Comment on The Web is Going to Die
_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 5 days agoI mean, sort of? It was decentralized because that was just the nature of the early net, rather than a conscious choice to avoid governments and corporations censoring you. They simply didn’t have anything like the net we have today.
Broadfern@lemmy.world 5 days ago
That’s fair. I forgot briefly that fediverse has that political side lol but meant more the technology of “broadcasting” and inter-site communications. Seems a better comparison than email at least.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 5 days ago
Yeah, Usenet was structured that way more for practical reasons than political ones. Local users were truly local, as in you usually connected to a server that was geographically close to you. Often it was on the same university campus you were on. The long-distance connections between servers didn't have the bandwidth for everyone to just be freely hopping around browsing whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, at least not at first, so mirroring the content was a better approach. It also made things much more reliable, the servers didn't need 100% uptime.
Usenet was a lot more "trusting" in its structure. The newsgroups didn't have moderators per se, and they weren't hosted by specific instances; they were more just a "tag" you could add to a post to let people filter which subjects they were interested in seeing. There was a globally agreed upon list of newsgroups and a distributed system for creating new ones, but it was all pretty informal. Wouldn't work well in the current Internet, it'd get spammed to death in seconds. But on the surface level it really felt a lot like the modern Fediverse does, with subject-specific groups and threaded discussions and such.
Cybersteel@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Userboards, newsgroups, irc chat