I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion.
8h 47m ago by lemmy.world/u/BonesOfTheMoon in lemmyshitpost
It's surreal to think about how genuinely good Facebook used to be, before they added the algorithm. It made our social lives better instead of replacing them. You could go on Facebook to peruse events in your area, having an idea of who would be there before you went.
Couldn't disagree more.
Prior to fb, there was dedicated forums for the music scene I was in to in my area. Everything was in them. Finding what was on was easy as all the promotors used them.
Then fb came along, the forums slowly faded and finding events became unreliable in fb's chaotic algorithm bullshit. Now some things are not on it, some are insta only etc.
Fuck META.
I like how they specified before the algorithm and you cite the algorithm for why you disliked it
Let me clarify.
Before the algorithm when both fb and forums coexisted was still annoying.
Some events would be on forums.
Some on fb
Some both.
Occasionally I would miss out on early bird tickets or tickets all together.
There was never a point where Facebook made anything better on that front.
Don't even get me started on the fuckery that fb marketplace is vs what we had.
Used to be. There was a time when forums and facebook both existed and worked well in their respective niches.
Discord is (unfortunately) filling the gap now. Why have a bbs when you can have a shitty chat platform with shitty search and conversations that are impossible to track?
I've never used discord outside of multiplayer online gaming. And not for years now..
It has IRL event promotion on it now?
It's nice that your area had that. Mine didn't until Facebook, or at least nothing a somewhat tech savvy 15 year old new about.
Back when I was booking shows it was great because you could blast a small event and know it was reaching a lot of people. Bands would share it, every band member would reshare it. But then I noticed the growing discrepancy between the amount of people who claimed they’d attend online and who showed up. Like so much on FB, the illusion of being a part of something became more important than actually being a part of something. But yeah, for a brief moment there was a bit of “social” in social media. Then came the yelling.
rofl tell me you do not understand how FB got started without telling me...
That shit's been a privacy nightmare from the beginning.
Zuck has been selling personal info from basically day 1. He's been abusing people since day 1.
The day people realize convenience does not equal good is the day humanity grows up from a petulant child to a moronic teenager... Too bad it's looking more and more like we'll never make it past, "petulant child".
Events was what kept me on the site for far too long after they went bad. Being able to organise events with friends so easily was incredible. I can track the decrease in my social activity along with fb making their system worse and it makes me sad
Before Zuck hired Joel Kaplan to specifically cater to right wing interests.
It was kinda nice yeah.
Oh, you think the darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark.
Do not cite the deep magic to me witch, I was there when it was written.
I'm not trapped in here with you. You're trapped in here with me!
Bazinga!
These pretzels are making me thirsty!
I came here to make this exact quote. Good job bro!
I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I've been on university work terminals and back... frontiers! I've stood on the back deck of Usenet bound for Mosaic with sweat in my eyes watching Netscape Navigator fight on the shoulder of the internet... I've felt wind in my hair, riding Lynx off of monochrome monitors and seen usegroups burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it, felt it...!
Like ASCII tears in a digital rain
The true measure of your worth: do you prefer amber, green, or true B&W?
Pretty sure the first C prompt I ever encountered was amber. Will always have a soft spot for it.
We have a winner!
My terminal used to be set up such that local terminal usage was green & black and remote was amber.
So, that was a PC, or a color terminal? Either way, you're probably a young old fart.
bye
I was on BBS forums in the '80s.
wasn't usenet fun?
Well not sure about the other poster but the BBSes I used were ones you had to dial into and you were the only one there. Well unless it was a fancy one that had multiple phone lines. I even ran one for a short bit my junior year of high school on my commodore 128 and a 1200 baud modem. Good times. Then I got to college and learned about usenet and IRC. This was like ‘89.
