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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

If we use Twitter to announce that people should #deletefacebook, what social network do we use in the event that it becomes necessary to #deletetwitter?

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you ssh into your own trusted openbsd system, run bitchx and connect to efnet, just like the good lord intended back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

i am only partially sarcastic here.

I do miss the mad west of the IRC/NNTP days. I also miss multiple search engines. Yahoo/Lycos/Hotbot/Dogpile/AltaVista all give you different results and you could have fun searching around.

The current Internet is a monoculture

NNTP, so awesome until 95% of its resources were consumed by its abuse as a file sharing platform for (naughty to nasty) images and pirated software and until power-hungry local group moderators started abusive banning/deleting practices against people who disagreed with their opinions on politics etc.

People want their own fluffy & safe social bubbles, not open, distributed networks.

You do realize that DDG is the modern incarnation of Dogpile?

Also, why are we pretending that Bing, Yandex and Baidu don't exist?

Because Yandex and Baidu give your data to some of the worst governments in the world.

IRC, so awesome, until local server admins began k-lining people for disagreeing with them.

An aside and coincidentally, WhatsApp runs on FreeBSD.

you can afford a dedicated openbsd system?! i'd have to use a friend's free shell account and hope i don't get klined (again)

you lost me after openbsd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

ahhh, Yes... I remember IRC. I used a different client though.

I looked at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_Relay_C...

mIRC is the only familiar one. Then again, this was back when I was a kid. Vaguely related, AIM was my jam. I was a script kiddy and needed IRC to talk to all the l337 h4ck3r5.

Definitions:

bitchx - an IRC client: http://www.bitchx.com/

efnet - one of the oldest IRC networks, founded in 1990

IRC baby, and efnet is an old network you can connect to. Bitchx is an irc client, free last I checked. To GP, are eggdrop bots still a thing?

I believe they are, though I haven't checked in a long time. Seems to be semi actively maintained.

https://github.com/eggheads/eggdrop

irssi

Back in my day we walked uphill to the vt100 terminal both ways, used ircII, and irssi didn't exist yet.

lol touche

Scuttlebutt, a decentralized social network. ( http://scuttlebutt.nz/ )

> I do miss the mad west of the IRC/NNTP days

Plus, a lot of new people on there have described it like that. https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25WJZGMingRgdlOTrZJjOz7GHnS1D9...

It's the wrong question.

Social networks are nothing more than a reflection of our society. Blaming Facebook and Twitter is easy but the hard part is dealing with the polarisation in politics, the intransingence of Russia, the inability of people to know who to trust and what is real or not and the slow disintegration of our institutions.

The real question is how do you fix society ?

Having access to the detailed user data of billions of users is definitely something new and it's being used for efficient propaganda worldwide. FB has again completely naively unleashed a beast they had no intention or intuition on how to control. Anyone who remembers Facebooks early days should not be the least bit surprised that they are playing fast and loose once again.

The same can be said about a lot of things like littering, gun violence, etc, but there’s still things you can do to treat the symptomz

The digital economy at large is based on the mass manipulation and abuse of negative emotions. Profit over people.

"We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

Dr. King, Beyond Vietnam (1967)

http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...

I think both questions are good.

People ask for tools and then the tools shape them.

As a ham radio nerd, packet bulletin board systems should really make a comeback. They fell apart as the internet came about, but in an effort to re-invigorate the now-unused spectrum and hardware TNCs[1] all over the place, APRS[2] was created, which has this nifty feature[3]. We also have a type of email system called Winlink[4] (which runs using the ARDOP protocol[5] or VARA[6] replacing Winmor[7] and Pactor[8]).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_node_controller

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Sys...

[3]https://aprs.fi/

[4]https://www.winlink.org/

[5]https://www.winlink.org/content/ardop_overview

[6]https://rosmodem.wordpress.com/

[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winmor

[8]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACTOR

Mastodon or other decentralized platforms. Or nothing. That's a pretty good option too.

I've been using MeWe recently, it's basically like classic facebook (chronological, not full of crap you didn't sign up for) but sadly doesn't have a critical mass of users yet.

Mastadon

Why but just use Facebook to announce you're nuking your FB account and Twitter to announce the same

Post to your .plan file

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