3 ms·

One of my first online experiences (around 1996 or so) was the chat room that my local (dialup) ISP hosted. There might have been a couple dozen or a hundred pe

by titzer 3y ago

One of my first online experiences (around 1996 or so) was the chat room that my local (dialup) ISP hosted. There might have been a couple dozen or a hundred people that hung out on that chat room back then, but it was fairly diverse in terms of age ranges and experience...at least as far as tech/net early adopters could have been back then. I think I only met one person IRL from that chat room, but it was, in comparison to today, surprisingly chill. Not only that, but people just as a matter of course used pseudonyms and were careful about privacy. Knowing someone's (temporary) IP address was already a lot. But as the internet grew forums and news sites and blogs, I bounced around, and through, many. I lost interest in most of them before they got enshittified, but it does, in retrospect, seem that most suffered either of two fates: irrelevance, stagnation, and evaporation, or enshittification to one degree or another. I count among my past lives the past online communities that I participated in. I don't long for those pasts but I do feel a loss that not only are those specific ones gone, but the striking inevitability of them all dying. It seems like a law--a tragic one at that. Anyway, RIP <nostalgic online forum>.

nologic01 3y ago
I remember some MOO circa 1992 or 93. It seemed a fantastical something. It incredible how badly malformed the "future" has become.
banana_giraffe 3y ago
This brings back memory of one of the first BBSs I ever joined. It was a tech support/news/sales channel for a local computer store. It was fairly heavily moderated, but still, it had a small community. At some point, the moderation stopped, and the community flourished. It also, for some insane reason, had an upload area that would cycle files on its own, which because a great source of games. I only meet one person from it IRL, and that was the moderator that vanished one day. And I only meet him when he sold a fancy modem and told me about the BBS being a great way to test it out. I eventually moved away, but still dialed in (with long distance, even) and felt like I knew people online, if only via pseudonym. One day it all died. No doubt either the PC it was running on finally died, or someone said "what's this computer in the corner do, anyway?" I sometimes still miss TechBBS.

by titzer 3y ago

nologic01 3y ago

I remember some MOO circa 1992 or 93. It seemed a fantastical something. It incredible how badly malformed the "future" has become.

banana_giraffe 3y ago

This brings back memory of one of the first BBSs I ever joined. It was a tech support/news/sales channel for a local computer store. It was fairly heavily moderated, but still, it had a small community. At some point, the moderation stopped, and the community flourished. It also, for some insane reason, had an upload area that would cycle files on its own, which because a great source of games. I only meet one person from it IRL, and that was the moderator that vanished one day. And I only meet him when he sold a fancy modem and told me about the BBS being a great way to test it out. I eventually moved away, but still dialed in (with long distance, even) and felt like I knew people online, if only via pseudonym. One day it all died. No doubt either the PC it was running on finally died, or someone said "what's this computer in the corner do, anyway?" I sometimes still miss TechBBS.