Still is. Y'arrggghhhh!
woah. i thought alt.tv.simpsons died
Friends, hear my story…
In the days of old, the days where 300 baud modems were bought by us, the Early Adopters, there were meetings in dark places where code was exchanged on cassette, to be loaded from our tape drives, to create a new BBS, and you - yes you, dear reader - could be your very own SysOp. A king! Let them fall before you as you interrupted their email to live chat. Behold a world where encryption dare not tread, and you, My SysOp, could read the thoughts of all your subjects! Enter a universe where mom picking up the phone downstairs, only to be greeted with digital screeching, turned your conversations into garbled, alien characters before your eyes!
This is where it began. This is where I began. And thus shall I endure, today, tomorrow, and all tomorrows. The lore is mine and mine alone to carry.
Post on, dear friends. I did all this for you.
pfft. ive cut better lines than yours before.
Assuming y'all aren't just fucking around, reading the comments here is actually really cool, tangentially interacting with people who have internet stories from well before I was born
I'm just from the dialup era, and I still feel old online a lot of the time, but then someone here is like "yeah, Berners-Lee invented HTTP just to make a website to mock me"
We are of similar eras. I just missed the days of building phreak boxes and it was always a bit of wonder to me.
While it’s harder these days for a litany of reasons I think it’s still in our collective interest to be bearers of stories, old and new, to the neophytes of the current generation.
I guess what I’m saying is, I am in your camp but to my kid’s generation we are still warlocks
So much of the wonder of computers and networks and just.... all of it has been abstracted away
So many people just have phones or tablets as the majority of their computer experience
Get into Lora (meshtastic/core). When I settle into bed I check to see if my solar powered nodes made any friends or if the heltec I keep in the car pinged anything cool.
I did a meetup a few weeks ago and its a cool smattering of younger folks and HAM folks who go wayyyyy back.
People talk about it being useful in an emergency, and sure, but mostly it's just cool.
I got my first "home computer" in the days of the BBS's when there was such a thing as a "long distance call". Internet access was crazy expensive and not for the average geek. Back then it was a bit "underground". There were professionals and there were passionate hobbyists. Most people didn't have or need a computer in their lives. Things changed in the late 90's boom. A cultural shift when suddenly everyone joined in. The geeks were no longer king
These kids have never been slapped around a bit with a large trout and it shows.
W98BSoD slaps usualsuspect191 around a bit with a large trout
I will invoke the old words
A/S/L
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot slaps CaptPretentious around a bit with a large trout
It's like I'm back on quakenet!
18/F/Cali
Weren’t they all…
I watched the Adam Friedland interview with Clavicular yesterday, and Gen Z is so fucked. I realize not all of them are like that, but that someone like Clavicular has gained any traction is a sign the youth is not alright.
As an early GenZ myself, the only consolation I have is that I still had a pretty un-GenZ childhood and the lack of that rot will likely give me a competitive advantages going forward.
The only place I hear anything about that guy is on lefty podcasts and streams, I tend to avoid most social media so I'm not exactly tapped in to that shit but it kind of feels like the reactive coverage is his biggest boost. I tune in to chapo and hasan and friedland and denims and seder and holy shit I'm so sick of hearing about this irrelevant fucked up kid on all of their shows.
That’s my rotation as well. You are probably right.
What is denims? Everything else I listen to.
She's a lefty twitch streamer who's usually on in the mornings, mostly does reacts to current event stuff with some light context discussion, is one of the people Ethan Klein has tried to bully with lawsuits.
Th3Discourse with Majority Report contributor Brandon Sutton is another cozy lefty morning twitch stream, and he usually raids right into the latter when he's done.
I hadn’t heard of this person so I asked my 15 year old son if he knew about him or if his friends were in his orbit.
“He’s a loser. No.”
I appreciate you for giving me this intense moment of connection with my boy
Haha. You’ve got a good son.
Adam was bugmaxxing hard in that interview
I don’t think many of them actually take Clavicular seriously. Gen Z culture seems to be all about “inside jokes” that everyone knows and self-aware lolcows. It’s annoying, and I’m glad they all had their teens stolen by Covid. They deserve it.
You know, I bet Covid really is to blame for this nonsense. Some developmental delay type thing.
Old man yells at the Cloud.
I regret nothing.
