Back in 1993, I went to get another degree to just to get internet access, which was one of the few ways to get it back then. We had VAX and Unix, both fine platforms, hundreds of students would log in to one CPU from a terminal on campus or the house. We were connected to the world and communications were fast. I remember that's when the entire continent of Australia was connected by a pair of 2MB cables at the time. We had many distributed servers for news, email, IRC, gopher, etc, but it was lightning fast. Engineers at companies put tech documents on ftp servers. The internet was a big world library and the world was free. #JavaScript wasn't invented yet to slow us down or bury us in popups and advertisements. The entire internet was ad-free and advertising was a ban offense.

Then one morning I remember what would be known as #EternalSeptember, thanks to #AOL. And the #CanterSiegel spam happened. And the real cranks invaded. Many of us banned every .com address to regain sanity. This is when investors invaded the internet to hype it up into television quality. At least we still have #Wikipedia, #InternetArchive, and #Mastodon. Watching #Bluesky open up the floodgates to fascists was obvious to those of us who remember the past.

I wish #eternalseptember would end and the #aiwinter would get here soon.

Seeing this #forkiverse thing emerging in my timeline got me curious and somehow reminds me of the #eternalseptember usenet discussions from the early nineties. Makes me feel old. We did survive at that time, I bet we will again

RE: https://mastodon.social/@onthisday/115673398971761625

I was working for SkyCache. We did satellite usenet and web cache pre-injection, saving ISPs money on transit costs. This lawsuit had a second order effect of dropping transit usage for those same ISPs. They stopped paying for our service.

It was a weird time on the internet. Prior to the lawsuit, a burst of innovation and scaling network capacities to accommodate the demand of P2P apps. With Napster falling and the dotCom bubble bursting all in the same time frame, the industry stagnated for a while. It was unfathomable to think we wouldn't need to keep scaling our network equipment, then overnight, *crickets*.

I think we're about to see the exact same thing happen with datacenters, GPUs, and electricity thanks to AI.

#AI #fuck_ai #eternalSeptember #napster

#OSM has its own #eternalseptember - it's called highway classification. The most recent reinventions: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/official-classification-of-highways/137263 / https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/rfc-feature-proposal-motorway-classifications/137119 and a plea to not discuss this ever again https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/lets-not-talk-about-highway-classification-in-osm/137150 which, unsurprisingly, also turns into a discussion about highway classification.

Okay, signing up for Usenet again like it's 1999.

Going with Eternal-September just 'cuz I like the concept. :)

#eternalSeptember #usenet

Yesterday #AOL finally shut down #dialup. No more bee-bzz-brr-chrrr.

In 2019, 265,000 people in the US were still using a dial-up connection¹ (at 56 kbps!). Before the shutdown, this number was in the low 1000s².

What were they doing? An average website probably takes 10 minutes to load with a modem. Still eternal-septembering the #usenet? ;)

I'd be interested in numbers from other parts of the world.

#eternalseptember #modem #isp

⒈) https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2019.B28011?q=ACSDT1Y2019.B28011

⒉) https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-still-pay-for-service-but-not-for-dial-up-internet.html

@unibremen

#eternalseptember

@MagicLike September 1993 never ended though… #EternalSeptember

Today marks 5 years since I last went into an office for work.

I left early that day (a Wednesday) because I had some kind of stomach bug and vomited. It was a $50 Lyft ride from Brickell, in Miami to the then BB&T commuter parking lot in far west Sunrise just past Sawgrass Mills.

The office officially closed that Friday, and I retired in September 2021.

For me, time has warped into having no meaning and today is simply March, 1837, 2020.

#COVID #EternalSeptember #MarchForever #ForeverMarch

@BeAware I haven't had (almost) any such issues with #fediseer, but my primary audience has been #lemmy and the #threadiverse instead of microblogging. There's surprisingly different norms that have been organically reached in mastodon over the past decade which are fairly alien outside it.

It honestly feels more like a small group of people trying to futilely hold back the Eternal September through scolding and pile-ons.

#EternalSeptember

The only reason I am not saying this #January is going on forever, is because #September1993 is still going too.

#EternalSeptember

Seeing so many people in the "Local" feed on Pixelfed posting photos with captions like "Hello Pixelfed" or "First post" is seriously a really nice version of an Eternal September.

#pixelfed #eternalseptember

@themizzi @kissane

they don't want "the normies"

they fear an #eternalseptember

thing is, since this is federation, anyone worried about that can keep their niche communities separate and never encounter "the normies"

and, like erin said, we want "the normies" here

otherwise they get mindwiped by plutocrat agendas on centralized #socialmedia

to do that we have to make the process of getting into the #fediverse dead simple

dead. simple.

even picking a server is a step too high for many

@Khrys Mastodon le réseau social qui se prépare à un #eternalseptember bis ?

@NaClKnight

yeah

if we ever want #mastodon #fediverse to grow, it has to be dead simple

dead. simple.

"i don't want all these normies on mastodon"

you kind of do

otherwise they are off in #twitter land or #rednote land or #facebook land getting mindwiped, and then voting

you can curate your mastodon experience to your hearts content, and avoid them all

don't worry about #eternalseptember on mastodon

worry about #plutocrat agendas controlling hordes of zombies

@fringemagnet
#EternalSeptember