The first computer I encountered as a kid was a 386 DOS/Windows 3.1 box. Thanks to a couple #BBS's in local dialing distance and to #fidonet from there, I then grew up drenched in text lore without realizing it: mostly peculiarly academic focused #UNIX stuff and all sorts of 8-bit recollections. And so I learned #Assembly and C. I also now realize I inherited a lifelong nostalgia both for big-iron I've never touched and for an 8-bit era I never really used.

from a very brief mention in the bbs doc from @tomjennings, i tracked down a copy of the SEAdog store-and-forward mailer

i'm blown away that this much functionality was packed into an MS-DOS based program that could run on an XT with 256kb of ram. it even had its own routing system.

https://archive.org/details/SeaDog_4.0_Operations_Manual/

Празднуем 33 года 2:5080 #fidonet #Екб

The Modem World: "A prehistory of social media", documenting pre-Internet online communication
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300248142/modem-world/
#socialmedia #history #fidonet #1980s #bbs #+

@tomjennings

All of the FTSC documents should now be on the previous link posted. They're not external links, they point to the site where they're hosted.

And, the more the merrier

@nafmo @FrankauLux

new tomo devlog post: how do you deal with shitty people behaviour?

https://tomo.city/#2025-01-22

excerpt:

after posting that "Eris-Free Net" wikipedia article the other day, it made me think about how to deal with misbehaving shards on tomoNet, and how governance works on decentralized networks.

when i started thinking about creating something like tomo years ago, i often thought about Ultima Online as - not so much a model for - but an example of a network of online communities that was always interesting and sometimes frustrating to deal with

in-game, for several years, UO really was the "wild west" of online communities - so much was left up to players to figure out. for a long time, there were no game mechanics that enabled players to enact governance of their own (e.g. creating towns, villages, provinces and local laws). the outcome of this was that most often a kind of hillbilly/frontier justice, or outright dog-eat-dog existence, became the norm.

this was great for player-killers and people who loved strife. it added some intensity to the game that no other game had, or in my view has ever had since. (WoW/EQ/etc all elected to bolt everything down and render the world in nerf).

...

BBSes also had governance-by-sysop/god, FidoNet with network coordinators, and USENET with its backbone cabal.

tomoNet - a network of tomo shards that agree to all swap groups/posts with one another - is going to have to deal with the question of (self-) governance sooner or later. at the moment, tomoBBS has no specific controls for managing defederation and it does *not* use the ActivityPub protocol. it needs some, and i need help thinking through what the options are, for a network based on NNTP.

...

if you've got thoughts on how your online social community was governed (or failed to be governed) by its users, i'd love to hear about it. it's a wide open topic for debate, and there are no wrong answers at the moment.

I'm not done yet, but it's a start. I can't be bothered to automate it for this one-off

FidoNet Technical Standards Committee documents

https://defsol.com/f_ftsc

@tomjennings @joho http://www.fidonet.itu.se/ft.htm seems to have working links to #fidonet technical documents still. Not sure how up to date it is (but I guess most stuff hadn't changed in a long time).

@tomjennings Yes, there is.

What @timoj said

Finally managed to find the time to reboot the Definite Solutions website to something more appropriate for 2025 and much less bloated

https://defsol.com

I am writing this toot in #FIDONet mode. Just kidding. but close. Playing with `mastodon.el` in #emacs. And the 'write toot' buffer has a very #bbs vibe to it, with the keybindings right on top. I hesitated on this before, looked complicated. But less complicated than the convoluted way I came up with to share bookmarks with my #orgroam notes more often.

I was tagged in the 'Blog Question Challenge 2025' by @markpitblado (thanks!). For me, this includes highlighting great tools like @eleventy, @drafts, and @ia – and a trip down memory lane and #FidoNet.

If it weren't for the supportive #11ty community here on Mastodon, this post would have been quite different. So I'm passing the challenge on to @zachleat (thanks for creating Eleventy!) and @bobmonsour (thanks for your invaluable contributions to the community!).

https://anders.thoresson.se/post/2025/01/blog-question-challenge-2025/

Warum bin ich #neuhier? Wegen dezentraler Organisation des Fediverse. War früher #fidonet-Sysop. Fand es aus Gründen der Freiheit immer schon erstrebenswert, Kommunikationsplatform nicht in singulärem Privatbesitz zu haben. Die meisten Inhalte im Fediverve scheinen politisch linken Einschlag zu haben? Als Demokrat kann ich damit leben, würde mir aber auch Inhalte meiner eigenen, liberal-konservativen Prägung, wünschen. Empfehlungen von Hashtags, Instanzen od. Accounts, denen ich folgen kann?

#Mastodon reminds me of #FidoNet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

Hmm ... BinkP you say ...