@SecondJon Excellent post, I just visited your profile and liked very much the points you made.

We differ in political views, but agree that it's no reason for conflict and name calling. The division and polarization we observe spreading around in many countries will only make things more difficult.

I am also a BBS user, started up with local scene and Fidonet back in the early 90's.

Internet access was only for academic or large corporate sites. Most people had no idea it existed, never mind what it could be used for.

Glad you found Qoto, I think it's an excellent place too.

@SecondJon Don't know if you have seen my post about this, but it's an excellent article and you might enjoy reading.

https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426

@design_RG
Fantastic article that highlights a lot of reasons we need to save....or bring back that web. But how do we go about doing that?

I suppose for me, it's about personally avoiding the corporate web. I talk to friends about mastodon like I used to about my BBS. I get the same strange looks but occasionally someone is interested or knows someone who is connected.

I haven't publicly blogged in ages. Even my family blog, behind authentication, that I post to with family updates doesn't get any views from family because it's not posted within Facebook.

@SecondJon Ah, I am glad you enjoyed the article too. I thought it was wonderful.

True that people are getting used to the no-effort, feed me, TV style stream of data scrolling on their screen.

Years ago I decided that a Forum was something that would benefit our local cycling club, which only communicated one-way, via a mailing list to the membership. Which also did not accept or publish letters to the editor, as I suggested, they were comfortable in controlling the channel and the message unopposed.

I found a free Forum hosting service, creted one and did not only the admin and moderation for it, but created a lot of content to attract the users.

Many of them had not used Forums before, not a problem if people are willing to put the effort to learn.

But they were already more or less into Facebook, and had trouble understanding things in the forum - organized into threads, by topic, placed in proper sub-forums, etc.

Result is it didn't catch on, and I gave up filling it up with new content and not getting replies, comments or participation.

I have thought of creating a blog for some time, love writing and it's a nice way to organize information that I am interested in. But the lack of comment or any user interaction in many blogs is disheartening. I feel sorry seeing that, how discouraging it must be for the author and publisher.

The fact these new instances and networks are available is wonderful, there are many new possibilities.

I am really excited and putting in long hours reading, posting, learning, sleep be damned. 😜

@Robin hey there. Looks lie we have a lot of overlap. I may set up an account over at theres.life, but I don't know that I want to have multiple accounts to keep up with.

If you're looking, you could see if there's an ACNA Anglican church near you. Reformed, historical, Bible teaching. It's been refreshing for us.

So...you know from experience how much wood a wood chuck could chuck, eh?

@SecondJon ACNA. I'll look into it. Thanks! There's a tiny little dying Presbyterian (PCA) church about 40 minutes away, but the pastor is treating it like a mission church even though it was particularized (meaning it can stand on it's own) 4 years ago. There's a Reformed Baptist church about 70 miles away, and one apostate Presbyterian (PCUSA) church in town.