Re: But is UseNet "Social Media"??

On Mon, 2 Feb 2026 15:51:29 +0100, "Carlos E.R."
<[email protected]> wrote:

>Oh, and here we had (have?) to pay local phone calls, so we tried to 
>make our calls to Fidonet or Internet as short as possible.

There was a point at which all of South Africa's internetional
internet traffic was on a 9600 bps dial-up line via Fidonet, between a
BBS at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and Randy Bush's BBS in Oregon
USA. When TCP/IP connections became more widely available, it was the
other way round -- Fidonet packets were exchanged over the Internet by
FTP.

That was also the time of the distinction between the Internet
(TCP/IP) and the internet, which included Fidonet technology networks.

Fido techniology was developed after uucp, and was more sophisticated:
in nested replies it would show the initials of who had posted what,
so it was easier to follow conversations. I miss echomail for that
reason. And yes, there wqas a lot of social chitchat, so FTNs were, at
least in part, social networks. 


-- 
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web:  http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk