IRC is a neat chat protocol, perhaps the oldest that's still in use. It's channel or topic-centric in the sense that users join channels they're interested in, then get to know people there. That isn't bad but I was thinking it'd be pretty cool if you're simply broadcasting your messages to whoever is in your friend list (or is following you), and everything is aggregated in one big stream of text. There should still be channels but they're for discovering new people to broadcast to. You can include #topics in your broadcast and anyone who's following that topic will receive your message as well.

Now, before I continue: it's probably clear that I'm basically describing microblogging. Yet Twitter and the like have a completely different feel compared to IRC as the latter is instantaneous and chat-centric as opposed to this stupid popularity contest. Twitter is too media-heavy to even resemble it but someone mentioned I'm describing GNU Social. Even that is different. You don't use that to chat with people, you use it for status updates. Or at least I think, I never used it beyond basic testing. Whatever, my design probably has subtle differences. Refreshing web pages is just much slower and produces a different atmosphere. So ignore the similarities.

So there's a single stream but to prevent chaos it'd still use threads. Every message is either a new thread or a reply to an existing thread. Threads should normally be posted to at least one topic. If people don't do that, it will be harder to discover new content and you end up with silos of people who already know each other. So as a new user you're presented with a bunch of topics, follow what interests you, and see what appears in your stream. Individual threads can be opened in new tabs if they're particularly interesting.

Federation. IRC has it but a server only federates with a single network. A user joins a network and connects to a random server inside it, but it doesn't matter which because they all serve the exact same content. From a user's perspective, a network might as well be a single server. They just serve to reduce the load. But there is no federation between the various networks. So there are probably hundreds of IRC networks out there and if someone is on another network, you have to manually join it. This is bad UX. This should be fixed.

So servers federate with all others by default, and users can manually subscribe to blacklists to filter out spam, but a server cannot instate its own blacklist. Possibly there can be a default blacklist but it should be stewarded by people with integrity to prevent it from being abused for the sake of censorship. Look at what happened on Lemmy.

That's basically the entire design. Don't confuse this for XMPP either because although it has proper federation, it still works with private chat rooms instead of messages broadcasted to the entire network and are then filtered through #topics. GNU Social really is a better analogy but imagine it inside a CLI. That probably exists. But somehow I'm just not able to find anyone to interact with on that network. On IRC you join a channel, say hi, and get noticed. I want to bring that feel to a network with hashtags. I never liked any of the microblogging services, there is no community there. Maybe networks can serve as secondary filters, so you join the network of like-minded people and subscribe to topics that interest you. But you shouldn't be entirely shut out from discussions about the same topic on another network and never be made to manually add a new network. You're just filtering stuff through your liking perhaps with a slider that determine how much stuff from outside your network enters your stream. One slider lets in networks with similar people, another lets in topics you haven't emphatically subscribed to, but which are similar to what you did subscribe to. So both networks and topics exist in matrices. It's actually surprisingly similar to this website!

@x0x7 (You opted out of excessive mentioning but for some things I wanna share with you in particular, you say you will notice them anyway but you might not, lmk if you wanna opt out even from rare mentioning.)
@WinstonSmith