Honestly, it seems like we never successfully replicated the AOL/Prodigy era chat room paradigm. My family still has friends we met in late-90s AOL chat rooms, and we honestly ended up stuck on their dialup for years longer than would have been sane due to wanting to stick to that community (at the time, I think the bring-your-own-connection service was still an extra fee, so we'd have to pay $15 to a local ISP plus $15 for AOL or whatever, versus paying them $25 in the first place."
There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience.
I also wonder if by tying it to a paid service in the first place gave a bit more ammunition for moderators to handle the "obnoxious 12-year-old" class of troll.
> There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience.
Some clients are nice enough to include a list of common / popular servers, but they don't provide much more context about them. I would love to see some of those modern IRCv3 features but I'm not sure of clients supporting them and IRC networks supporting them.
There's IRC, which tends to have a much higher technical barrier to entry though, and a lack of centralization makes for a more difficult discovery and user experience.
I also wonder if by tying it to a paid service in the first place gave a bit more ammunition for moderators to handle the "obnoxious 12-year-old" class of troll.