@solarvalleys Oh AND: the Fediverse reminds me of it a lot. People were inventing new weird cool ways to use it all the time; the implementations were a jarring mix of professional and amateur; tools and platforms and communities would rapidly rise and fall … It was beautiful chaos, and you felt like you were just seeing people’s minds made manifest. Fediverse has that same feel to me. Somebody better name a new Fediverse tool with the word “hot” and then the vibe is complete!
@solarvalleys Definitely AOL chat rooms. But also figuring out how to use Netscape Navigator and search for things using a seach engine called Hotbot. And teaching myself how to build entire websites on notepad.
It was neat to see things evolve fast. Examples: AOL sent these loss leader free offers to grow their network, it gave you free time to try the service and was an installer package that came in the physical mail as little cartidges. A short time later as CDs (the precursor to DVDs), with even more time. It rapidly went from “90 minutes free, wow!” to “600 hours free, wow!” and they went from people coveting them to just piling up everywhere and getting upcycled around the house. 🤣 “Honey hand me one of those 3000 hours coasters for my drink”.
Or how fast web development went. I remember how excited we were for hotdog pro, where the html tags had *colors* and you could push *buttons* to add tags! A short time later “Hey Netobjects Fusion just stick this graphic here somewhere, i dunno you figure it out, use a dozen nested tables with a single clear pixel in each cell, kthx”
Man now that I think about it, the frequency that businesses and organizations had the word “hot” in their brand name back then was another thing lmao. Hotdog, Hotmail, Hotbot, and I know I’m forgetting some other ones. Because the internet was HOT my friends! 🔥
@anticurrent It took me multiple tries and multiple weeks to find a fediverse home. Compared to the 5 second single silo commercial options that’s like geologic onboarding time.
I think we gradually got accustomed to a “benevolent dictators” model of internet use, and decentralization of social is more like 90s internet where you had to learn what websites or services to go to by reputation, referral, and by trial and error.
Even well intentioned flagships will hit the “uh oh this is expensive to operate AND expensive to curate” problem. When you get above a few thousand concurrent users, screening malicious activity (e.g. bots, fraud, trolling, sock puppeting, extremism) requires increasing effort. At some tipping point of concurrent users, you max out your capacity to deal with it effectively, and then quality significantly degrades for everyone involved (including society apparently lol).
It’s easy to see the problems, but hard to think of alternatives.
My only current theory is: services have to stop being designed around the idea that everybody will get along, that everyone having public exposure is always 100% beneficial to them, and that all speech is harmless (even in democratic societies that taut rights to speech, most also have exclusions for harmful speech, such as “fighting words”, “genocidal incitement”, “injurious denial of established fact”, etc)
@OldChicoAle @Coelacanth I’ve always found this a weird argument. Literally every major tech we use is never because the normies understood it. Like I’ve lived through them getting the home PC, AOL, myspace, smartphones, etc etc. Normies never just start to use this stuff. They get dragged to it and taught how to use it by the other people in their lives who show them. It’s exceedingly rare for a normal person to see an ad and go ‘why yes, this is the thing for me!’ They always have a helper holding their hand.