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floss.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
For people who care about, support, and build Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS).

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John Goerzen

I am so happy to see @driscoll here. Kevin is the author of two fantastic books: ": Welcome to the " and " World: A Prehistory of Social Media". I've talked about Modem World several times, including in two blog posts: changelog.complete.org/archive and changelog.complete.org/archive .

Although I lived through the era, I credit Kevin with getting me to more clearly see the story as part of the broader Internet and history as well. 1/

The ChangelogLessons of Social Media from BBSsIn the recent article The Internet Origin Story You Know Is Wrong, I was somewhat surprised to see the argument that BBSs are a part of the Internet origin story that is often omitted. Surprised be…
John Goerzen

@driscoll Many of you reading this will have never experienced the era. To use lingo, the high cost of long-distance phone calls caused BBS instances to be geographically-oriented and mostly small, despite global federation networks like . Kevin wove those stories in with what has happened with social media since. I've seen several people here note the similarities between BBS and Mastodon - Kevin's book makes those comparisons deep. 2/

Nov 22, 2022, 04:45 PM·Public
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John Goerzen

@driscoll The companion to that is, of course, the BBS Documentary by @textfiles . Together, these two works give you a sense of the people behind the scene, and its legacy today.

I don't believe "Modem World" mentioned directly, but the thoughts in there are remarkably prescient for this moment.

So, welcome Kevin! /end

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💀🌇 FKA kevin

@jgoerzen 👋 Hi! I'm so glad the book resonated with you. I loved your post about growing up in rural KS and getting online.

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Jesse Liberty :csharp:

@jgoerzen My answer got lost so I'll make this short.

I remember Fidonet well. For PBS (LearningLink) I built a distributed, threaded BBS built on FidoNet (every night it collected the entries from 25? sites and aggregated them into a threaded discussion). Great fun.

I also ran Atlantic Palisades and was Wizop on PCMagNet (PC Magazine). I even made small contributions to Magpie.

Part of me misses usenet, though frankly, Mastodon really reminds me of it.

Oh man, I'm old.

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