Samuel RajkumarDec 2, 2022
Peter Griffin ☕

What was your first experience of the social internet?
(I would do this as a poll, but mastodon.social only allows four options.)

• BBSes
• Mailing lists
• IRC
• Personal pages (Geocities, Tripod, etc.) and their guest books
• Comment sections on web sites
• Chat rooms
• Messengers (ICQ etc)
• Forums
• Blogs
• Early networking sites (say which)
• Social media as we know it now (say which)

Have I left out anything?

Please boost if you find this interesting?

Dec 2, 2022 at 3:57pmWeb
Show threadPeter Griffin ☕Dec 2, 2022
Allied question: how did you first discover the ones you used?
Show threadcyberjunkieDec 2, 2022
@zigzackly I think the VSNL handbook had BBSes along with the concept of Gopher and Archie, NNTP.
Show threadAbhinavDec 2, 2022
@zigzackly Chat Rooms. MSN. ICQ.
Show threadcyberjunkieDec 2, 2022
@zigzackly BBS, among the first ones in India!
Show threadRanjith KollannurDec 2, 2022

@zigzackly Yahoogroups -> Hi5 -> Orkut -> Facebook (2002-2007); Blogs mostly between 2007-2010. But mostly with people I knew offline beforehand, like from school, college or work, until I signed up for Twitter (2008).

Also there was pagalguy during B school entrance exam preparation (2004-2005).

Show threadRahul MatthanDec 3, 2022
@zigzackly BBS. The one run by Atul Chitnis called CIX. There was another as well but I can’t recall the name.
Show threadSundarDec 3, 2022

@zigzackly
I visited Geocities pages a lot but didn’t see it as a social thing.
Tried IRC but could really get into it.

Mailing lists were the first among these that I actually participated in. I think I saw them described in a local language (#Tamil) magazine, and the idea of groups organized at multiple levels (comp.lang.xyz) fascinated me, so I checked them out. And over time built up the courage to ask for help and participate in discussions.