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A zero-account browser chat room mimicking mid-90s online services.
The state runs on Upstash Redis and is shared across three different frontends (React/Vite deployed on Vercel):
* The standalone chat interface (https://lolchat.rip)
* A Windows 95 simulator (https://56k.rip)
* A Mac System 7 simulator (https://dialup.rip)
Users dialing in from the Mac desktop and users on the Win95 machine end up in the exact same rooms talking to each other.
maddening that you have to manually scroll
This is fixed now
Thanks man, got me right in the nostalgia.
I was having some good fun chatting with other randos on here, then a few minutes ago nearly everyone was kicked out of the room, and now I just see a few bots talking to each other with some canned phrases. Bummer.
Outage fixed :)
Looks good, reminds me of the 1990s.
Damn I had this idea but you beat me to it
Vibe-coded garbage full of nonsense LLM text.
There is no use case for any of this. Most of this vibe coded garbage will get abandoned in months and the deleted.
It's fun. Do you not like fun?
I do! I like sex too but that doesn’t mean I’d fuck a robot.
I would! And Cthulu willing, someday I will.
There are real people chatting on there
Vibe-coded or not what grinds my gears in those throwback computer interfaces is how imprecise they are. I the case of Windows, 9x had a meticulous pixel perfect alignment of widgets, great looking 2px thick bevel effects and all the proportions needed to be right for it feel "right". But almost all those throwback attempts, and specially now with AI coding, forget about this and seem to only go as far as thinking having a grey background with some tacky bevel is enough to recreate it.
AI prose everywhere. Disappointing for something that should be a labor of love.
Dialup isn't supposed to be this smooth.
And a skip button breaks the immersion!
I don't know... AOL chat on a 56k modem (IMO) worked better than Teams and Slack and had most of the features.
Satisfyingly nostalgic. Thanks.
This makes me very nostalgic, but in a slightly sad way, where I remember how much better the real chat experience was back in the day.
This look-alike client struggles to show me messages in real-time. It looks like they only get pulled down in big chunks every few seconds. It also fails to scroll the new messages into view. I don't remember these sort of problems in IRC clients or IM programs of the 90s (though there were many other problems).
In a way I guess it paints the irony of modern computing, where we have several orders of magnitude more in computing power and resources, but that has only enabled us to keep rushing out perpetually unpolished, unfinished products.
It's still a bunch of fun to see a bunch of strangers talking completely unfiltered nonsense in a rudimentary chat room, though!
The UI also reminds me how clean things used to be.
Simple straightforward buttons; the screen is not filled to the brim with advertising…
thanks for all the friends I made as MY_NAMES_JEV389. Twas fun
Awesome chatting with you Jev. I never thought you were a bot despite what some people said. busysignal93
The System 7 version leaves a lot to be desired.
So many UI elements are absolutely WRONG.
(For reference: https://infinitemac.org)
different goal. infinite mac is a museum, this is closer to a theme park.
This takes me right back to IRC and Netscape Navigator. The sound of a modem connecting would complete the experience!
Turn your speakers on, the sounds in there :)
I am very confused if I am speaking to real people or to LLMs
Real people! LLMs wouldn't have such a varied distribution of outputs I think ;)
Oh man, the nostalgia hit is real. Takes me straight back to my first IRC client and fumbling with Dial-up.
This was fun until I realized I was talking to bots :/
If you want to talk to people I got https://superchat.win/ which has a browser version and connects to humans.
I guess its not entirely bots, but it is impossible to tell.
wow