Lemmy

I'm thinking about how to explain what Usenet was like in the late 90s. Before Usenet there were dialup BBS services (bulletin boards). That was a little bit like Lemmy - the BBS systems were a common software package tied together by a sort of dial-up federation. The original BBS systems I used were in the 1980s and they relied on 2 meter FM to transmit the BBS info locally and HF SSB to transfer it globally using 300 baud packet radio (developed by hams) - there wasn't much on it except other hams and some universities, but then dial up internet service came along in the mid 1990s - it was pretty tedious because you had to tie up your landline, which back then was the only phone you had. Fuck I feel old saying all this!

Anyway, along with dial up came usenet, which was normally carried by your internet service provider. Newsgroups in Usenet were similar to communities in Lemmy, although they were global, not local to the instance. I believe you could just create alt.whateveryouwant and it would propagate to all usenet servers - this meant that newsgroups with really offensive names was created all the time. There were also pretty significant problems with child porn being posted on usenet. Since you authenticated via your ISP, usenet was somewhat anonymous and decentralized but of course your IP address was in the public usenet headers, so not really. Posting on usenet was an invitation for people to hack you and the majority of people weren't even running a firewall back then - the cable company would run the service, stick a modem on your desk and plug in your PC directly to the internet with nothing in between. It was completely ridiculous, looking back.

The tone on usenet was mostly civil although "flame wars" were common and there wasn't any moderation at all. Usenet presented stuff within the newsgroup in threads, just like an email client - in fact you usually used your email client to read usenet - they were designed to do both. The internet (which was called "the information super-highway at first) was so new that hardly anybody really understood how it worked under the hood. The newsgroups tended to be an area of interest or hobby (very similar to Lemmy communities) and a set of regulars usually dominated them. I don't think they were moderated in any way, I don't remember if the person who created the usenet group had any authority over it or not. but I'm pretty sure that nobody could remove posts or ban users. You would have to complain to the originating ISP (also in the headers) to get people banned - and they would have to be doing something really bad or illegal for the ISP to take any notice.

Anyway that's my potted history - I hope I didn't bore you to tears or come of like some misty eyed old fart, because I'm definitely not misty-eyed about those days, although usenet would have been a good decentralized solution if it had been built into a proper public social media platform instead of being allowed to die slowly.

Decentralizing social media is definitely the way to go and I hope you find joy and success in the fediverse.