Data Loss, Liminal Spaces, Chatrooms

14 Aug, 2026

I was working on a lengthy blog post about chatrooms and just venturing around the internet trying to find something interesting to write about.

However, I was using Ghostwriter, like I always do, to write up my drafts. I ended up accidentally closing the program window. No dialog popup, no warning, it just said "sure, boss" and dutifully closed.

All progress lost¹.

I remembered that Ghostwriter still holds on to unsaved drafts at (flatpak) location:

~/.var/app/org.kde.ghostwriter/data/ghostwriter/backups

So I rushed there (I've been down this road a year before). Aaaaand, no cigar. It did have a backup for a miscellaneous post I never ended up using. Ah well, such is life.

I did an honest attempt at trying to reconstruct the entirety of that post from memory, but I just sort of gave up and felt pretty defeated. So this post is bastardized version of the original.

In the post-that-could-have-been, I talked about some bizarre desire to hop on chatrooms. At first I thought maybe I was lonely or something, but then I figured out what I was really after was to try something new and have an excuse to write a blog post. IRC and Matrix were protocols I had little experience with, and in the case of the latter, none.

Since my first blogpost was titled "Rediscovering Cyberspace" I thought I'd do some good ol' exploration.

Read the Matrix protocol site a bit, then created an account on their homeserver. Following their suggestion I tried the Element client. After a bit of fumbling with configuration, I was set. Started larking around the rooms listed there. A lot of empty rooms, with messages as current as 2024.

After about 3-4 empty rooms in a row, I finally found a room with activity. I lurked for a bit, getting a feel for the place. Joined in on some conversations, then moved on to the next room. And on and on it went.

I did some research onto how Matrix works, and its networking stack is too on the edge for my knowledge. I looked up how people set up homeservers... not really for me at this stage.

Decided to try out IRC I booted up Konversation and it was, surprisingly more of the same: some activity and a lot of graveyard chats. My whole exploration thing wasn't going anywhere.

I couldn't help but get the vibe of liminal spaces somehow when I was going through rooms on Matrix and IRC. It was this uncanny sensation of emptiness in areas that are usually (or maybe were?) populated.

Weirdest ones were on Matrix. Rooms with 30+ people but no messages being sent for years. I'm not sure how configurable rooms are though, maybe there was a cutoff on chat history after a certain date or something. Still a weird feeling.

I'm fairly certain the problem was with the search I conducted. Because there was no real search criteria. It was aimless exploration. There's probably exciting conversations happening on both protocols, or others like XMPP, but I just missed them during my 4AM expedition.

If anyone's got some good places to go exploring, let me know.

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