I came to the Tildeverse by way of cmcabe's paper about pubnix systems that
was posted on tildes.net, which I found being promoted on Reddit during one
of the user uprisings there. I found the community ideas interesting, as
they echoed a lot of the stories of the 'net from the pre-WWW days, and as a Linux sysadmin I'm no stranger to the command line.
I spend a lot of time digging around the 'net and web, hunting for long-forgotten communities of yore. Part of the appeal is the thrill of discovery, reading things that man has not laid eyes upon in, sometimes,
twenty years. Part of it's an insight into the early years of the 'net, in
the contemporary words of people who almost certainly thought what they were typing mundane and ephemeral. And part of it is trying to spot, to
recognize, why these communities were, how they thrived, and why they are no more, that the online communities of today (and tomorrow) might learn from
the past.
I think I mentioned the newsgroup alt.callahans on here once; it was a very popular social and role-playing group, once upon a time. Over the years, a
few groups spun off from it, perhaps most prominently the alt.dragons-inn community.
Well, another, much shorter-lived, spinoff was alt.kalbo, created in late
1993. Google Groups has *almost* all the old threads back to the beginning, some 1300 or so. (Though the most recent few hundred are, predictably,
spam.) It was meant to be a smaller, cozier, community for a group (in?)formally calling themselves the Nomads of the Net, somewhere to
socialize that was (stop me if this sounds familiar) less overwhelming, less *busy*, than alt.callahans or alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst (another
short-lived spinoff from the early '90s).
Interestingly, the genesis of the idea, the manifesto, almost, survives, on LiveJournal, (re)posted by one of the original authors in 2014 as "relevant wisdom from the deep-net past":
https://elimloth.livejournal.com/84721.html
I'll quote one bit here, between dashed lines:
---
"Something of a legend in the history of the Net, the Alt.Nomads were
known to have established encampments in at least half a dozen
formerly deserted newsgroups, and were rumored to have resettled many
more. The exact numbers were hard to determine, since once a
newsgroup reached a certain size, the Nomads tended to move on. They
would usually leave behind a flourishing culture, which had
incorporated many of their customs and mores.
Sharply contrasting with many of the other Net groups, this culture
strongly emphasized courtesy and respect for both inhabitants and
visitors. It was notable for a love of music and laughter, and an
enjoyment of storytelling and wordplay of all sorts."
---
Eerily relatable, non?
In a thread from November 1993, I found some interesting comments that I
think are equally relatable, and worth thinking about, vis-a-vis online communities and the Tildeverse and all that jazz: (Most quotation marks are verbatim; it was a convention at the time to write in the third person, and
put one's speech in quote marks.)
---
David Mar:
"[T]oday I looked at alt.kalbo as a respite from
the rest of the Net. Somewhere to relax and _unwind_. I loved hearing
about your surprise party for Rosty, Liralen.
"The folks here, we've known each other for a while - we don't need the
intros and the frantic 'searching for a purpose with this new group of
people'. Man, it's nice to sit here and just chat, _really_ chat, with
a bunch of friends." "
---
Mary A. Mark:
"I'm awfully glad we went ahead
and invaded alt.kalbo, to create a smaller, less-known space.
The overwhelming success of the coffeehouse has been a terrific
proof of concept for social spaces on the net - but it's too large
for me. And I find a.c has become too large and noisy for me as well.
This is pretty good - a few more people would be welcome, but nothing
like the triple-digit-per-day posting of the others. "
I actually find it a *physical* difference -
partly I suspect because logging into a.c had gotten very
stressful for me - I'd start to tense up as soon as I thought about
it and then sit there scanning message lines as fast as I could
trying to distinguish things I really wanted to read from those
I wasn't interested in or didn't have time for - and feeling
guilty at all the time it took to even do that - it just
wasn't pleasant at all! And that was *without* actually dealing
with any of the content...
"Here, I find myself physically relaxing and slowing down -
I have a sense of anticipation, of looking forward to this -
I log in, and think 'How many messages are there today? Wow - 10!'
and as I read through everything, I file things that I might
keep or reply to into incoming mail, where I can think
about them, and reread them, and maybe answer them later on...
And while I'm doing that, I'm slowing down - there's a sense
that I can take time with this, give it my attention, enjoy it.
"It really is a completely different sensation, at a very direct
physical level."
---
What happened to the Nomads, and alt.kalbo, you might ask? As with
everything else that was good online in the '90s, it got eaten by the WWW
and early social media - in this case LiveJournal.
--
Inanities:
gopher://tilde.town:70/1/~lkosov/ (with netmail address & GPG key) He/him/them/they/whatever. If in doubt, assume the above post contains sarcasm --- Synchronet 3.18b-Linux NewsLink 1.113