Jason Perlow ✅🐧🍔 ✍️In the 1980s to get online, in addition to grokking your PC you had to know how to configure a modem and a comms program, needed phone numbers for BBSes or online services. Nothing was just handed to you. Because of this friction, the user community we were left with were mostly -not- stupid people. Did we have trolls, yes. Even smart people can be toxic. But it wasn’t on Twitter or Facebook scale and they were easily dealt with. We can replicate that with this paradigm.
embilbie@jperlow love that 'grok' is part of the vernacular too btw
TheJen@jperlow Yep. I'm so excited. :)
Claude Champagne@jperlow Many brillant people are not tech savy. Just saying.
@ClaudeChampagne this does nor require tech savvy in the least. It requires maybe 30 mins of investigation to decide which server to be on. Could it be a little easier yes. Remember back in the day when you needed a phone book to find out a phone number for your local pizza place? Same deal.
Jay 🆘@jperlow I deeply disagree that using the Fediverse ought to be hard to keep out simpletons. Not to mention that “smart people”, especially tech-heads, are some of the most abrasive and disagreeable personalities there are.
@jsit someone will make it easy. It’s open source. If someone doesn’t make a better aggregator site for choosing servers, or if the official client doesn’t do a better job of it, someone can fork the code for it and build a better one. The right wing extremists can also run their own fediverse and build easy to join serverlists than we can ban accordingly. It’s all good.
Dan@jperlow Oh the good old Hayes commands! https://michaelgellis.tripod.com/modem.html
kurtsh@danvanmoll @jperlow Oh, now this is my jam! Grew up on PCtalk but long live Emulex/Qmodem/HSlink/ARC! (Procomm/PKZIP can +++ATH! 😁)
BTW: Any fans of @textfiles & "BBS: The Documentary"? https://kurtsthoughts.com/2012/09/07/bbs-the-documentary-now-online-in-its-entirety/
BTW: Any fans of @textfiles & "BBS: The Documentary"? https://kurtsthoughts.com/2012/09/07/bbs-the-documentary-now-online-in-its-entirety/
@kurtsh @jperlow @textfiles Oh I remember the documentary.. I was 14 when I had my own BBS with 3 nodes running (on 386-PCs with open cases and connected via Novell Netware). I can still hum the sound of my 19.200 modems..
@danvanmoll @jperlow @textfiles What BBS software? Remember how you could tell at what bit rate you'd successfully connected at based on the tone, clarity & intensity of the connection 'static'... just because you'd heard it so many times? 🤣 Man, I loved those days...
@kurtsh @jperlow @textfiles PCBoard - at least that's the one I remember the most... so many nice plugins and addons available.. Yes, I miss the excitement of these days... my first week on Mastodon really reminded me of back then.
Mike Murphy@jperlow Elon is like the epitome of a smart person who is toxic
@mcwm undoubtedly we will get some. They’ve always existed. we won’t be at the mercy of one single powerful one here either. We’ve got tools to deal with it here, as well as local liquor stores and dispensaries in more in more states if we need analgesics
Steve White@jperlow
Loved FidoNET :D I love the computing power but BBSs were a blast.
Loved FidoNET :D I love the computing power but BBSs were a blast.
@stwhite architecturally this is not that different from fidonet
GeekGyrl
Rufus T. Firefly@jperlow Which is why this kind of reminds me of Usenet. Back before them graphic interfaces the kids have now. Nossir, back then you had to terminal emulate to a UNIX server! By cracky, these young 'uns have it too easy these days.
Now get off of my lawn.
Carl Setzer@jperlow I deeply hope we can avoid the worst excesses of Twitter or Facebook.