Text 751, 124 rader
Skriven 2007-03-24 08:58:32 av Mithgol the Webmaster (2:5063/88)
    Kommentar till text 745 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
Ärende: The hypertext Fidonet
=============================
And about 10:38 23 Mar 07 it was written from Michiel van der Vlist to Mithgol
the Webmaster:

 MtW>> I expect dozens of thousands of users fleeing to the hypertext
 MtW>> Fidonet because of its advantages,

 MvdV> I do not expect that to happen, but be careful what you wish for. Do you
 MvdV> really want FidoNet to be flooded with tens of thousands of top qouting
 MvdV> anarchists writing under an alias and who are impossible to moderate?

No :-)

However, I don't see how just their numbers could make them impossible to
moderate.

For example, 328th nodelist (1995-11-24) had 39827 entries, according to the
letter in ENet.SysOp by Alex Woick, 2:244/1500 (21 Mar 07 22:36) ÄÄ which is
seen at http://fghi.pp.ru/?area://ENet.SysOp/?msgid=2:244/1500+4601a65c

This means tens of thousands of sysops, and probably a hundred or two hundreds
of thousands of points. The Golden Age of Fidonet.

Was Fidonet impossibe to moderate in that good old times? I hope not.

But Fidonet was already at it's dawn.

Because in June 1994 T. Berners-Lee in CERN wrote his RFC 1630, 'Universal
Resource Identifiers in WWW', 'A Unifying Syntax for the Expression of Names
and Addresses of Objects on the Network as used in the World-Wide Web'.

An in December 1994, T. Berners-Lee (CERN), L. Masinter (Xerox Corporation),
and M. McCahill (University of Minnesota) wrote RFC 1738, and Uniform Resource
Locators (URL) were documented.

This is when the cyberspace became a hyperspace, where users are able to click
hypelinks to teleport. And an illustrated hyperspace ÄÄ after HTML has come to
life.

And this moment of the past is when the Fidonet was backstabbed. The network
once born by a pederast was killed by masochists, who enjoyed the disadvantages
of pre-hypertext, non-automated net. Who enjoyed taking pains and spoiling
precious seconds of their mortal lives on manually switching between echomail
areas, manually writing letters to areafixing robots, and manually looking for
messages, et cetera.

So Fidonet stayed non-hypertext, and now GoldNode+ Nodelist Compiler reports
only 7163 nodes ÄÄ 18% of much that once was. More than 80% of the nodes have
fled, because the masochists are always a minority. And the net is dying slowly
all that twelve years. In the world where the number of computers grow almost
exponentially, the number of Fidonet nodes is dwindling.

I am going to alter this tendency and to change the future.

 MvdV> It certainly is not what I would want and if it ever comes to that, it
 MvdV> may be a reason for me to part with FidoNet.

 MvdV> FidoNet is not the InterNet and I do not believe inviting the InterNet
 MvdV> into FidoNet will save it. Inviting bikers into a horse club will not
 MvdV> save the horse club either. You will still have a club, but it will no
 MvdV> longer be a horse club.

My proposal was based on the contrary assumption. I believe that Fidonet either
is not a horse club or, at least, may become not a horse club. Fidonet is not
about what we ride. A journey on a horseback and a journey on a bicycle or even
a motorcycle is still a journey. I suppose that Fidonet is a society of fans of
communication and social intercourse. If Fidonet is just a society of fans of
old software, I fail.

Imagine an illustrated colourful hyperspace delivered by existing Fidonet links
and tossers. Is it a sweet dream or your worst nightmare? Dive into the Web and
look at http://ftsc.org/docs/ ÄÄ do you see its pretty tables and coloured rows
as an advantage?

 MvdV> Frankly Mithgol, or Sergey, or whatever your name is, I am less than
 MvdV> enthousiastic about you not simply using your real name in the message
 MvdV> header. Fidonet has a strong tradition of using real names and I would
 MvdV> like to keep it that way.

Let me keep my peculiarity. If you need my real name as written in passport,
you may always find it in your copy of Fidonet nodelist, or in my signature.

What is probably more important is that my signature offers my best Fidonet 2.0
regards. As you may have already known, the Web 2.0 propaganda rises in the Web
nowadays. Its ideas include gradually lowering the need of manually looking for
information (the data would come via RSS and other means of subscription), and
the ability to ignore the advertisements (via Greasemonkey, Adblock and other
content modifying tools), to ignore (filter out) some authors, and abilities to
cross-post data between several content feeds and datamongers, and a united
profile for registration (via OpenID or net passports) to avoid filling lots of
registration forms before participating in online communications.

All of that ideas, which for the dwellers of the Web are still an elements of
not so distant future dreamed of, are long ago implemented in Fidonet and have
already become parts of out everyday life. For decades Fidonet users receive
their wanted echomail areas via subscription, for decades we see almost no
advertisement, are twitting the unwanted authors, are using cross-posting, and
we have a uniform profile and personal address for all of the conferences.

We, members of Fidonet, have even already lost the warm feeling of pleasure
given by our life conditions. We consider natural that we are free of the need
of daily visit to different sites and sorting the news incoming from that sites
(because mailers and tossers do that for us). We feel disgust by the very
thought of advertisement or a manual cross-posting. We could have gone mad if
the need of creating a new address arised each time we started to participate
in a new echo; a Fidonet user may be ready to take a new address (if he is a
point) or to establish a new link (if he's a sysop) for a rare and a wanted
area, but not for each area.

That's why, if we consider Fidonet a communication tool, a social intercourse
tool, then it's hard for us to deny its comfort and its advantages over the Web
(even the Web on its forthcoming Web 2.0 level) ÄÄ but, unfortunately, we can't
say that we know nothing to Fidonet's disadvantage. The major, the principal
disadvantage of Fidonet is absence of hypertext and hypermedia.

I want this disadvantage, the last and the only major disadvatage of Fidonet,
to vanish. It's killing the net since middle 1990s. It has no right to last.


With best Fidonet 2.0 regards,
Mithgol the Webmaster.                 [Real nodelisted name: Sergey Sokoloff]

... 69. All midwives will be banned from the realm.
--- Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.  (Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, IV)
 * Origin: I have a strange feeling, as if I already had a deja vu (2:5063/88)