Re: But is UseNet "Social Media"??

On 2026-02-03 04:52, Steve Hayes wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I also miss the initials in the quotes. I have seen some people do 
that now, but it is a mess because current mail clients (or usenet) like 
Thunderbird do not support it.

I also miss that all groups were moderated. There was no spam. Every 
person was real.

-- 
Cheers, Carlos.
ES🇪🇸, EU🇪🇺;