This is corny, but thanks for being awesome! It feels so nice to see this community grow out of a shared vision of what the internet should be.
Standing up my little instance has been a blast! I’m not quite done with it, but your combined enthusiasm gives me hope for the future of the internet. 😊
As an old fart it pretty cool to see some moving back to how things were. Smaller more personal spaces run by people instead of corporations.
Fellow old fart. I remember having to call my buddy so he could hook his family’s phone line to his bbs before I’d dial in. I remember standing up a web server in the days where you could find all the new sites on a page at NCSA or CERN. When there was a literal directory of the WWW.
The corps definitely made it easier to get out there, and thank god for online shopping, but the dream of connecting with random people on the other side of the world never had banner ads or unskippable video propaganda.
I really thought that I was NOT old fart… but since I remember lowering coax (not LAN) cable to my buddy one floor below over the window to play AOE… I guess I am :)
Hehe. One of my first tasks as a student worker was dragging coax through the department’s dropped ceilings, upgrading their network from Apple’s “Localtalk” to 10-base-2, because the university hadn’t gotten its own internal networking sorted out. There was ZERO security - anyone who could plug in could send print jobs to the President’s office - access controls didn’t exist. In retrospect, daisy-chain is a really dumb network architecture, but coax was cheaper than cat-5, the total length of cable was way shorter, and you didn’t have to buy any kind of fancy network switch.
Magical times. I learned so much, without it feeling like learning at all, and it was so exciting I never needed a repeat lesson. I could probably still find the resistor you have to cut on a Mac+ motherboard to upgrade RAM, but I have to look up the syntax every time I want to create a new SQL table. Makes me wonder what kids today are putting together for similar experience. Selfhosting seems close, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world where my grandma (or, I suppose, by that time, I ) pick up a Lemmy-box from BestBuy, slot it into the router, and join the federation.
Ugh. Running coax and transceiver taps to old banyan vines networks. Nightmare fuel
Yea I ran a c64 bbs the went wwiv multiline. god the upgrade from 300baud to 14.4k or 19.2 felt like lightspeed…God im old
Is robotics 19.2 was awesome to see pages of text load at a time vs scrolling in at 300baud. Telex was wild.
Oh wow, thanks for your perspective!
Regarding your last point: My chinese-made e-scooter can’t be readily used right after you buy it. You have to:
- download the app
- register an account
- sign away your soul and firstborn in the privacy and TOS agreement
- Watch a several minute long & UNSKIPPABLE intro video
- Finally unlock/activate your scooter
Especially the video felt super dystopian. As if I were not a conscious person, but an asset that needed training.
People used to make their own sites and dedicated forum boards where the norm. With the mess of old hardware floating about, the overall lowering of bandwidth costs, more options being made available and simpler to deploy, and storage in the TBs coming down on price the population is bound to make things personal again one way or another. Being just another profile on some big platform doesn’t have the ‘me’ mark to it that putting your own together does. Have fun with it, break things and make them better, always a new idea to be had.
Unfortunately no old cloud servers or switches on ebay. As such availability of used hardware is more limited in future.
you dont even need big old iron. I run all my containers etc on old business sff pcs and storage on synology. works great
Hi from another part of the Internet hosted in a basement somewhere in Northern Europe running a different piece of software :-)
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