I went to a presentation at the Computer History Museum called Dialed-in: The Prehistory of Social Media.

The event was a discussion with Kevin Driscoll, author of "The Modem world: a Prehistory of Social Media", and danah boyd, author of "It's Complicated".

The event talked a bit about the history of BBSes and contrasted current social networks with the local communities that sprouted up around BBSing.

To me, in a nutshell, BBSing was an exclusive group - not many people had computers, and the onus was on a caller or sysop to buy a modem, get a phone line (or share a line and risk the hazards of doing so...), find terminal software and build a BBS list.

The panel could have been an open discussion - I'm sure many of the people in the crowd were sysops at one time, or even current sysops. Thankfully, they dodged a bullet by avoiding the sys-op/sise-op wars of the 1990s.

I went with 3 sysops/friends of mine from the golden-age of BBSing. Taipan Enigma and Dr. Strangelove started NIRVANAnet(tm), and Zardoz and I were some of the first sysops to join the nascent network. We joked that the panelists missed out on the culture that they were observing.

It was good seeing people I'd spent the 90s conversing with, both online and in person at the user meetups we'd arrange. The idea of going out for beers afterwards was suggested, but I had an hour drive, early work days ahead, babysitters to let go, and so on. Quite unlike the old days when a couple of nights out ended up with staying up all night, posting on BBSes, greasy-spoon diner breakfasts, and going home to nurse a hangover.

I'm taking a one month break from Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. I'm going to stick with Mastadon for the time being, as it seems unadulterated by algorithms and company marketing teams - it's just interesting people at this point.

Reddit, I may browse -- there are a couple of interesting subreddits I read for technical info and advice. We'll see.

I need to find an RSS feed for news, I realized that I get most of my news from Twitter these days.

I realized that my blog and domain (kataan.org) are 25 years old today! I started a project to move the older items from a text archive (downloaded from blogger, remember them?) into my Wordpress database. I hadn't realized that with blogger, I used it like Twitter as a microblog - there are some days where I posted multiple times a day, on different trains of thought.

1999 was a crazy, interesting time.

I was working in the middle of the first dot-com boom, right in the center of it all. I quit my job at a gaming company for a jump in responsibility and a share of a streaming music startup right in the middle of the Napster mess. I was in the meeting on business deals where we danced around money, because no one was sure who should be paying whom. Do we pay for exposure, or do they pay for content?

There were 3 search engine companies within a couple of blocks of me. Hotwired became the cool new site. Friends at web companies were charging clients like they were attorneys, getting them a presence on that web thing that they didn't understand.

South Park, a little green oasis in the SOMA area of San Francisco became the center of "Multimedia Gulch". Companies that had been focused on CD multimedia moved to web design and creative services.

It all went a little too far. fuckedcompany.com documented some of the excesses, like flake.com, a portal for breakfast cereal lovers, and a company down the street that had their coming out party on a Tuesday and closed the doors on a Thursday.

[oh, the parties - it seemed like someone was getting a round of funding and throwing a party in their converted warehouse/sweatshop space. One of the guys at my startup hosted an email list with all of the "private" parties going on almost nightly in SOMA. The recyclers in the area had a field day with collecting empty beer cans and bottles...]

By mid 2001, the money had started drying up, Aeron chairs and office furniture were available at bargain prices from closed-door dot-coms. 9/11 ended the boom once and for all.

A friend of mine, a San Francisco native, went through his address list in 2002 and realized that two thirds of his contacts had left the city as quickly as they'd come a few years back.

But, it was a good time while it lasted.

Looking at how this blog is shaping up, it reminds me of my first iteration of a blog, back when I was consulting and shooting way too much film.

I found it...

20 years ago, a kind of daily journal of things I found significant, trivial goings-on, photos I'd shot while working in San Francisco and things I wanted to save in Google's cache lest they dissapear.

Man, that was a long time ago - a whole life ago. Most of the photos are of places that no longer exist, old architecture replaced with new.

I like the idea of supporting alternative "smol web" protocols. While part of me likes sticking with low-tech HTML (minimal use of CSS, no scripts, static content), someone on the BBS brought up an interesting point - you still need to use a modern browser for security's sake, and that opens up all sorts of privacy issues - not to mention they're overkill for rendering basic HTML.

I'd love to find a lightweight, supported browser that didn't support any of the bloat that's been added over the years.

Gemini is nice, the markup is simple, but someone complained that it's SSL only. I don't see that as much of an issue, I prefer encrypting everything to make the target data pool larger. Encrypt your shopping list.

That leaves us with Gopher. The markup is a little more difficult, although it would come back to me after decades. It's not encrypted, not a big deal given the content (although, see my previous comment...). When Mozilla took gopher support out of Firefox, I thought that would be the end of it, but I found a Gopher client for Windows - and now I found Lagrange, a cross-platform browser that does Gopher and Gemini, I'm quite happy.

If only it would support basic HTML, I'd have a perfect SMOL WEB browser...