Is that really true though? Do you have any sources to verify that? I'm from England and AOL felt pretty pervasive here.

I'm from Australia and free AOL CD's were everywhere by the late 90's, but I knew absolutely zero people that had ever used it.

Likewise, everyone was familiar with the 'Prodigy' and 'CompuServe' icons on our desktops with earlier versions of Windows, but nobody used them.

Correction: Free AOL disks felt very pervasive here.

Future archaeologists are going to be sifting through the landfills and determine that AOL discs are going to either be some sort of currency or curious religious artifacts.

I was on AOL for a big stretch of that time, and those archaeologists wouldn’t be wrong. It was so pervasive that it was a thing of wonder and majesty on the actual www (eg the classic viral Web 1.0 post about getting a license plate starting with ASL).

I almost remember the exact moment I realised that AOL in fact wasn't the internet but rather some shovelware that sat above it. As soon as I got winsock working I never went back.

Well, yeah you make a fair point there. I can't speak to who used them but it at least felt like free AOL and Compuserve hours were in heavy use. Might just have been in my tiny sphere though.

Yes, they were everywhere including cereal boxex. But who didn't repurpose these free 3.5" floppy disks to store their stuff back in the day anyway?

Free AOL disks were everywhere in France too.

Especially in my uncle’s cherry trees to scare the birds.

> The rest of the world [snip] never had an AOL/ProdigyCompuServe phase

In the Phillipines, Facebook is tied in with your mobile provider so most people only got Facebook (when I was there some years ago). Facebook is what some people there called the internet. Definitely a walled in garden, and definitely a strategy by Facebook to create a moat in some countries.

I'm aware of this 'colonising strategy' of FB in developing markets and I find it really sad that many people's first experience of the net and the web will have been FB.

The early internet was largely America centric.

IRC won't come back for the masses, it's UX doesn't allow it.

IRC’s UX never went away for the masses, people use IRC semantics all the time on Slack and Discord. The UX that never became mainstream once the internet was, is the same as it ever was: people by and large don’t value decentralization and don’t understand how to use it effectively. The closest it’s ever gotten was torrents, and even then most people didn’t branch out from TPB.

No, the only similarity Slack on Discord have is that they are "chat like" and have "chat rooms"/"channels".

But the whole UX around using them is very very different.

And that is what matters for the normal user.

Just the list of lacking default features is quite long, like: predictable display of formatting, emoji, pictures, file sharing, voice chat, nested conversations/threads, chat history, different user roles, user avatars, etc.

And yes you can bolt all of this on top of IRC, but that doesn't matter. Defaults matter. At least for the common users UX.

And as long as the IRC standard doesn't include most of this points by default (especially chat history, avatars, etc.) it won't have another golden time.

Also no msg-commands as the default way to do things, programmers might like them, the common user doesn't.

Unless “short feature wishlist” is “open source both the client and the server”, then the golden IRC days are not coming back. The whole point of IRC is that there isn’t a central point of control.

I lived in England in the mid 90s and CompuServe (and to a lesser extent AOL) was the way I and most people I knew got 'online'.

Discord is just another walled garden.