Flin is typing…

Published: April 30, 2026

I recently realized that I had quietly and completely accepted the way interaction works in modern messengers. I did not choose it, did not think about it, it somehow just "happened".

And this format is such that it could be called telemetry of human relationships, or social accounting. After all, a chat has a whole set of small familiar hooks:

• "typing…" status
• online / last seen recently / last seen at some specific time
• read receipts
• reactions
• notifications
• unread counter
• deleting and editing messages

All of this is often convenient, and I do not want to say here that messengers are evil. But is it always convenient? Is there a downside? And most importantly — was I given a choice?

Take IRC, for example. It is an old chat protocol, almost 40 years old, but still popular in certain circles. In its basic form, it has almost none of the things listed above. Everything is very simple: you join a chat — people can see you; you leave — you are offline; no indicators and no built-in media, just raw text that cannot be deleted or edited after the fact, and chat logs that you can store locally.

Terrible, right? :) Inconvenient… But now you start looking at it differently, as an interesting alternative. Because in IRC there is simply an exchange of messages, and that is where the whole meaning of the interaction lives. It does not have modern conveniences that add a new layer on top of messages and often provoke things like this:

• "He read it and is silent. Why is he silent?"
• "She was online, but did not read it. Am I being ignored?"
• "Nobody reacted to my message. Maybe I wrote something wrong."
• "Why did she start typing and then change her mind?.."
• "Why did she read it 6 hours ago, but only reply now?"
• "Why did I get a reaction instead of a reply?"
• "What does this reaction mean?"
• "And what does this gif in response mean?"

And so on and so forth. It is a very fertile environment for all kinds of anxieties, fixations, social rituals, and other things. You simply want to write or read text, but you fall into a funnel of microsignals.

Why not give people a choice in their favorite messenger? Let them turn off what they do not want to see, and turn on what they do want. Apparently because that would sharply reduce engagement, on which monetization ultimately depends. It is easier to give everything as it is, without explanation: we thought about it for you.

And people did need similar things in IRC, too. For example, when someone stepped away from the computer, they could change their nick from flin to flin[away]. But even here there is a difference from the automatic "online" status. In the first case, you consciously hang a sign on the door; in the second, the system does everything for you, and often in far too much detail.

Or take email. It is a separate, interesting kind of communication. There is a pause there, more room for slow and thoughtful correspondence, and in that format it feels much more natural. You send an email, and that is it — there are no motion sensors attached to the other person. No dashboard with indicators that can be interpreted in any way you like, while in reality something completely mundane may be behind them.

Once again, I am not against messengers; they are convenient and often necessary. But it is interesting to choose different ways and formats of communication yourself, to understand why and what you choose, to have agency, instead of simply living inside defaults that someone else chose for you.