Wenn ich an den Föderationsgedanken denke, fühle ich mich an zwei Ansätze erinnert: #Gravatar als plattformübergreifender "Avatar", und im Blick auf Mastodon an die alten BBS/Mailbox Zeiten... Da gab es die lokale Box, und darüber hinaus konnte man ggf. ins #Usenet gehen... #Fidonet sage ich an dieser Stelle.
As usual they forgot about us 😂 #GenX or Xennials were. here first, using stuff like ICQ, MIRC, Friendster, MySpace. We were the pioneers of blogging, penning our thoughts on Diaryland and Geocities.
Also, what's this lament that there's nowhere to go? If anything we have more #SocialMedia options than ever.
Some are #Blogging more, some are in the #Fediverse#Mastodon & some are stubbornly on #X & #Facebook
We are just scattered.
@liztai GenX here, I was on #fidonet , was an active #usenet user, so all monolithic social media systems might die overnight and I couldn't care less.
When the histories of journalism and BBSing collide. 📰 🖥️
This screenshot shows the top of an essay titled "FIDO Net Made Me Do It" by Randy Reddick, where he recalls using ProComm to connect to a BBS for the first time in 1984.
It's from the book "When nerds and words collide," published in 1999 to reflect on "computer-assisted reporting" or CAR. You can download it here: https://www.ire.org/when-nerds-and-words-collide/
Y'all remember the Wild West that was the early internet? So, after Napster got shut down, file sharing didn't stop, you know what it did? That's right kids, let's say it all together: DECENTRALIZED! This protected those sites from being sued and shut down. It's interesting to once again be moving around in decentralized networks again 20+ years later. The past and the future are colliding in such interesting ways.
I'm quietly amused by people calling Napster and AOL the "early Internet". The early Internet was 1974.
Yes, people are rediscovering all sorts of things from the #BBS days, from asynchronous conversations through supporting one's local sysop to having a plethora of mail reader programs; and (as we've talked about before) big centralized corporate paid-subscription #CompuServe & #BIX versus distributed #FidoNet.
This week on my podcast, I read "Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet," my recent @medium column about building a better internet:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
When I got on #Usenet shortly thereafter, the Unix Greybeard set never passed up an opportunity to tell us newcomers that the #Fidonet-Usenet bridge allowed the barbarian hordes to overwhelm their Athenian marketplace of ideas:
> See, because you need an always-on computer in order to really reliably use #decentralized social media
Bruh. #Usenet, #Fidonet and #UUCP (#UUCPnet) beg to differ (no reason you couldn't use #NNCP for Usenet now if #NNTP isn't your thing).
now that i've got a lot of the core parts of #tomo working, i have an open design question for you fellow amateur architects of social communities:
the #internet of the #90s was seen as a means for replacing regionalism with globalism. we gained a lot - mostly a high volume of people with shared interests, but i think we lost something vital in that transition.
the #bbs of the 80s and 90s was unique in that most were inherently geared to local use within a 5-20 km radius, often due to telco long distance fees. users already had locality in common by the time they began a conversation.
local user meetups were commonplace. people would spontaneously invite everyone in an area code to a "403 gathering" or a "667 meetup", have beer and coffee, and chat for the sake of chat.
i'd like to facilitate letting users weave their local social fabric into tomo's design, and i'd like some examples of how that has worked elsewhere.
have you ever seen an online community that had a unique way of creating a sense of locality for its users? what did you like about it?
@vga256 Hi there, don’t know if I’m your target audience. Just read an @arstechnica article about #bbs and was feeling nostalgic. I haven’t seen a modern era online community that could match the same feel of a bbs & #fidonet . Overall those were simpler times where you had to wait days/weeks to get a response to your post. Looking back I think it was the anticipation that helped bring the community together. There was no instant feedback
@warpslide@mikemathia That also takes me back. I haven't thought about Legends of the Red Dragon in a long time. I'm sure I had a #Fidonet email address, but I don't recall using it. Echo net was something akin to #Usenet, right? It has been a few decades.
If you could enjoy #Twitter, #Mastodon should not be worse, but for someone who grew up with #BBS, #Fidonet and #Usenet, the #Fediverse is just a big heap of only few confusingly noisy timelines. Features around #hashtags would need to get improved so that it gets easier to have clean places⁽¹⁾ for a topic while not by default being visible in those other big timelines and getting lots of fly-by comments⁽²⁾.
Or let this just be the place for the ones liking the current status quo. Thanks to this status quo many users start or restart using Usenet now!
THAT'S GREAT!