Have some damn respect old man helped build cloud while you get excited because your IPad is blue
I'll stop yelling at the cloud when it stops tripling my electric bill!
My ICQ number was 737916. A hacker stole it 20 years ago because I thought, "why would anyone want this?" and used the password "buddha" for some reason.
I loved that platform. Those were innocent days by comparison.
Wish I could have gotten that number back.
I tried to get into it on the relaunched site a few years ago, but it didn't work. I might have used my university email account as the recovery email, and that account is long gone.
But...why? I doubt anyone else that I know is using it...
Apparently strings of numbers mess with Lemmy. I don't see my icq number at all in the app I use, Boost. For you it formatted badly. Very strange.
Are they not escaping text input adequately? Because that shouldn't happen...
no issues on voyager
There's no reason to use it anymore. I was using the OTR encryption protocol with it, which was the best there was to offer.
That being said, I did say "could have gotten," not "could have."
1576488 checking in; still burned into my memory from 30ish (fuck) years ago.
I got a Gmail account back when you had to get an invite.
Drops mic
Moi aussi. My Livejournal user number was 3 digits.
I sold gmail invitations on ebay.
I have usernames older than you.
also they were like 20something when myspace started anyway
Tom and I go way back. He's never so much as given you that over the shoulder smile.
Adobe flash games and adobe flash videos. Beige computers. Monochrome monitors. Trackball mice. DOS. The original Doom. Newgrounds. Joe Cartoon, Killfrog, and Stickdeath. Napster and Limewire. Geocities. Forums for days. Browser games like Utopia.
Oh shit! I had completely forgotten about Utopia until this post. The hours I wasted. Haha! MUDs before that...
I'm so sad that I missed out on this era of the internet. I only got online in 2020, just horrible timing. all you older folk were so lucky
If it makes you feel any better, while I got to experience it, I'm also so sad that it's gone and not coming back :(
Why's that? What part from that era would you like to see again today if you could?
Forums. Gaming guides made by actual gamers. Clans that are recognizable and actually respected, playing against the same. Email being the main method of 'notifications'. MSN Gaming Zone. PS2 network gaming, and not having to pay a fucking fee to play with your friends and those halfway around the world. Hosting dedicated servers. Lists of available servers and games to join, instead of this bullshit 'matchmaking'. Modding games, and to an extent programs. Websites not having 50 fucking layers of Javascript garbage just to load what is effectively a static page. Before analytics were everywhere, before ads took more real estate than the content. When Google was just a search engine.
E: Gamespy. Also, I also had someone in vrc recognize my name, and also recalled my clan, from back when we were just a Halo/Custom Edition group. I was so fucking excited, to be recognized, almost 20 years later. My clan is still going, though the numbers are single-digit now. Life happens.
A lot of stuff, but basically, before the internet was shit, and simultaneously, corporations taking over humanity.
Sad no one will experience it again.
The modern internet can be more interesting than the old one ever was once you start to explore it, rather than hanging out on like three websites total.
fuck. i can't remember my icq # anymore. it was 6 digits and started with an 8.
867530
Nein!
That I could remember
Mine was somewhere in the 2 millions. I probably still have it saved somewhere.
And still falling for the bait
We built this city...!
You feel me.
I turned off those modem noises.
I still have a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 with the beautiful aluminum case.
Facebook, Myspace, etc. all came after I finished grad school.
That's nothing. I was on ebaumsworld
I used telnet talkers! No web browsers existed.
Shit.. you're all pups..
I was on whatever the hell the network was between Stanford and the elementary schools in Palo Alto in the mid 1970's and cut my online teeth on an IBM Teletype 33!
(Now we're talking "old school.")
Guilty as charged.. What'cha gonna do about it!
ISCABBS?
I See Crabs Are Back Being Salty?
Lol. Iowa Student Computer Association Bulletin Board System. Still online, apparently.
I See, Computer Association BBS’s Be Serious.
I looked up "They're taking the hobbits to isengard" the other day for no particular reason. I felt old when I saw it was 19 years old. Then I remembered it was on ytmnd before that.
