RSS never tracked you

@Daojoan blogs definitely begged for dopamine, but it was slower release than the kind we have now.

@Daojoan Even these got ruined nowadays. RSS feeds often don't have the full article text. Email contains tracking pixels and links. "Blogs" have texts behind paywalls and cookie warnings. We need the old web back.

@undefined_variable @Daojoan I still use IRC on a daily basis. It's not gone.

@forst Problem with that is - we often paywall our stuff these days so that it isn’t all just scraped and summarised by a smorgasbord of bots. It’s such a balancing problem

@Daojoan Old web gave serotonin. Mmmm.

@Daojoan this is just euphoric recall - at least nor/xor you have total recall

@Daojoan to join the "well actually" crowd, email absolutely did have throttling, although retry and backoff logic tended to be much more reliable and well-tested back then

there was a lot of the old internet that wasn't democratized and "yours" (e.g. acquiring connectivity, acquiring compute), although the details have shifted around a lot

@Daojoan@mastodon.social

RSS never tracked you.

Email never throttled you.

@Daojoan I wish the major browsers would bring back built in RSS!

@Daojoan

Tracked you? Hmm, they all left logs. I processed logs in the 1990's to see where people where located. I mean, no cookies, but they did everything they could to track you then. Yes, we throttled email, but they came through after a day or two. Server could not handle the volume.

@azonenberg @undefined_variable +1.

There's something like 30k people signed into Libera at any moment - and all the old names like EFNet, DALnet, etc are still there.

@aaron @undefined_variable Even flyback is still there, lol.

@Daojoan
I blogged in the 00's on #politics and now I'm blogging again on #Creativity #music and #Psychology but I have tracking cookies disabled on my site. And no ads.

@Daojoan silently deleting or spam filtering feels a lot like rate limiting.

@Daojoan @temptoetiam sorry but blogs ALWAYS begged for dopamine.

@Daojoan US ultra capitalism perverted it into a dystopian hellscape.

@Daojoan IRC never died

@Daojoan I was so sad a couple weeks ago when the SMBC feed removed the content. I'll only see it now when it gets shared by copy/paste.

@r @Daojoan I feel like there were models for democratized connectivity? The earliest setup I remember using was through torfree.net, and they were one of a group of freenets running under a co-op model, I think. Looks like they’re still around and offering free service as well, which is a pleasant surprise.

@Serenus @Daojoan yeah, this existed in various places (*especially* _outside_ the United States, where suburbia and monopolies really ruined things). there also existed people hosting stuff on spare computers and using dynamic dns providers

you gain some, you lose some. nowadays connectivity and compute are *way* easier and more affordable, but the cultural knowledge that you _can_ self-host seems to be disappearing