Only those with a legitimate reason were supposed to be allowed access… merely being a student at a university with some level of internet access being the primary legitimate path for most. There is always an audience for authoritarians, as we can see these days in real world politics.Īs I believe I have mentioned in the past, I was yelled at on Usenet back in 1988 merely for having a address, that being the product of a commercial company selling access to the sacred groups which were meant to be free of such crass commercial endeavors. The forums for a popular video game or Mastodon before Elon Musk bought Twitter, are examples of that, where a few loud and persistent voices can wield influence and shape norms by simply shouting down anybody who falls out of line. That is a situation that works well with a small, controlled audience. ![]() They are the insiders and you need to obey and study them if you want to be accepted into the group. In other words, typical forum behavior where those who were there first believe that has given then the inalienable right to project their ideal social conventions on a bunch of strangers who show up later. ![]() They got yelled at for being uncouth in the moderated forums, with snotty self-righteous group moderators telling those that breached expected decorum that they needed to read the FAQ for the group, which was generally published to the group on the first of the month. Generally people were good and the only problems were generally the incoming freshman class in the autumn because that was primary source of new users. Moderation was generally light, though it varied from news group to news group. I am sure some fans of the Fediverse and nodding to themselves in a self-congratulatory way even now. It was a distributed network, so did not depend on any one server or organization, but was dispersed among servers all over the internet. It was, in many ways, an ideal that many today wish social media today would move towards. ALT did not, in fact, stand for Anarchists, Lunatics and Terrorists, it just seemed that way.Īnd there were many other locally created groups that had limited distribution.
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