Its been a long time Massassi. I'm glad to see your well. The last time I was on here (admittedly many years ago) there was talk of shutting down the forum. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that's not the case.

For those of you that hated me, (and many did), you can blame Triscuit for my triumphant return. I got up super early this morning and logged into steam. I have ole' Triscuit as a friend and, recognizing him for a Massassi Vet, decided to see what he was up to. According to steam...

While on his page, I saw he belonged to a Massassi Temple group! I quickly sent in my submission to join (please add me!) and decided to see how the old stompin grounds were. Thus my adventure brought me here.

There is much I can say about Massassi. How it shaped my childhood, how this was my first (and best) interaction with "Social Media", how it forced a young me to do things with computers I would have never done otherwise.

Instead of creating an impenetrable wall of overly romantic reminiscence, I'll settle for asking about a few of the folks i remember:

Mentat
AlCeio(?)
BaconFish
CoolMatty
MB
Jedi Kirby
Roger Spruce
Did Wookie make a comeback?
Alan
Couchman

PS - I really really reallly miss this guy: No modern emoji compares.

wow its been a real nostalgia party on this site recently.

I remember you as well! I hope I wasnt a jerk to you. If I was, sorry!

cans omeone ban this guy plz

(MB, I mean. Can someone please ban MB.)

Niiice! It’s MB! To be honest I felt I had a particular rivalry going with you. Perhaps arch enemy is closer to the mark. Not sure why, don’t remember anything except being at odds with you and Atony(somthing weird?). I do remember enjoying jumping on the “MB is fat” bandwagon.

As to you being a jerk, don’t sweat it. I dare say many of us are less then proud of our petulant youth. What I mean is I would love to slap young me around if I could.... So no worries!

Good to see you still here kicking it old school.

.

I've actually started checking this place a few times a week again lately, I'm not sure why.

Also occasionally ventured into the chat but nothing seems to happen.

It's so boring there.

You have to go to the chat when the Finns are awake

Are you sure that improves the situation?

Buuuuuuuuuuuuurn!

Yes, you have burned them. From now on, I will refer to you as "Captain Burns" of the U.S.S. starship ....Hot.

I originally stopped hanging out in chat because my rural ISP reset my connection every 10 minutes.

That's really annoying. I have a local-ish cable company that provides 1GB internet service for 99/month. I'm pretty happy with it. They have outages every so often (probably ~6 times per year and they last anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days). Because of the outages I also pay for DSL service through the phone company (centurylink). It's awful. 3mbps (if I'm lucky) for 50/month. But since I work from home it's important to have backup.

I meant in the RST sense — they’re dropping IRC connections. Everything else is fine. I’d complain but honestly the majority of IRC traffic these days is botnet C&C. It’s annoying to me but I understand why they’re doing it.

Edit: I’m outside cable/DSL range. I’m on LTE. My ISP is a reseller. I don’t know whether it’s them or the network operator, but having botnets running on LTE would get really expensive really fast.

It might be nice to switch to something that doesn’t require an always on connection running on a single device. Just a suggestion!

WELL LETS START IT AGAIN YA DINGUS!!!!


Also Jon, are you suggestiong we get a _slack?!?!_

I was gonna suggest Discord, but I haven’t used either of them so I really don’t know which would be more appropriate.

oh yeah. I've used discord for D&D before… I'd be happy with either one tbh. Also happy keeping irc as well

Looking around it seems people are happier with discord. It’s also free (-er).

Couchman's not MIA, I'm Couchman.

Also, kIRBY still pops up on Steam playing games fairly regularly, as far as I can tell. So he's not here, but he's still plugged into the system, man.

Discord's not a bad idea. Not that I'm in the chat now.

ewwwwwww

Have you guys considered using Matrix? Last time I looked at their website it wasn't clear it was ready for production, but it looks like it might be now. YMMV

That's not a couch, man. This is a couch!

I suggest we use that couch as a solution to the chatroom problem.

I hate slack so much. Would be willing to try that matrix thing.

Reading a bit about Matrix, it looks like you have a choice to either create a new room on matrix.org, or you can set up your own homeserver on your own domain (like matrix.massassi.net).

Also, there is an IRC bridge bot, which could join #massassi and presumably relay whatever Finnish transmissions it intercepts there.

I’m reading the Matrix webpage and I’m having a really hard time understanding what the point of it is. It seems like Jabber for people who’ve never heard of Jabber.

Like, the site basically says “Matrix is better than Jabber because Jabber wasn’t popular enough” except I’ve heard of Jabber, and before today I sure as **** never heard of Matrix.

Does the site explicitly say “this is an IM service”? No. It says a bunch of words about it being some kind of meta-service for gluing other services together and federating identities between services. That sounds awesome! Except I’m not a service vendor, I’m just interested in hosting a chat room. So I’m not sure how this is selling me on it. And if I were a service vendor, their stated mission of giving users control over their identity and data is exactly contrary to my own incentives so I’d never use it.

I’m sure it’s technically excellent.

https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-is-the-difference-between-matrix-and-xmpp%3F


Didn't Google sort of kill XMPP? Or something like that?

Homeserver ~= email server / auth provider. So while Brian would probably be providing a valuable service for the Matrix community (being the only non-developer to run one), he’s also probably not the right person to do it. That’s more the job for the Googles and Hotmails. (And they won’t.)

Bridging other services seems to be the preferred way of interacting with this...

I don’t know how that would be possible.

They sort of killed their own use of it in their own products, I mean (for example, Google Voice). The big tech companies used to be all gung-ho on XMPP until they weren't....

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have to run your own homeserver to set up a chat room in Matrix (or Discord for that matter).

From what I can see the main draw of Matrix is that it's an open replacement for IRC with bridges to modern things like VoIP (and file-sharing). Right now they seem to be recommending the web client, but since I've never tried it I have no idea how clunky it is.

Which basically makes it Slack except the jank is your problem

OK I just tried this thing by clicking on the Riot.im page, and, goddamn, why are all modern web apps ugly as sin and waste a metric ton of screen real estate on meaningless spacing between lines of text???

Unfortunately it looks like the developers of this project are biased in favor of Linux et. al, and for the console-based client (which would be the only tolerable way of interacting with it IMO) requires Cygwin to run on Windows. Lol

Or WSL. Either way, that’s very annoying because recent versions of ConHost don’t properly update the screen when something changes asynchronously.

No doubt their preferred Windows client is Electron based.

Still left wondering... at least on paper, this is different from Discord how? Fewer features and no authoritative backing org, but you can on-premise if you’re a masochist?

I've never used Discord, but I'd say just try that maybe.

Discord has a Linux client deb

It's probably just a proposed open source alternative to what Discord offers today.