Dust and cobwebs

For something like twenty years, now, I've been a regular user of Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. I'm actually there now, in fact, on EFNet in a channel called #gaysnuff. I don't know if I should give that particular detail, except it's pretty dead. Ha ha what a pun. No, I mean, dead as in no one there but me. It used to be fun; there used to be quite a few guys with various kinks of a fatal sort, all talking fantasy. They're mostly gone now. But then most of the whole EFNet is gone now. It used to see 100,000 users at any one time, or more, and at the moment there's all of 26,000. I don't know where they've gone. Probably the same place as all the guys who used to go to bars, maybe.

I admit that, especially in the last five to ten years, I would disappear from IRC during periods I wasn't quite as horny (or noose-hungry, maybe is a better way to put it). Then I'd come back after a couple of months, and things were a little different. The channel would have a new set of bots or operators, or different users, or what not. Now, there are no bots, and usually when I join the usual channel I'm also the first one there. Ops for me, yay! Not that I remember what to do with op privileges, anymore. It's not as if there is much reason to throw an ops' weight around in a moribund channel.

IRC is not very spiffy. Old tech rarely is, and everyone goes to the shiny new places instead. I can't imagine finding someone to share a snuff fantasy with on Grindr, but maybe one can. (I don't even own a smartphone, so I wouldn't know.) It's still possible to have fun on IRC. All it takes is a few warm bodies.