp/iMessage/WeChat etc. won and XMPP and IRC lost.

What perplexes me is that there are now even more competing messaging services than ever before. This suggests to me that none have won.

Indeed. And in the world of competing messaging services the world prefers anything but XMPP or IRC. This suggests to me that they lost.