The current events with Lemmy makes me feel that people don’t realize that “federation” was the default state of the internet (aka web1.0).

What are your favorite BBS forums? My picks are mostly tech/Linux related:

  • Arch Linux BBS
  • Linux Mint forums
  • Linux Questions

What are yours?

  • @AlolanYoda
    3•1 year ago

    Wait, what do you meant when you say

    “federation” was the default state of the internet

    ?

    Because the main deal with the fediverse is that you can move across and interact with different instances, which are all distinct but interconnected. BBS forums were all separate, with no interconnection between them. There were the various sub-forums inside each of them, but these are more akin to communities on Lemmy or subreddits on that other site, from my point of view.

    Did I misunderstand what you meant? Or maybe miss your point?

    All of my favorites are dead :(

    • @geranimo2112
      4•1 year ago

      There were BBS forums that were connected. That’s what FidoNet did, spreading messages server to server.

      Not OP, but to me, the Fediverse is most similar to Usenet. I ran a Usenet server ages ago as an intern at a small company where we exchanged the forums (i.e communities) nightly with a big provider via modem. The technology has certainly changed, but it’s the same basic spirit.

      There were the big centralized places, like Compuserve and AOL later on that had a more consumer friendly setup. But in that same era, Usenet and the interconnected BBS forums were the Fediverse of the day.

    • @zephyrOP
      3•1 year ago

      Yeah, maybe a better word would be “decentralization”, where there’s no one service taking over all.