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Fidonet used to provide the federation across message boards in the BBS era, so there is literally nothing new. Really the new thing was smartphones opening up
by richard_todd 6y ago
Fidonet used to provide the federation across message boards in the BBS era, so there is literally nothing new. Really the new thing was smartphones opening up microblogging to average people who want to track celebrities and pretend what they had for lunch is worth sharing. (Edited to clarify fidonet was in the BBS era)
- TheJoYo 6y agoI agree but I think there's potential for celebrity owned and managed federated instances. Twitter doesn't really give handlers the tools to manage their celebrity client, otherwise we would have seen things with Trump go very differently. An owned and managed instance can invest heavily into moderation and image cultivation in ways that Facebook and Twitter will never provide. The whole thing with Wil Wheaton on mastodon.cloud was a good example of what goes wrong, however.
- riffic 6y agoI'd really like to see Twitter white-label their app as a managed SaaS on custom domains. Perhaps that's what Bluesky is intended to be.
- TheJoYo 6y agoI don't have much hope for Bluesky. Twitter could re-enable RSS if they really wanted to show that their interest was genuine.
- riffic 6y ago> I don't have much hope for Bluesky. me neither. I think, based on Twitter's track record, people should remain skeptical until shown otherwise. They haven't delivered much to prove they're willing to do the right thing.
- skybrian 6y agoFidonet boards exchanged messages overnight so the propagation delay was much longer. Also, the topology was different. I don't think the idea of each user publishing a public stream of messages that others subscribe to was a thing back then? Instead you would post messages in forums.
- richard_todd 6y agoI was replying to a post claiming the only novel part of mastodon compared to old message boards is federation. I’m merely pointing out that many old message boards did have federation. To your points (1) yes, everything was slower back then (2) people could and did post streams of their work within the BBS framework, everything from multi-part posts to “owning” a message-board topic, to text/ansi e-zines, but back then the focus was much more on following topics than people.
- dsr_ 6y agoAt this point, the Usenet servers which took massive amounts of bandwidth and disk space take tiny amounts of bandwidth and disk space (assuming you don't allow binary posts). Maybe it's time for Usenet to come back. - Truly federated - Topic focus instead of people-focus - Killfiles! - Proper threading - Standards-based servers and clients
- tlavoie 6y agoUsenet over UUCP worked just fine, with UUCP serving up email too on the dial-up batch syncs.
- numismatex 6y agoSo did FTP over e-mail. The tech evolves. UUENcode sucked, btw. And the NZB-based file aggregation and directories served up were pure trash.
- rbanffy 6y agoI really like NNTP, but spam was becoming a huge problem in the Usenet and its nature makes it harder to assert the identity of a poster.