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.
new tomo devlog post: how do you deal with shitty people behaviour?
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.
Yow! New from @katbamkapow
*"Through close-readings of HOMOCORE, contemporary zines, FidoNet documentation, interviews, and hybrid digital/analog archival research, this paper shows how the political afterlives of FidoNet and HOMOCORE can be read through the lens of queer activist self-destruction."*
Brewster. 2024. Network breakdown: the queer anarchist politics at the heart of the ‘net from FidoNet to HOMOCORE. *Internet Histories*.
https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2024.2424609
I worked on a #PAVEPAWS set in Texas 1992-1994, Operate on a Cyber 170 Mainframe, my mission was to provide direct comms upon a Sea Launched Ballistic Missile from the Southern Hemisphere, 4 of my circuits ran directly to Cheyenne mountain. Most of the software was in fortran I believe. Ran Mag tapes.
I was around also for #FIDONET
So I ignored Rule 1 at my own peril and suffered the consequences. If you are wondering, rule #1 is:
- it's the firewall,
Meanwhile, rule #2 is:
- it's DNS.
It was my local Subtext 'proxy box' to block telnet abuse that was doing something weird with FidoNet connections. At least I got MacTCP 2.1 out of this.
(@jcs I'm good now)
#subtext #macintosh #fidonet #fsx
@mok24 @denix #Fidonet 2:282/541.12 checking in. Moderator of MACCOMM, MACHW and MACSW :-) http://www.textfiles.com/fidonet-on-the-internet/e1995/elist512.txt
@arstechnica this is sad. It was the #bbs world that got me online at such speeds as 300 and 1200 baud and in 40x20 characters with at best 4 colours. I was still able to send email though.... ahh #fidonet
RIP #wardchristensen online pioneer.
@feoh @textfiles Interesting! That'd be a bit like asking IBM insiders to write the history of IBM. We've seen how that's turned out.
I'd like #Fidonet to get the @LaineNooney treatment à la "The Apple II Age".
Has anyone written the definitive history of #Fidonet?
I know it got some treatment in @textfiles 's #BBS documentary (which I devoured - thank you Jason and all of the contributors!)
Fidonet seems ripe for treatment: it has fascinating technical and social dimensions. Technical choices about the structure of the network were made piecemeal, always with the intent to reduce call cost, and included many political choices. How explicit were they at the time? How were those choices made? Likewise, I can't seem to find much about the content of the discussions on the network. There's a tantalising glimpse of GAYNET, a public echo (forum). What other subcultures thrived on Fidonet? To what degree was this endorsed and supported by sysops? Who were the sysops? By definition, you'd have to be a wealthy probably educated, probably homeowner in order to afford the expensive computers and ongoing call costs of being part of the Fidonet.
@evacide We did a lot more than Internet in 1994. We, amongst other things, had a free and unregulated FidoNet, with over 150,000 people around the globe connected, sharing sh*t because we wanted to, and could 
Oh, and in 1992, FidoNet was a transport provider for news from Russia and Glasnost 
All of it by means of PSTN 
**>> DIALED IN **
**>> THE PREHISTORY OF SOCIAL MEDIA**
Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA
Highlights and clips
https://computerhistory.org/blog/dialing-up-community/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx9V_xYJ9gM
@blakespot @eiZen One of my earliest modems was V.23, so 1200 down, 75 up. #Fidonet #Viewdata
@breadandcircuses Weird that I was online for years before I had Internet access. My first Internet email went through a #Fidonet <-> Internet email gateway to reach my uncle in Canada.
