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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
by 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 agoMan 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 agoYeah, 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 agoI 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 agoThat’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!
- amatecha 4y agoHmm, no, but last I checked you can use hltracker.com , which someone snapped up and my friend is running the tracker server for! :) Yeah, we just idle around and occasionally chat. Activity is extremely variable. Of course, the upside is there's the trusty News area. Most posts are "hello from [old computer] I got running with [old OS]! Hotline was the best!" , and similar such nostalgic sentiments :) haha Indeed, well last I checked with WebSockets they're not legit TCP/IP sockets, so I'd still be stuck doing some kind of intermediary/proxy or something... Dunno, haven't looked into it that much yet. I don't know of any way to open a raw TCP socket in a browser, though maybe some obscure solution exists that I don't know about..