Badger Badger Badger Badger
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
Everyone loves magical Trevor!
If you bought your dial-up internet from your local newspaper, there’s a pretty good chance I was doing tech support for it.
ICQ 514984 checking in.
Stop....PLEASE!!! ....i can only get SO erect!
9337000 checking in
968015 was my boss
1576488 checking in
I couldn't join facebook cuz I no longer had my .edu address. also, it was on a vax machine...
but i still remember it.
Single colour monitors, kids! Single colour monitors!
Team orange or team green?
Oh man, I had to use the orange ones sometimes at my first programming job. They were VAX/VMS dumb terminals. It sucked getting stuck with one of those, because the job was making a visualization GUI for some data, and these ones literally couldn't run the GUI; they were text-only. Eventually they started reserving one of the GUI-capable machines for me.
I remember my CompuServe id. I remember the sequence to kick the operator off a call and jump into AT&T's switching network for the free calls. A 300 baud modem was the shit in 85. Most these fetuses have no idea how anything works and what I used to do to get a connection would make their mind explode.
@BonesOfTheMoon I was 76474.3012 on Compuserve
76474
Sidney, TX or close by. Its why I never would show mine.
Wow. Seriously.
The first five digits of mine was a local zip code. Not quite my zip code but less than twenty miles away. I think they may have handed them out from the nearest tymnet node. There was a university there as well.
I remember using a program called “Neotrace” to find the general geographic area a user was in based on their IP.
That freaked people out in the 90’s.
I have the number “x277853” burned into my memory… but I can’t 100% remember what it was for. I want to say it was my ICQ, but no one else seems to have an x at the beginning of theirs? Where was this x number from?
Yeah, seems there is a belief that past a certain age, you should have zero fun, be nothing but a wage slave, and die somewhere quietly, where no one will see what fate awaits you.
Well, I happen to think minors especially should not have access to social media, or at least somehow have minor only social media.
Prevents them interacting with predators, getting brainrotted, and most importantly: leaves us with more mature people to interact with.
conversations? on geocities? telnet on geocities? wtf is this?
I think they're referring to some early java applet clients that were popular back in the day. he might have telnet'd into the servers that the clients (which were hosted on geocities) would connect to.
only reason why I think that is because I did similar and even found a way to circumvent room bans using telnet 🤣.
In one server variant you could change your name to a mod after they left the room and have admin privileges in that room.
a particularly shitty mod at the time received my ire and I was able to ban them from their own rooms because the software only validated on the clients to not ban yourself 😈
man, I've always been an asshole.
I never had a conversation on geocities, but I do remember you could do some SSI stuff, so maybe it was possible. I think lost my last geocities site password and didn't care to go through the effort of resetting it in '96 or so.
You can telnet into the HTTP port basically everywhere that doesn't auto-redirect to the HTTPS port (and start/resume a TLS session), and there could be stuff in the HTML source (or headers) that a browser might hide from you, at least by default -- but I can't think of how you would use that in geocities to "see private messages". (In theory you could manually start/resume a TLS session, but a proper telnet client might break on some of the bytes received, and you'd definitely have to figure out how to send some non-ASCII bytes.)
8833052,
Edit: but I originally got the Internet in my house in Aug of 1986. I was almost 6 years old. I've been on the Internet since before it was the World Wide Web. Back in the days of BBSs, and MUDs. By the time I got that UIN, I was already 15, and heading to university.
I'm reasonably certain that I may be among a few hundred people that never went backwards on our connection speed, and had 24 h access to ISDN by 1996, and never have lost Internet access since 1986.
2845383
4469182
I suddenly want to play Ultima Online!
1576488
Aol mp3 channel 1
Behold... a 7th!
My ICQ was 1428816.
And when young people ask me if I ever play multi-player games.. my dude, I played the first one. Midimaze on Atari ST.
57598641, checking in.
Also, I just recently found a list online of old-school BBS names and numbers, and that was a fun 15 minutes going, "yup, called that one. and that one. ooh, that was the one with great u/d ratios."
