I think one appealing thing about mastodon is that all the little federated villages remind me of the MUSH community in the late 90s. Where you could get a MUSH installed, but it was running on the money and good will of some random stranger. It's the whole... little pieces of technology running on sharing and love... thing.
@KitRedgrave 👋🏻
Also: I'm one of six people you're following? I will take that as a compliment. 😝
@benhamill six people your instance knows i'm following. the counts don't really federate too well. if you jump to my instance, you'll see i'm following like hundreds of people
@benhamill or... not.. something very very weird has happened!
@benhamill @KitRedgrave Looks fine to me.
@KitRedgrave I think "distributed systems" is the weird thing that has happened. Heh. 😝 Ah well.
What MUSH(es) did/do you play on? I mostly spent time in Rivendell on Imladris in, like, 97? to 02ish.
@benhamill i mostly sat on 8bitMUSH for pretty much... ever. from like 2001 on. i still sometimes connect, even.
@KitRedgrave I still connected from time to time up to about 5 years ago, but... :shrug: free time goes📉
@benhamill yeah :/ i'm glad they're still around, and the spirit of it carries over to new endeavors like this
@benhamill It's BBSs and Usenet, and early forums. It's communities at their most organic.
@ajroach42 Those predate my internet access, but I understand the parallels in theory.
@benhamill They predate my internet access, too. (Well, I mean BBSs are still a thing, I ran one for a while in 2004...) but I know about them from http://olduse.net/ and just generally resaerching things and talking to everyone I can about them.
@ajroach42 I kind of want to say "agree" but that makes no grammatical sense. And "same" isn't quite right either. Not literally anyway. But... I get you.
@benhamill For a while, when I was in highschool (circa 2006, I guess?) I had a class that was supposed to be intro to IT. But the teacher didn't know anything, and there were only six people in the class.
But we had a BUNCH of surplus hardware. Like hundreds of computers, and a couple of servers.
So I set up dozens of them, networked them, and we played Doom.
@ajroach42 haha. Of course.
@benhamill 100% agree.
@benhamill - Actually it is just the same as the Diaspora/Friendica federation. I have been on the network for 4 years and slowly you get to know the podmins (D*-admins).
To help out I have made artwork for funding campaigns, paid money and bought beer for Danes, Indian and Dutch admins :)
I have the same village feel.
@benhamill > referring to MUSHes ever
YES :D HI