This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance
Remember the old BBS services?! Lemmy and the fediverse is exactly what the natural progression of those services is! It was alway meant to be free to everyone it was just a bunch of us geeks talking to one another with computers and anyone could join in, you just needed a modem and a computer.
The fediverse is fast! Images used to take days to download on a 28k modem. It was fucking glorious! Then America Online, Prodigy, Compuserve found a way to monitize it and here we are. Everyone thinks the internet is Facebook, Instagram, tik tok, when in reality, this, the Fediverse, was all it ever was.
BBS were so much fun back then. We had a local one in South Florida where we would all get on and we would have meet ups on weekends so we could talk in person and hang out. I used to log on with a 2400 baud modem which I upgraded to a 14k myself. It felt so fast at the time. I also would get on the telnet talkers and Irc to meet folks. I was a shy awkward teenager back then so meeting people on those services was great.
Back when AOL started getting popular my friends and I would hoard those installation disks so we could make new accounts when we needed to. Back then they would actually charge per hour to be online. We would use credit card generator programs to get online for free until they caught us and we had to make new accounts. Once AOL went unlimited it was a game changer. The bad part was it was hard getting on due to everyone jumping on.