alt Hacker NewsI'll be tarred and feathered for saying this, but every time I see a modern chat app I pine for the days of ICQ (as it looked in the 90's).
It had a UI I prefer over anything since - compact, comparatively unobtrusive, information-dense, and fast. I could port my full chat history around with me between machines, and also search it reliably (no vanishing scrolling or lazy-loading handicaps). And it was handy you could advertise different presence states to different people/groups.
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I wonder if the 'unobstrusive, information-dense' will not die with our generation. The new guys grew up with flat and material design, plus UX design classes all about spaced typography and screens.. they will never miss what we do.
And apart from the advantages you mention, it was really configurable in terms of the level of involvement and openness you wanted. You could use it exclusively to chat with friends and otherwise be unreachable (as in MSN and their ilk later), or you could be open to chat with strangers. And you could find people by interests, I remember looking for coin collectors from countries whose coins I didn't have :)
Then MSN Messenger displaced it (at least in Spain) and it didn't have even 10% of ICQ's functionality.
You might like the IRCv3 client I build at https://github.com/matt0x6f/irc-client. It's highly capable and modern but limited in its resource footprint and quite zippy. PRs welcome as well.
I held off back in the day, for awhile but I remember my number 1202948; ICQ rocked! My sister had a much lower number and used to tease me about it, since I was the "nerd".
>information-dense
In other words, designed by IT guys. And a reason (among many others) normies would never get on board. Not saying I disagree personally.
Amen.
I long to bring this back in a Miranda-IM way (super customizable), but other projects get in the way.
I don't care if only a handful of us (few milly) find it useful.