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.
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/
> 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).
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?
Oh boy. First, caveat, my memories of this stuff are of course old, and memory being what it is, drift. Also, when I did nodelists -- up to the 100-node point -- I did them by HAND with pmate.
Nodelist creation was taken over by St Louis. tbh I have no idea how they handled names.
But fidoNet had one absolute built-in guarantee: unique phone numbers. So four thousand CAT BBS could be unique.
Can't name collision be left as a social problem? eg. just let their be (N) tomonet.pets.cat entities exist? And have their members sort it out?
The nodelist is the fido thing you probably are concerned with. Its outside the fidonet itself.
the node list appeared as one big fat long CSV-like text file. However it was assembled by fragments collected by local nets, eg. if you're in small town East Overshoe, the folks there appoint a net coordinator, who types in the junk that comprises a record (name, phone number ("address"), bit rates, hours of operation, etc. This fragment was sent weekly (or whatever) to a regional coordinator,.... here my memory is vague, and it changed.
RCs each got copies of other RCs fragments, and assembled it. Or, the RCs gathered fragments and sent them to St Louis (this at least was done early in fidonets history).
What i wanted was to use Echomail, Jeff Rush's conferencing system that uses FidoNet as it's carrier. Like usenet over email.
The idea (never even discussed, all out of my hands by this point) was to create a conference called NODELIST, and that conference's messages were all nodelist fragments that BBSs could build a nodelist from. If you're in the US and don't care about direct dialing EU, don't download those fragments.
This creates a bootstrap problem but DNS hints solves that. The nodelist just being a text file meant you could simply type one in.
But net search for "FidoNet nodelist compilation" and you'll stumble on makeNL. That name might be mine; but probably Ben Baker's. It was long ago.
I don't have a filename beginning with "makenl" on my computer so probably Ben's.
here's a thing: after I relinquished control, a lot of the people who took over centralized a lot of stuff. Not out of bad intent (though there were a few....) but out of lack of overarching theory.
I was pretty open with my idea, but I didn't have it together enough to know how to ... guide or induce them to continue. And it all moved so damn fast.
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 ;-)