It is 2018, and we have more and better options to communicate than ever.

Yet for all its openness, the Internet has become remarkably good at creating boundaries between us.

Yet sitting here at nearly 2 AM and not being able to fall asleep my mind drifts to an accidentally nostalgic statement that a friend made earlier. "I'm chatting." Of course, he meant he was on a call, but it reminded me of years ago when "chatting" was really a thing. It was the heyday of instant messenger services -- of AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and (if you were a true nerd) Google Talk and IRC.

I remember how every topic-specific forum had areas for off-topic posts, and every profile had places where we carelessly shared our screen names. The Internet was social, partially because it was incredibly informal. The lack of structure meant never-ending places to meet new friends.

I remember opening Pidgin, and as each service logged in, ten, thirty, fifty screen names would appear. Inevitably, several would be green, meaning that the person was online and available to chat. Within moments, I would be talking to multiple people. Some were friends, some were people I'd met for a day at a conference or competition, some I'd never met at all, and knew them only by their screen name and the forum where we exchanged tips on upgrading to the cool new browser called "Firefox".

Today, we have all new ways to chat. We have new services that promote voice and video, and work on our phones and tablets. We have ways to have groups, and chat rooms, and send multimedia messages.

The Internet feels remarkably less social than it used to be.

Of the old messaging services that used to be so popular, only Skype and Google Hangouts have survived in any real use. If you tell anyone you'll give them your AIM, MSN, or Yahoo! screen name, you instantly gain a third head in their eyes. IRC is acceptable, but only if it's someone in the tech industry to discuss a specific product.

Of course, there are a multitude of new chat options.

You can chat on Facebook, logged in and bombarded from all directions with everything other than the people you want to chat with. And if you want to use it only as a chat service? Good luck, it's assumed that if you have Facebook, you will use it for everything from events, to sharing photos of your lizard, to playing games that will suck up your time. It's safe to assume that if you do message someone on Facebook, at least half of the time they'll be busy doing something else; likely pretending to be social by sharing their lives and looking at others and occasionally posting canned responses to other people's posts and ignoring the same canned comments on their own.

There are, of course, new chat clients that aim to replace the instant messengers of old. No longer are they simple lists of your contacts, and a button to search through endless chat rooms.

Rather, the likes of Slack and Discord mostly corral their users into groups or servers --

ones that you must be invited to join.

Beyond that, they happily sip your system resources. As I watch it now, Discord is using more than 160 megabytes of my RAM to do nothing but show me the messages I missed earlier in the day. As I typed that sentence, it spawned several new processes for no good reason that I can tell. The online indicators are useless; often indicating that someone is on their phone when they are asleep. Slack is no better.

In addition to that, both Slack and Discord suffer from a user interface designed to limit your use of the application to one person or group at a time. Both present single-window experiences, where one conversation at a time takes front-and-center. Discord even goes further; there is no overall contact list that is visible at all times, instead showing only the status of contacts in a specific room, on a specific server.

With every new service that struggles to further organize your social interaction,

it makes it harder to casually interact.

We have instead, come to the point that we let Facebook tell us who we are friends with, and dating websites to help us meet our future spouse sight unseen.

You go to the bar with you friends from work to blow off steam, but even with the best efforts of community watering holes there are few places where casually interacting with other patrons is anything less than socially awkward.

It is 2018, and I have forgotten what it's like to not be afraid to talk to someone I don't know.

It is 2018, and I have forgotten what it's like to use the Internet to build a friendship.

It is 2018, and I miss the days of simple instant messenger.