this always bugged me...

my theory is that they are a part of sburb and paradoxically originated from the game, like the meteors or the game discs

okay, so I remember the kids early on are like "how do we still have internet?" and the reason is basically just "magic" because they have a stable connection when in hte medium the whole time. I mean hypothetically the Trollian and Pesterchum servers should've been crushed by meteors, along with all the internet infrastructure.

also, despite being coded in different languages that shouldn't stop them from being able to communicate cross platform, it would just require code that sends the message in a data packet for the other client to unpack

because they are both riffing on IRC clients (trollian being trillian, pesterchum being AIM i guess). back in the day, IRC chat clients were how everyone online talked to each other, and different chat clients were compatible because they were all built from the same framework. nowadays, this beautiful cross-compatibility is no more cause of a lot of different but equally stupid reasons

why would it bug you. personally i think it would b awesome if i could communicate with an alien in my normal average messaging app

miracles