Ah Telix...
@BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world @lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
I'm 30 (Zennial microgeneration) and the only item from the list I could directly relate to is the perceptible audible difference between baudrates, not just because I did experience dial-up Internet, but also because I tinkered with radio modulation (hands-on experience with ham radio).
As for numeric identifiers, I can recall of a few ones, but I didn't use ICQ: things such as (if I recall correctly) ECE9D8 hex color being the specific shade of gray for window background in Windows XP, the ID of a specific Orkut community I used to participate at the time, among other numeric memories I have (many of which are buried in some kind of "locked state", i.e. I'd need specific triggers in order to recall them, just like I'm occasionally reminded of cartoons I watched during my childhood).
In fact, my numeric and symbolic memory is particularly good. I can still clearly remember a few mnemonics from school, such as Portuguese "reficofage" (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) from biology classes, "sohcahtoa" (sine = opposite / hypotenuse, cosine = adjacent / hypotenuse, tangent = opposite/ adjacent) and "seno sem sono / cosseno com sono" (sine awake/vertical, cosine sleeping/horizontal) from math, AT and GC pairs also from biology, among a vast repertoire of mnemonics... without mnemonics, I remember x = (-b ± √(b² - 4ac)/2a for second degree polynomials, I remember pi = 3.1415926, I remember phi = 1.618033, I remember mol = 6.02 * 10^33, among many other constants and things... I developed my own mnemonics as well, I remember the whole Morse code and ASCII codepoints for letters and numbers, I remember some commands from Visual Basic 6, I remember some windows libraries such as user32.dll and kernel32.dll... FileSystemObject ActiveX... wow, I mean, I remember a lot of very old things... And it's been a bit more than a decade since the school times and my Windows XP childhood.
In the eyes of the society, however, it may be quite a pointless ability in times where one can just "Google it". Well, guess I'm still going to remember things despite Google's existence.
Bro got brutally post mogged. Unfortunate for him that he crossed paths with an Elder. He needs to grind 4chan for the next few weeks if he hopes to ever recover. Instagram reels won't help him out of this one.
mine is 4906xxx. Yep. been a while.
Bragging about how long you have been on social media is like bragging that you are the coolest kid in a special needs classroom.
And for people who might be impressed, a 7 digit ICQ number proves they aren't really old school.
What about my 5 digit Slashdot uid number? Does anyone remember Slashdot?
I do. In fact as part of the reddit exodus, and the shut down of hardocp, I found myself going over there more often as part of my "scan of the internet".
six digits here , loooooowwww six digits.
Oh yeah, mines 6 digits, but the first 3 are 101. I started using it more when Reddit enshittified too much.
I do.
https://slashdot.org/~ender (edit, since it's not super obvious - #79)
Nice. Too bad Slashdot doesn't show the date an account was created. I would like to what year I made mine, Around 30,000 so I know it's pretty early, but would that be '98, '99,or '00?Don't know. My Fark profile was created 2002.
What about my Fark account number being a low 6 digit number (It would have been lower, but I just lurked for a year first)?? Or how far I got in various MUDDs on my local BBS?? I need someone to recognize my internet clout!! My gmail account is my name with no numbers.
I played YAHOO! Games, god damnit, and used Dogpile to search Ask Jeeves, Lycos, and Excite, HotBot, and AltaVista!!!1!!!!
My ISP (run by a jerky company) kept its BBS running until the mid-90s just for us still playing the MUDDs.
I'm a bit older, but this reminds me of back when people used to shame people with 8 digit SteamIDs, because they were obviously noobs, compared to 7 digit people, and of course the 6 digit people.
Bwah, my 7 digit one starts with a 0, yours starts with 8, [insert various slurs]!
And now the entire format has been through I think like 3 total revisions or something?
All depends on what that first digit is.
Wow, still taking shots at disabled kids in this day and age.
The kids are in fact not alright.
Oh hey, did you watch "Waiting..." recently, and decide to mold your identity thru that piece of cinema?