नया Chatroom

24 Oct 2020

Of the many forms of communication, I enjoy text messaging the most. Although it appears to be very simple, there's a fair bit of complexity involved in the activity. One of the reasons why I enjoy this medium is that I get to think and take my time while expressing my thoughts. I have the freedom to edit myself, and structure my responses. I especially need to self-edit, as I tend to think too quickly and as a result I often lose my train of thought. Text is a wonderful medium of expression, with multiple ways to format messages in order to convey thought.

The rituals of text messaging have evolved with time, and have become a lot more complex. The platforms and digital infrastructure needed to have a secure text messaging conversation has also added further complexity. Most of our daily messaging is on platforms owned by a single corporation–Facebook. Putting aside the wildly critical notions of platform monopolies, surveillance, and data ownership, text messaging platforms have also become quite monolothic. It's nothing like the good old days spent on IRC chatrooms. Platforms like etherpad are very interesting as it brings some of the freedom of expression back to text messaging.

A few months ago, I was a participant of a workshop facilitated by Xin Xin and Lark VCR which taught me how to create custom chatrooms. It uses FeatherJS, hosted on a Glitch server, and the code template allowed me to quickly create and edit my very own chatroom. The power to create and control my own communication space on the internet! Oh the freedom! This is a very novel experience for me, and perhaps for most people on the internet. The ability to create my own infrastructure is very satisfying.

This also affords me the ability to define the experiences within this chatroom. I want to experiment and create new kinds of chatroom experience, which are conducive to storytelling and communication via text. Simple text formatting, such using higher weights, capitalisation, or italicising the text are powerful in their own right. Although using emoji, adding random variables, and gamifying the experience can make this a fun chatroom. A chatroom which breaks the current visual and semantic norms simply because its fun to do so, and it can.

For example, the words 'Neue', or 'Pro' and more are used to differentiate products-BORING. Why not using other languages? I've used 'नया'. It means new, but it sounds better and is different. Breaking the homogeneity of the internet is a critical part of this chatroom's identity.

Access the chatroom here!

This is still very much a prototype, and things keep breaking!