XfavataX
evacideIf you are in your late thirties to mid-forties right now, there is a good chance that you have spent most of your life in a cycle of making some sort of home on the internet only to have it crumble beneath you like chalk and having to start over.
Mark IJbema@evacide i miss the time when my home was irc and usenet
Steven Reed
Oblomov
krejgo
draeath
LukefromDC
Lightning Bjornsson* 
Jordan
gullevek ☢️ 🇯🇵
Ozzie D, NP-hard 
@ozdreaming @mark @evacide The nice thing about my irc life is that there are still the same people there that where there more than 30
Years ago
Years ago
ghosts in the silicon ▒@evacide it's true
Simon B
Jess Mahler
Ken Butler@evacide usenet (which probably betrays my age)
Darwin Woodka
DMTom
W. Latif Ayubi 🏴☠️@evacide Letting big tech companies host and own your accounts was a mistake. In the early days we hosted our own stuff, our own websites, email, etc.. We need to go back to that. Not your keys, not your home.
Strypey@wayubi
> Letting big tech companies host and own your accounts was a mistake
Agreed.
> In the early days we hosted our own stuff, our own websites, email, etc
This is a common legend, not entirely true. It was quite normal in the 1990s to trust hosting of email, etc, to institutions with which we had a direct relationship; universities, ISPs, etc. The move to hosting by faceless platforms like Yahoo, Hotmail, EGroups, etc, began in the late 1990s, as the DotCom bubble inflated.
(1/2)
@wayubi
> I used to host my own stuff on bluehost and geocities
Good for you. I had a website in the late 1990s on Orcon's gratis hosting, which I made using NVu and uploaded over FTP with Filezilla. But this style of self-hosting wasn't universal ever. As I say community-hosting by a trusted org was just as common, if not more common.
@wayubi
> I'm sorry your memory is failing you, it happens with age
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, and presume that was intended as light-hearted humour. But FYI that kind of joke doesn't always land when posting in a text-only medium, or when talking to strangers, and especially when you're doing both.
Ærion(2/2)
It's akin to the way obtain veges. It's true we haven't always relied on corporations to supply them. Some people still grow their own, and it's true that a generation ago more of us did that. But even then, plenty of people got at least some of our veges from local greengrocers, farners markets, and small, locally-owned supermarkets.
Some of us are lucky enough to still have such things, and increasing the availability of them is just as valid as a way of de-corporatising vege supply.
@aerion @strypey @evacide Strictly speaking, neither are any of the self hosting services in existence (or the domain resolution services you need to drive traffic there), but it's understood that your own code uploaded to a web server via ftp counts as self hosting, and not everyone has a stick up their ass.
Adam@evacide is that old enough to have had a geocities page? 😊
I still kind of feel like the idea that we would all have "homepages" linked together by common interests and spontaneous social networking was one of our better ones. Fediverse is pretty cool too though...
I still kind of feel like the idea that we would all have "homepages" linked together by common interests and spontaneous social networking was one of our better ones. Fediverse is pretty cool too though...
worldruined
Mecrisp@adaroc @evacide We have https://neocities.org/ now! I am still active in IRC, and the Fediverse is a cosy place to be, too. I miss StudiVZ a bit, and these small creative forums for everything.
@evacide and end up here then
Zone of Ghosts@evacide it's true but then we built it on the sand of private billionaire beaches, that's on us, maybe we let the sea take it all and start again on firmer freer ground.
sb the chippy-choppy@zoneghost @evacide
I would love this. How do we do this without being billionaires or nation states ourselves? To my mind, the only way to accomplish this is to seize the means of production.
I would love this. How do we do this without being billionaires or nation states ourselves? To my mind, the only way to accomplish this is to seize the means of production.
@zoneghost
To be fair, many of those places didn't start out like that. Probably didn't even intend to turn into what they've become now. Investors happened, and with that enshitification followed.
Just look at the origins of Facebook, that didn't start as a disguised advertising company driven by a mass corporate surveillance machine.
Dave Mason@evacide
Memories of Google+. 😏
Memories of Google+. 😏
Dror Bedrack@evacide let me see... IRC, ICQ, Forums and message boards, Facebook, MMORPG, Twitter... yes, pretty much. I feel a bit like a drifter now. No real home. Just go in and out, take what I need, wave hello, and carry on.
Eric McCorkle......is that just on the internet, or in general?
Hurt k¡D
✨pencilears✨@evacide one more reason to have a persistent handle and a fursona.
The chalk may crumble, but I will find my friends again.
Mouthmogging@pencilears @evacide I've had a fursona and been furry for decades and it never occurred to me how useful a fursona is as a defacto universal internet identity.
I just like imagining I'm a blue rat but like yeah no if you wanna find me, follow the blue rat!