Can we keep the "no smoking inside commercial establishments" policy at least? Otherwise I'm down.

Yahoo Messenger

Our parents playing with fire

Count me in.

Also can we keep the progress (what little there has been) we made for LGBTQ folks?

RCEs, RCEs everywhere

But I mean at least everything has a small memory footprint instead of using 4Gb to load a god damn web page.

IRC still exists man.

What's a Shenandoah beard?

I can't tell if you meant boomer or zoomer and now I think you did that on purpose because both work.

The technology isnt the problem, though. Its how people are using it that is.

This is just the "80s were so much better... as ling as you werent gay" or "50s were so much better... as long as you werent black" but for the 90s.

The people making our lives arent going to stop just cause you slap a fresh coat of denial nostalgia over it.

This guy is doing it https://openpath.quest/2026/i-am-retiring-from-tech-to-live-offline

AI was the last straw. Have you heard of that island off India where the indiginous population kills any outsiders fool-hardy enough to land? They are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday, or at the very least should not want to see completely extinguished. A reminder. Never forget your roots. Here in Pennsylvania we have the Amish performing a similar function. Significantly less hostile, though still set apart, they bear witness to what was normal for all of us a couple short centuries ago: horse and buggy, wood stoves and lanterns. My intent is to be AI Amish, which means Internet Amish. Not 1780, but 1980. Neo-Amish. I'm fine driving a car and flipping a lightswitch, by which I mean that they don't make me into something I hate, which AI and doomscrolling do.

Though if your friend is over and wants to check their msn, DO NOT LET THEM LOG IN TO YOUR TRILLIAN. It will merge your friends lists because Trillian followed a "one person many accounts" model, not a "many people each with many accounts" one.

Instead of AIM, MeshCore. Cheap, off-net, encrypted, solar-powered, simple.

I think I have enough hardware laying around to serve as a dialup ISP for this. And the upstream bandwidth I already have is probably more than that of my dialup ISP 30 years ago.

I'm down for anything co-op

"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization." - ChatGPT

Give me back the golden era of Usenet!

Blockbuster doesn't carry pornography.

Basically a reverse hitler.

Anything with a processor inside of it and connected to a high speed internet connection will enshittify. One wat is to limit CPU speed and internet, say use solar/wind powered mesh routers instead of fiber connections, so good enough to get info and simple communication, not enough for lots of pictures and video. That means you need a blockbuster for video.

• Altman and Amodei

They don't carry anything

That's not entirely true.

Both still exist:

https://trillian.im/

https://pidgin.im/

Treat it like a Ren Faire.

Wear the No Fear shirts and carry a Walkman, but do it for fun.

Sit back, watch some Reading Rainbow or Erie Indiana.

Maybe sing the Song that Never Ends.

It's all play acting, but it's nice. Especially if we focus on the nice parts of the 90s, the stuff that led to the wokeness of today.

Sure, and it's nice, but the network effect is a removed

I remember i downloaded ICQ for my counter strike clan. That was the first i had ever heard of it, but i guess it had hit international popularity already . When I realized you just got a number, i was baffled that i couldnt search by name. Didnt take me long to memorize that number and make many online friends

Is a co-op clone just a community library with extra steps?

Guck that, move it to summer 2001 so we can at least use ICQ and constantly warn everyone about 9/11

honestly right now ain't so bad. we got microbreweries and shit.

They carry rose tinted memories

Meshcore, and the underlying LoRa, are trash.

I would like to add one exception to this: explicitly for smoking establishments. It'd be nice to have a weed'n'feed is all.

Bend, Oregon

oh fun. that is an oversight.

Oh and today levels of healthcare… and today levels of assistive technology for people needing assistance, oh and…

i got better healthcare in the 90s dude. but i needed less back then, so i got whatever i asked for.

Anything with a processor inside of it and connected to a high speed internet connection will enshittify.

No. Anything running proprietary software will enshittify. Pretending the problem is some sort of inevitability that can't be solved with Free Software is just doomerism.

Blonkboster's is legally distinct from Blockbuster's and it smells the same, but i say you can still taste the hog anus when you get blasted by the air freshener

just the nightmare is alive in Gary. ain't had power in weeks from what i heard. and it's dog days. there's no way the delays in repairs ain't intentional.

they might be lucky enough to not be statesian, let's not be USonormative

Absolutely. Yeah, there have been attempts at enshittifying FOSS projects, they fork or are replaced. Control your own data, own your hardware, use open source, and enshittification can’t happen.

And Domino’s instead of Pizza Hut

IRC and newsgroups, too. Self hosted websites and forums.

I hate to be the regressive, but yeah…this was better.

people who say this never actually, like, quit social media or anything that would bring them closer to this

I hate to be the regressive, but yeah…this was better.

I am always a forward looking person but i agree with this. The '90s is probably the best time period for humanity. Other parts of the world had it bad of course, but the cold war was over and the economy was amazing. It was the second "Era of Good Feelings".

ICQ, IRC, and Livejournal.

Not Amish, LoTeK!

Reticulum and HaLow please. Give me enough bandwidth to stream a movie from my house.

Data over LoRa is like 200bps :)

we don't draw things in real time tho, we wait for them to finish

Let's do both, gotta have options. and a Taco Bell

I still know my ICQ number by heart, and a close friends too, who is lower than mine by about 50k. 140... and mine was 201...

Haven't used em in about 25 years.

But then I also still know my childhood phone number.

I loved ICQ! I'm sure some people thought it was a horrible idea to see people type in real time but to me it was peak messenging.