The official Steam group for Cyberspace Lounge!

Sad news and future plans

Our headquarters, a server on 199x.chat, has come to an end along with the entirety of the 199x.chat service.

199x.chat was a Discord alternative hosted by Oregon Pacifist (OP for short), an independent retro games content creator. In early 2024, he launched Retro Gaiden[retro-gaiden.com], a no-nonsense and no-drama social network focused on retro culture, especially retro games. I was one of the earliest sign-ups for the platform and have been one of the top creators on there since its start.

Later in 2024, he launched 199x.chat, an attempt to create a self-hosted Discord alternative intended to allow people to build chat communities in the form of Discord-like "servers", but without Discord's paywalls and data harvesting. To my knowledge, Cyberspace Lounge was the second-ever "server" ever created on the service.

For about ten months, 199x.chat ran smoothly as a fun experience that enabled the community of Retro Gaiden, as well as outsiders who never even heard of Retro Gaiden, to get to know each other better. Many of us developed friendships in ways that microblogging social media doesn't quite permit.

This experience inspired my dream for Cyberspace Lounge: to create a sort of safe haven for those of us who grew up during the early days of the World Wide Web. It celebrated old net history, 90s and early 2000s culture, it was intended to allow some of us to attempt to relive at least parts of our childhood in an age when adulthood is a nightmare.


As part of an attempt to update the software 199x.chat was running on, so that the service could make use of a bigger feature set and make it even more viable as a Discord alternative, something went wrong with the process. Initially, image links were broken, causing all profile pictures, emojis and other images to go missing.

Then, OP tried restoring from backups. The problem is, because of the fact that he self-hosted this ("on a 2013 iMac running Linux Mint", in his own words), there weren't loads of redundant backups. Something also went wrong during the backup process which ended up causing the entire system to crash. He was unable to even get the system's bootloader to operate properly.

He spent several days using his free time to try to get things fixed but unfortunately, nothing worked and he has been forced to shut the entire 199x.chat service down.

It's not what any of us wanted but he tried, and I give him all credit for that.


So, here's the deal: Cyberspace Lounge will live on. However, I'm going to take some time to try to figure out the best course of action. I have a lot of plans to turn Cyberspace Lounge into a full-blown multimedia project and community, but real-world stuff forces me to keep it on the backburner for now.

For now, this Steam group is the only real presence Cyberspace Lounge will have on the net. However, in time, I might just spin up a regular Discord server as a companion; I was considering doing so a while ago but chose not to, in order to prioritize the community on 199x.

In addition to the community itself, I'll drop some details about what I've been considering for extensions of the Lounge as a multimedia project.

First off, I've really been getting into AI lately, and I've thought about extending Cyberspace Lounge onto Pixelfed and maybe Instagram to post AI art and nostalgic images. Think those great Twitter accounts that post nostalgic images, but with my own twist on things. The goal would be the same as the community: post content that gives people the ability to temporary relive their childhood, safe from current-day drama, politics and other nonsense.

I've also been jotting down scraps of an idea for a podcast and/or Youtube channel wherein I would tell stories from my life (mostly my childhood), talk about how those stories impacted my growth as a human, and I'd encourage others to share similar stories in the comments. While I'm undecided on whether or not I want that to be officially part of the Cyberspace Lounge project, or even tied to my gaming username at all, I do hope to do that podcast/channel at some point. In one way, it'd be a great way for me to relive my childhood while also (hopefully) engaging others' memories and creating a community of folks who wax nostalgic on better days than the era we live in today.


I'd like to take a second to salute Oregon Pacifist for his efforts to create people-first alternative services. Retro Gaiden was the start in creating a truly amazing concept, especially in the day when you generally either have to be on algorithm- and drama-driven big tech socials, or you have to be on alternatives which are usually just echo chambers. Retro Gaiden, and the philosophy of his projects, are different: let's just get back to the days when the internet was a fun place to be.

Fortunately, Retro Gaiden is hosted on a dedicated web host, meaning that an issue like this is far less likely to ever happen. Provided it doesn't grow too fast, hosting costs are negligible and it will be around for a while.

So, thanks again OP: thanks for the fun that all of us had over the course of nearly a year.