Subj : Re: Community To : boraxman From : tenser Date : Sat Oct 01 2022 13:47:11 On 01 Oct 2022 at 12:59p, boraxman pondered and said... bo> te> bo> I'm all for gatekeeperism. Nothing is improved when it is opene bo> te> bo> masses. bo> te> bo> te> Well, that's why these things die out. bo> te> bo> te> Ham radio's population grows ever older and is dying faster bo> te> than they're being replaced. bo> te> bo> te> Compare BBSes now to the 90s. It's not just the Internet. bo> bo> I am a Linux user, and Linux is still niche. It hasn't taken over the bo> world, and shouldn't. The very fact that Linux is "niche" is what makes bo> it useful. IT caters to those who are seeking its reconfigurability, bo> its freedom, its power. When something becomes BIG, you have to drop bo> catering to all those people who built it in the first place. Linux is not niche. It is actually huge, and _mostly_ backed by very large corporations that depend on it. Linux, in fact, has taken over the world; from Android phones and tablets to home routers, to every supercomputer on the top-500 list, it's literally everywhere. Hell, I saw it booting on an informational monitor in the Frankfurt airport last month. Schoolchildren are given chromebooks running Linux. Some like to say the sort of stuff that you do above, but they're not the ones doing the work. Most of those are at Intel, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, or Google. bo> Google got BIG, and now it sucks as a search engine. It ruined the Web. Nope. bo> Social media got BIG and ruined the social aspect of the Web. Once bo> things get big, they lose what they were, and become bad. The bo> popularity means nothing if it doesn't do good. The web didn't have much of a social aspect before social media. I was there and saw it develop from a few weird hyperlink pages to what it is today. People looked elsewhere for socialization before sixdegrees.com, friendster, and then blogs, myspace and facebook. USENET and IRC were the two big ones. bo> It's pretty easy to switch to a mindset where you're just seeking sheer bo> numbers, quantity over quality. Where you're willing to sacrifice what bo> makes you unique, your unique offerings for generic mass appeal. bo> bo> People could very easily make 'tweaks' that result in third party bo> companies now scraping and monitoring the data. People could make bo> tweaks that result in sysops having to give up sole control. Modern bo> Tech has a lot to be desired, and is in a ruinous state. I'm not saying bo> it WILL happen, but one has to keep this in mind. bo> bo> Maybe I'm jumping at shadows here, but I come here because I felt bo> repulsed by Social Media, by how the whole model works. I'm just saying bo> lets not think reinventing Facebook is the solution. Your argument is essentially that BBSes are special because they are not important enough for the crass commercialization of Facebook and Twitter, IG and Tiktok. Ok. But consider that they were orders of magnitude more popular 25 years ago; now they aren't. Why is that? First, because they didn't give people what they wanted, and second, because you had "big personalities" being jerks _because they could_. At the time, there was no real competition, so people could appoint themselves lord high poobah of their calling region and if you didn't like it, tough: you were at their mercy. The much more sophisticated and interesting Internet thankfully freed people from the torment of these petty tyrants, but what happened to them? Well, gee, as it turns out: they stayed and now they see themselves as the protectors of the faith. What bunkum. No one wants to turn the little BBS paradise into Facebook; don't worry. No one wants to exploit the population of BBS users. But that doesn't mean that they want to kowtow to the gatekeepers, either. bo> That being said, I'm quite interested in the PTT Bulletin Board System in bo> Taiwan, as it has 1.5 million registered users, with peak usage numbers bo> (numbers of users online at once) reaching the 6 digits at time. bo> bo> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System bo> bo> I'd be interested to see how close the experience is to using the BBS's bo> that we know. If close, it shows that one can indeed have many, many bo> users while still maintaining the BBS as a BBS. Why not login and try it? --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64) * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101) .