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Perpetual November

It was 1979 when Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis came up with the idea of a distributed network allowing users on different servers to post group messages to one another. Up to this point bulletin board systems were lone islands where you could communicate with just the group who dialed in. ISPs didn't really exist yet as there wasn't much to the internet. With Truscott and Ellis' contribution, servers were able to pass along group messages, and the islands were now connected. University students, hobbyists and those working in the technology were still the majority of those on the new Usenet service, but it soon became a rather popular.

Through the 80's and into the 90's more and more services popped up. During all this time the community on Usenet grew, created customs, coined terms and generally went on as communities do. While people would slowly trickle in, the only times there would be a large influx of new users was in the fall when freshmen college students started logging on for the first time. After a few months things would settle down. New users would get used to the slang, the etiquette and how it all worked. It wouldn't be until the next fall semester when a new batch would show up and make some noise.

In 1985 a company named Quantum Link launched a service that allowed users to dial in and access electronic mail, chat rooms, bulletin boards and file sharing. Four years later this company would rename itself to American Online. For the first few years the service was a walled garden. What existed inside AOL only existed inside AOL. If you're old enough you may have remembered companies had both a website and a "Keyword on AOL". But in 1993 that changed. That was the year when a couple million AOL users were given access to The Internet.

With this massive number of users moving outside the walled garden, many of the services previously filled with hobbiests and technologists were suddenly seeing more and more users. What used to be a regular yearly event was now a daily occurrence. With no acclamation period, the culture and etiquette of Usenet started to disappear. More and more message groups were popping up posting porn, illegal software, and spam. Conversations started loosing cohesion. For those who had been on Usenet since the beginning it felt like every day was the first week in September. The service still exists to this day. There are still people who post on it regularly and real discussions about software, technology, and hobbies are had there. But the community that existed prior to 1993 never really recovered.

I've noticed a lot of posts the past few weeks on Mastodon of new users expressing issues with "gatekeeping." In some cases there seems to be a rift growing between old and new users. With the huge numbers and short time for the exodus from Twitter, the culture is definitely going through quite a shock. While many of the new users seem to be excited about just how much the service is a "breath of fresh air" it will be interesting to see how much that changes over time. The differences between Twitter and Mastodon are not just the technology, centralized versus federated. Its also what and how people interact there and how they view the service.

I wonder if Mastodon will have its Eternal September like Usenet.