Comment by goalieca 7 days ago
The online world of 20 years ago was not federated and centralized into one of four large social media sites. There was no political machine trying to censor and control. We were left alone and no one care to control us.
Lol I was talking to a friend who is a web dev and works for a large company in the social gaming space. He referred to the "Civility" team which is just censorship and content moderation, plus sending mental health notifications if you've been playing/spending too much. I'd rather dig holes or shovel shit over working for a mobile game companies "civility" team.
The (Spain-focused) article points that 20 years ago was basically the same. "MSN Messenger" is not exactly a shining beacon of federation.
I'll point that there have been cycles (like many things computing) of centralization and federation coming and going. Maybe there's indeed nothing much intrinsically better about "ye olde Internet".
Head over to Instagram and pick a random reel. Now scroll down and let the algorithm pick out suggestions for you. (Not your main timeline, mind you -- this gets you actual algorithmic suggestions.) The first few will be normal, but it gets incredibly disturbing very quickly. I did this last night and it was about 90% AI videos. They included:
1. Beautiful cakes and muffins that squirmed and then turned into puppies. (This sounds cute but is actually kind of disturbing.)
2. Rats. Big ass rats. And some cockroaches. A sandwich full of bugs.
3. Pretty women having their heads sliced up with sharp knives, which then demonstrated that they were actually made of "cake".
4. Monsters in what appear to be backyard surveillance cameras.
This was interspersed with random content that I actually look at, plus a few thirst traps. The closest description I have for it was "this is what a bad trip is like." The Internet in 2025 is nothing like MSN.
What do you think teenagers discussed over MSN Messenger exactly? The finer points of botanical knowledge?
If my teenage friends had been faceless alien monsters with no humanity whatsoever, it would have been pretty similar I guess. My friends were mostly just stoners and kids who liked to drink a little too much.
I guess you never stumbled down the liveleak and /b/ back alleys.
MSN Messenger allowed me to login with any number of clients. I used Trillian back in the day, with MSN, Yahoo, AIM and IRC all from one chat client.
It was free as in beer, at least, and "lock in" and "walled gardens" were never a concern.
Sorry, bullshit. You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems.
And definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens". MSN Messenger was the second "walled garden" service I've escaped ever since Internet was a thing. I literally remember the pain as it if was today. I would even claim the raison-d'etre for Jabber is precisely the IM walled gardens of this era.
And Jabber was then (ab)used (by Whatsapp, Google Talk, etc.) to create more centralized services..
> You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems.
Nah. MSN tolerated Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin and what have you; breaking changes were once-a-year at most. Skype was the first to really seriously block out third party clients, and it was a sea change.
> definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens".
In theory, but not so much in practice. There were high-quality multi-protocol IM clients available for every platform. You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on. I guess you couldn't do a cross-network group chat, but that wasn't something that ever really came up.
> not federated and centralized
That's curious to me, because I see those as roughly opposed (both are proxies for organizational systems). NNTP (usenet): clearly federated (works by flooding). DNS: the religious obsession with the "one true root" doctrine, while it makes sense in the context of a global naming scheme (anybody advertising false root should be shot, according to Mockapetris), hampers the technology's adoption for other purposes. Global internet routing i.e. BGP is still pretty much federated.