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Comment by georgecmu | Hacker News Reader

As a historical note, there used to be quite a few very popular solutions for supporting early social networks over intermittent protocols.

UUCP [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP] used the computers' modems to dial out to other computers, establishing temporary, point-to-point links between them. Each system in a UUCP network has a list of neighbor systems, with phone numbers, login names and passwords, etc.

FidoNet [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet] was a very popular alternative to internet in Russia as late as 1990s. It used temporary modem connections to exchange private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSes in the network.

In Russia, there was a somewhat eccentric, very outspoken enthusiast of upgrading FidoNet to use web protocols and capabilities. Apparently, he's still active in developing "Fido 2.0": https://github.com/Mithgol

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For those who weren't around, Usenet was built on uucp in the early 80s. As messages were store and forward you had to wait a good while for your messages to propagate - many servers only connected daily! Oh, and better set cron to dial in often as messages didn't stay in the spool too long!

Usenet back then was spam free and you could usually end up talking to the creators of whatever you're discussing. I rather miss it.

Quite a few tech companies used private newsgroups for support, so you'd dial into those separately. As they were often techie to techie they worked rather well.

I first came across Usenet and uucp via the Amiga Developer programme. Amicron and uucp overnight all seemed a bit magic back in 87 compared to dialing into non-networked BBS's to browse, very, very slowly!

> Usenet back then was spam free and you could usually end up talking to the creators of whatever you're discussing. I rather miss it.

I still use usenet! It's not quite what it used to be, but you should check it out.

Can you still access it though Google? They've bought DejaVú!

Yes, you can still access newsgroups through Google, just search for your favorite group, e.g. comp.lang.lisp.

Or eternal-september. Free accounts, although you don't get access to the binaries groups I don't think. I mostly use it for comp.risks, comp.arch.embedded, and some other things like that.

Aoie is another service still around, and is free without accounts.

or you could use the site I built that reads HN/reddit/slashdot and any newsgroup you wish on a webpage. Its free if a little buggy - www.sagebump.com

you need the www

I'm the one who brought FidoNet to Russia (Soviet Union, to be precise) in 1990. I remember how it was hard to find two more guys with modems and access to automatic international line in order to request a separate FidoNet region for USSR. Finally we got 2:50 region code in September 1990, and there were three of us - two guys from Novosibirsk and one from Yekaterinburg, both are large cities in the Asian part of USSR.

For us raised in Soviet Union, it was eye opening experience that you may freely exchange messages with people around the globe.

Setting up links to the West was a very brave thing to do.

It's slightly misleading to refer to Fidonet only in the context of Russia. It was popular in quite a lot of places around the world, not just Russia. Not even principally Russia, in its heyday.

These things are definitely systems to learn from, both their architectures and their histories; and people have already been drawing parallels to Usenet on this very page, notice.

When I said that Fidonet was a very popular alternative to internet in Russia as late as 1990s, I didn't mean that it was limited to Russia, but that in Russia particularly (well, FSU) it was still popular even in late 90s, while elsewhere in the world it was subsumed by internet.

Indeed. My BBS was fidonet connected in the 90s. Many interesting discussions happened dispite the day long delay in replication.

Bang paths are still supported in email addresses too!

Your email address might be george@cmu!vax!something!mitre!foo

Which meant Route the email through foo->mitre->something->vax->cmu.

Sysadmins would often keep tables of known routes. While people would describe their route from common known routing hosts.

We were so living in the cyberpunk future then.

Yep my connection back then was uucp on an Atari ST off 720k floppy no hard drive, through a 1200 baud modem, running a set of a mix of ported GNU utilities and Atari software to get usenet and email. My email address was a bang-path ...

And we liked it!

Computing was more fun back then.

In the very early 90s, my personal computer had a UUCP feed for email and news from a local BBS. I didn't use bang paths on it; the provider had a proper Internet connection. It worked satisfactorily well.

Early email providers in Argentina used Unix to Unix Copy Program (UUCP) to move forward your messages to some of the few internet connected servers. IIRC you would write email in Pegasus or Eudora and then upload/download your mail with a 9600bps modem to a UUCP server.

And this is why I'm curious why nobody yet written a social network on top of NNTP.

nobody made one[1]

[1]: https://chan.bbnet.io/

Someone has, but it's only got one user.

(Just guessing, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened to be true).

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