——————————
1: Rooms? Channels? Groups? Echoes? Isolated(!) tag timelines?
There was something thrilling as a kid to dial into a #BBS in my small UK town and download an echo full of random messages from ranty Americans, when the world felt larger and the internet was still a thing people in universities did. I'm not sure anything can recreate how exciting that was #FIDOnet
@tomjennings i'm writing a decentralized peer-to-peer network of discussion groups with an nntp server back-end and a reddit-like frontend, called #tomo.
a lot of the ideas and implementation came from watching bbs interviews about #fidonet.
but because it's peer-to-peer (using nntp store and forward), i'm having trouble coming up with a reliable system for maintaining a master list of discussion group names (e.g. tomonet.pets.cat). i want to keep it as decentralized as possible, but i'm beginning to realize that "someone has to have a master list of groups" to prevent name collisions across the network.
i'd hate to be in the position where two distant servers NEWGROUP tomonet.pets.cat at the same time, and then have to figure out whose is canonical, and whose gets merged-in or deleted.
i can't find any info on how fido dealt with this situation in the protocol docs. was there a system in place to prevent name collisions like this?
while i'm sad to see #reddit circling the toilet, it only reminded me of how urgent it is that we finally ditch centralized social media. reddit itself isn't the problem - it's a symptom of a much more generalized problem we've had since FB became a thing in the late 00's.
i've spent the past week re-purposing, patching, porting, and expanding a great piece of software based on the same #nntp protocol that #usenet uses, for creating discussion groups. i'm calling it "tomo" (友 - 'friend') bbs.
some time soon folks can spin up their own tomo shards, create discussion groups in a similar manner to reddit, decide whether they want to keep the group restricted to their shard, or share the group with other tomo shards in a public network of discussion groups called tomonet. completely decentralized private or public discussions without supercorporation bs.
best of all, since it is based on plain 'ol usenet-like nntp, you can read and post to discussion groups from a 1977 VAX mainframe, a 1984 IBM PCjr at 2400 baud, an Apple Newton, or a brand new phone.
i can't wait to bust out forté free agent for windows 3.11 and get posting this weekend. 😎
@tilton 😅 that's one of the moderation bridges we'll have to deal with when we get there. the cabal was useful, but it was also the source of many of usenet's problems - it effectively was centralized control over the hierarchies.
i'm all ears if you (or anyone else) has ideas for making it work. i've always adored #FidoNet for its looser structure and "if it can send and accept bits, it can join the network" approach.
i really miss (what used to be) usenet too. i'm hoping that adding modern moderation and easier peering tools will make it enjoyable.
@Pack honestly, the entire idea came from my experiences with #FidoNet back in the 90s. it stuck with me for decades as an incredibly elegant system given the constraints
I just realized the #Fediverse is essentially the modern equivalent of #FidoNet (maybe that's why I enjoy this place so much)... Dating myself a bit of course, ha ha. Ex #BBS sysop ;-)
Article includes mention of the Fediverse, Activity Pub, and forthcoming Meta's Instagram joining the Fediverse stunting hype about Bluesky.
♲ karab.in/m/Twitter/t/8087
Twitter will stay the dominant media-fed and media-driven social platform at least in the US.
Bluesky won't make it. Investors will soon realize that it is a scam, nothing else.
The Fediverse will grow slowly and organically. More from Europe than other parts of the world.
#Mastodon will blow up because all its major instances will be hit by a simultaneous multi-day spam bot attack leading to Amazon #AWS blocking all traffic to&from Mastodon instances and there is nothing they can do about it because Eugen was busy implementing #Twitter UX into Mastodon Mobile Apps
The Emacs.ch instance will move to a self-developed #CommonLisp fork of Mastodon (with a Non-Mastodon logo due to a trademark feud) that employs AI algorithms from the PAIP book, get's rid of all #JavaScript (because it is non-free) and is mainly used by users of the #mastodonEL#Emacs package
Its operator will launch a second donations page begging for money to be able to buy two expensive #LispWorks HobbyistDV licenses because lispm from Reddit told him that this unparalleled, magical Lisp productivity is only gained with a superior IDE
There will be heated discussions between factions of the Common Lisp and the Emacs Elisp community about their Lisp being the better, faster and "most free" one
@amszmidt will chime in and do another "Emacs Lisp is not a Lisp - Bite me" post which generates so much traffic that the Emacs.ch instance will blow up in flames and its operator will eventually convert to a #Microsoft fanboy running an ancient fork of #FidoNet written in Omicron Pascal (but converted to #Delphi), hosted on a WinXP machine with IIS and #SQLServer2008.