4 ms·

How "fediverse-ey" was say, USENET, Napster or Bittorent back in the day?

by caycep 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
haunter 4y ago
>Bittorent back in the day What do you mean by this? Torrent never went away, there are countless high quality private trackers and even some really good public ones But considering piracy + fediverse then DC++ was the most fediverse-y one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B You could connect to any given X server where you could share your local drive + chat with other users too. It's still really good to find some extremely niche stuff but torrent basically "won" because of the hash based seeding system (as in multiple user can share and peer the same stuff). DC was just seeing others' HDD and find whatever you can and directly download from there. But you didn't know that Joe's "Movie2012x264.mp4" and Jim's "Movie2012.mkv" are the same thing or different.
- hauxir 4y ago
  it was like that in the beginning of dc++ but they later introduced hashing which did infact figure out the commonality between the two.
bombcar 4y ago
IRC was not even fediversed, it was independent fiefdoms, but it was fun.
- remram 4y ago
  For a little while it was an open federation of sort. The problem is that it had a single namespace of user and channel names, so misbehaving servers would cause chaos. Wikipedia has a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet
nemo44x 4y ago
Much of the pre-2k internet worked this way. Anyone remember Hotline or Carracho and dyndns.org for redirecting your dynamic IP to a hostname? The reason that approach ultimately lost was because it was federated and therefore Balkanized more or less. However, it was probably a better UX in many ways than putting everyone together in 1 room. But it was limited and cells would divide and divide further with no great way of interacting on common grounds topics. Maybe this is the way forward but I doubt it. I think we’ll see better approaches at centralization because that’s where the money is. We just need a way to digitize the norms you’d see from the same peoples interactions at a bar, church, DMV, sports venue, work, with friends, etc.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Man I loved Hotline. But it ended up as an instance of what jwz says about everything expanding to include email and turning into an OS.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    Yeah, I guess they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it. Everyone was there for the warez and probably pr0n in many cases. But the communities were really great. But it took Facebook to figure out how to centralize that.
- amatecha 4y ago
  I still hang out on Hotline and KDX and my friend has been running his server continuously since 2001. There are dozens of us! I also still point a dyndns domain to my IP, but just for some games and stuff. However, it seems that as a society we've settled on the web browser being the de-facto interface to everything, and we all expect persistent server-side data accessible from anywhere in the world. That said, it's still my goal to make a web Hotline client... one of these days... haha
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    That’s awesome! I did a quick search and it doesn’t seem like tracker-tracker is around anymore. What do people do there? Just old communities of people chatting, etc? Warez and mp3 were always a big draw back then but probably not relevant today. And yeah with websockets you could make a web client!
anigbrowl 4y ago
Usenet was technically decentralized, but in practice anchored on educational institutions that gave it a high degree of continuity. It was wonderful and freewheeling, but the advent of the web killed off a lot of the alt.binaries.* hierarchy and spam ravaged the rest of it - one piece of spam in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

How "fediverse-ey" was say, USENET, Napster or Bittorent back in the day?

by caycep 4y ago

How "fediverse-ey" was say, USENET, Napster or Bittorent back in the day?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

haunter 4y ago

>Bittorent back in the day What do you mean by this? Torrent never went away, there are countless high quality private trackers and even some really good public ones But considering piracy + fediverse then DC++ was the most fediverse-y one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B You could connect to any given X server where you could share your local drive + chat with other users too. It's still really good to find some extremely niche stuff but torrent basically "won" because of the hash based seeding system (as in multiple user can share and peer the same stuff). DC was just seeing others' HDD and find whatever you can and directly download from there. But you didn't know that Joe's "Movie2012x264.mp4" and Jim's "Movie2012.mkv" are the same thing or different.

hauxir 4y ago
it was like that in the beginning of dc++ but they later introduced hashing which did infact figure out the commonality between the two.

bombcar 4y ago

IRC was not even fediversed, it was independent fiefdoms, but it was fun.

remram 4y ago
For a little while it was an open federation of sort. The problem is that it had a single namespace of user and channel names, so misbehaving servers would cause chaos. Wikipedia has a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet

nemo44x 4y ago

Much of the pre-2k internet worked this way. Anyone remember Hotline or Carracho and dyndns.org for redirecting your dynamic IP to a hostname? The reason that approach ultimately lost was because it was federated and therefore Balkanized more or less. However, it was probably a better UX in many ways than putting everyone together in 1 room. But it was limited and cells would divide and divide further with no great way of interacting on common grounds topics. Maybe this is the way forward but I doubt it. I think we’ll see better approaches at centralization because that’s where the money is. We just need a way to digitize the norms you’d see from the same peoples interactions at a bar, church, DMV, sports venue, work, with friends, etc.

anigbrowl 4y ago
Man I loved Hotline. But it ended up as an instance of what jwz says about everything expanding to include email and turning into an OS.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Yeah, I guess they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it. Everyone was there for the warez and probably pr0n in many cases. But the communities were really great. But it took Facebook to figure out how to centralize that.
amatecha 4y ago
I still hang out on Hotline and KDX and my friend has been running his server continuously since 2001. There are dozens of us! I also still point a dyndns domain to my IP, but just for some games and stuff. However, it seems that as a society we've settled on the web browser being the de-facto interface to everything, and we all expect persistent server-side data accessible from anywhere in the world. That said, it's still my goal to make a web Hotline client... one of these days... haha
- nemo44x 4y ago
  That’s awesome! I did a quick search and it doesn’t seem like tracker-tracker is around anymore. What do people do there? Just old communities of people chatting, etc? Warez and mp3 were always a big draw back then but probably not relevant today. And yeah with websockets you could make a web client!

anigbrowl 4y ago

Usenet was technically decentralized, but in practice anchored on educational institutions that gave it a high degree of continuity. It was wonderful and freewheeling, but the advent of the web killed off a lot of the alt.binaries.* hierarchy and spam ravaged the rest of it - one piece of spam in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...