I've been using social media since long before the term "social media" was coined (e.g. Usenet, the earliest ARPANET mailing lists, etc.) I've avoided Facebook all along, used #Twitter quite a bit in its heyday (and maintain an account there that I keep locked now), and I used Google Plus quite heavily. I have accounts on Post (which is about to go dark, apparently), Bluesky (rarely look at it), Threads (hardly ever visit), etc.
Of course the scale of these can be vastly different. An ARPANET mailing list on the subject of wine tasting with a few hundred members was enough to trigger a Pentagon colonel coming out to sites to remind us all about appropriate usage of a Defense Department funded network.
That didn't change anything of course, and eventually DOD realized that such lists were pushing the evolution of email tools rapidly in very useful ways.
Did you know that the very first ARPANET mailing list Digest was for SF-LOVERS (science fiction discussion, obviously) and was created quickly as a "temporary" expedient because the direct (immediate) distribution list had gotten "too large" (probably still just hundreds) for available resources? The digest format created for that situation has remained largely unchanged since then and is still widely used on the Internet today.
I mention all this because in some ways #Mastodon is a throwback to those very early days (with Usenet being perhaps the closest parallel, given the Mastodon topological model). And Mastodon still manages to be quite "low pressure" in significant ways, even as your follower count goes up (which is the exact opposite of the situation on Twitter, even before Musk took over).
That is, when I check here in the morning, I don't usually feel the need to steel myself for a deluge of potential nastiness.
By the way, if you're wondering how the Pentagon happened to notice that small wine tasting mailing list ... it was because DATAMATION magazine mentioned it in an article!
@lauren don't forget the very early #GratefulDead lists that thrived in early labs. Some of earliest uses. 1973 Stanford university artificial intelligence lab started distributing dead list. A lot of eatly deadheads went into early computing work. So they were all over it. Huge mailing lists. @sail (chapter 3: Beyond Whole Earth Catalog, in Heads)
@lauren I had an ARPANET account as well. If I recall correctly, I once read a paper about USENET that mentioned that, because it was "store and forward," you could save a huge amount of bandwidth and could schedule
transfers so that they occurred when the network was lightly loaded. For example,
each post from the rest of the world would be transmitted once, when links had very
little traffic on them, to places like Austrailia, which had a very limited connection to
the rest of the word.
@bzdev Well, yeah, in a largely dial-up topology, often the cost of calls was significantly less during off peak (e.g. during nighttime) hours. In my own situation, the sites frequently calling me considered the call cost essentially de minimis. Especially the calls from multiple AT&T Bell Labs sites.
@lauren this post of yours has a "Read more" tag at the bottom after "in very useful ways." which link, as far as I can tell ,leads only to a "Network error" page. Repeatable.
@lauren do I need to sign up for another node? I[d estimate a full percent or more of my clicks in Mastodon go to error pages. I thought this was the "original" host but maybe it's got problems.
Also this typing tiny box is always two paragraphs behind me. I find it hateful having to wait 100 seconds or more for it to catch up. As much as I hate committing typos this UX makes it too annoying to fix them. okay only 90 seconds this time when I measured
"I mention all this because in some ways #Mastodon is a throwback to those very early days (with Usenet being perhaps the closest parallel, given the Mastodon topological model). "
agreed, though I like this UI much more than a UNIX shell account
@lauren I'm just going to note that the "low pressure" microblogging experience Goes Away whenever you pass some critical threshold of followers—I think it's around 10,000—beyond which you rapidly learn NEVER to ask an unqualified question, especially a rhetorical or ironic one.
@cstross I tend to avoid those kinds of questions in general here. On G+ I had something approaching 400K followers, so I learned quickly. Here I'm currently around 9K, so I'm approaching that 10K threshold you note.
@lauren i hope you're writing this all down in a book; and if not, then we need to get you the resources and labor power to get this published. you're a witness to history. these are not mere stories or recollections; these are testimonies to a part of history that wouldn't necessarily been available to people outside your job. thanks for sharing them with us.
@blogdiva Over the years I've been asked a bunch of times about writing a book, but I just don't see the point. In fact, I know an author who wrote a number of non-fiction (entertainment industry) books that were fairly popular, but they were a lot of work for him with very little in the end to show for it. Lots of time down the rathole.
While I suppose my recollections on this stuff might be interesting to a small cohort, there's no drugs, no orgies, or anything else like that of interest to broader audiences! Well, one "surprise" nudist experience, but definitely not an orgy.
@lauren@blogdiva Boring guys do not host Twilight Zone Film Festivals, or mount live readings of the "Upsidasium" script from Rocky and Bullwinkle, with the original voice actors.
@misterprotocol@blogdiva It's possible to be a bit crazy and boring at the same time. I will admit, however, that I was pretty stunned when Moore 100 filled up for the Jay Ward Film Festival. I really need to get the audio of that back online again.
@lauren I came in much, much later to the Internet versus your early pioneer days, but enough to have had email via UUCP. This does feel like Usenet, for sure!
@ai6yr Most of Usenet was dial-up UUCP-based of course, for a very long time, relatively. My own UUCP node received calls every few minutes 24/7, from a wide variety of educational, AT&T, DEC, and "other" categories of sites, including RAND, etc.
@lauren I haven't looked recently but UUCP would still be a really good system for very high latency systems (have done some playing around with mesh networking via RF here, lots of latency... TCP/IP does NOT like it--trying to get across California on point-to-point , many RF hops is problematic). I should go see if UUCP is still functional...
@ai6yr I'd bet there probably are still functional UUCP links running in various places for various purposes. It saw considerable usage in specialized industrial and even government environments. Whether or not it would make sense as a part of any new applications is a wholly different matter given its structure. I mean, technically, you could probably run a dial-up version of Mastodon over it, but it probably would not be trivial to accomplish for a number of reasons.
Older protocols like uucp and FidoNet have a philosophy behind them that's a bit deeper than high latency, though that is certainly true. They predate the existence of persistent channels, so many of their features address not simply high latency, but (in modern terms) 100% error rate for indefinite periods.
Lack of connectivity for batch-y protocols isn't an "error"; just just another state in the state machine.
(My brain still has a cluster of cells that thinks having a "permanent" connection is cheating, somehow. Or self delusion.)
The only modern stuff I know that thinks that way is Briar. Lol, I like Briar.
@tomjennings@lauren I love that philosophy... there is SO MUCH STUFF that breaks nowadays when there's some glitch in Internet connectivity (ie doesn't even work at all).
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