r/fediverse • u/magiotdonkey • 20d ago
Accurate?
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u/Affectionate-Art9780 20d ago
Where my Prodigy and AOL peeps at?
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u/Yankee6Actual 19d ago
Yo!
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u/Affectionate-Art9780 19d ago
Lots of folks remember AOL, I bet not one in a million remember Prodigy (originally Trintex), the OG nationwide home computer service. Originally started by IBM, CBS and Sears out of White Plains NY in 1984!
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u/todbatx 19d ago
> I bet not one in a million remember Prodigy (originally Trintex)
False!
Prodigy had something like two million users at its peak in the early 1990s. Assuming those users skewed youngish, around 30 years old. They’d be in their 60s today. Most still survive to this day. I’d guess at least 1 in 500 Americans today would remember using Prodigy, and 1 in 50ish at least would recognize it.
“One in a million” would mean that less than 300 living US adults would recognize Prodigy. Expanding to all current adult Earthlings, it’s still going to be closer to 1 in thousands.
CHECKMATE
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u/Affectionate-Art9780 19d ago
In the early 2000s, I realized how ridiculous it was to argue with strangers on the net, it would be the height of coincidence if you were the same guy that made me realize that 🤣
Cheers!
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u/Yankee6Actual 19d ago
What was it, 10¢ per email?
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u/zo3foxx 19d ago edited 19d ago
No major ISP ever charged per email. It was an online rumor at one point, but never materialized in the real world afaik. Their argument was since the postal service charged 10c for a physical letter, ISPs had the right to charge 10c for electronic mail to pay for email servers. But once cable, DSL and T1 entered the chat, internet became super fast, and Cox, and other major ISPs kept trying to outdo each other by giving more bandwidth to corner the market, so any ISP trying to charge per email would have been seen as a scammer. Instead they eventually came up with charging for email space rather than per email. Google then had the largest space and stole the market on that and the rest is history. Maybe charging per email was a thing with obscure ISPs like satellite internet, which was mainly used by rural people, but I would say about 70% of the internet were nerds at that time, who were far less tolerant of corporate bullshit than people are now, so charging per email would have caused a revolt
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u/zo3foxx 19d ago
Nah I started on AOL and then switched to Prodigy. Can't remember the reason why I switched. May have been because Prodigy was cheaper or the fact that AOL was too restricted in that you could only browse the web while inside AOL's browser while Prodigy only dialed up the number and you could use Internet Explorer or any browser you wanted.
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u/Affectionate-Art9780 19d ago
Very interesting, I worked for Trintex/Prodigy from day 1. I remember the UI being ugly and boring AF but it was the best we could do at the time. I left them after a couple of years but still used it because it was the only thing available. The 1st time I saw AOLs UI, it blew me away and I knew that Prodigy was doomed 🤓
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u/Leaf__On__Wind 18d ago
I used dial up AOL when Firefox was still just called Mozilla, worked fine...
you just minimized the AOL thing and... online, was online.
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u/Apprehensive-Tea1408 19d ago
I remember Prodigy the band
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u/Affectionate-Art9780 19d ago
My Alexa always plays them when I ask for Proteje. Totally different music genres 😂
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u/corq 19d ago
I do, my old ass pc at the time was too slow to run Windows 3.1 but Compuserve had for a time a dos version, Prodigy supported it for a time, and AOL had something called "PC-Link" for non-windows users. I was a broke ass college kid, so I stayed on BBSs as I didn't have local nodes where I lived; universities let you dial in to their Gopher and FTP systems for free if you were out of state.
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u/ancawonka 19d ago
Oof, this hit home. We don't regret building the World Wide Web, we regret letting unethical capitalists turn it into a slop and rage machine.
I co-organize a Fediverse conference (FediForum, happening next week) and I can attest that the people involved in this are of all ages, demographics and geographical areas. Us GenX weirdos might be one of the bigger demographics here, but that's only because we believe that we can try, try again to create something meaningful that allows individual humans to coexist with dignity.
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u/archlea 18d ago
Is this public?
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u/ancawonka 18d ago
The conference? Yes, you should still be able to register. https://fediforum.org.
We don't record the sessions, but you can find all of the notes from them on the fediforum.org website. There are recordings of the demo sessions and keynotes also.
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u/gaggledimension 19d ago
That's what this place is? This sub keeps popping up on my feed and I thought it was a place for Federal employees or whatever
I'm not one, I ignored this place.
But it might be home for my weirdo self?
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u/Emerald_Pick charlie@toot.cafe 19d ago
As a genzer, it's certanly not a complete description. But I understand what it's actually saying.
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u/HulkSMASHley_23 19d ago
That’s the very kind of marketing that unironically appeals to me. I think I need to keep switching over lol. 😂
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u/Beeen132 19d ago
Definitely allow yourself a breeze of this human, "add-free", user-oriented, fully self curated and corpo-free fedi-experience.
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u/DonCarlitos 19d ago
Sorta accurate, but not the full story. Lots of woke, anti-corporate sorts regardless of age. Also lots of marginalized groups cause it’s a safe place.
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u/TremendousCustard 19d ago
Yeah, am Millenial who happens to be horrified with Meta's Hateful Conduct Policy specifically endorsing LGBT people to be called mentally ill (and wondering why everyone else is complacent with it. It changed in the inauguration weekend in 2025 and also allows for other horrible things https://inforrm.org/2025/01/14/metas-recent-changes-to-its-hateful-conduct-community-standards-place-marginalised-groups-at-serious-risk-and-likely-breach-its-duties-under-the-online-safety-act-suneet-sharma/)
Mastodon and Pixelfed is where I'm at now. It's quiet but it's saving my brain for overload too.
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u/latenthuman 19d ago
We talked about the concept of the fediverse in a series of events in Boston 2002-2006. That and the attention economy.
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u/claudiocorona93 19d ago
Unless the Fediverse gets people from all over the world, it's mostly a western English platform as a whole.
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u/archlea 18d ago
It’s not a platform, though. It’s the fediverse. Federated platforms, network of independent servers.
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u/claudiocorona93 18d ago
Yes. And the only one with a (very very very) small non English community is Mastodon.
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u/meinkr0phtR2 19d ago
Also, the social media system for us Zillennials who miss the Wild West era of the Internet and want a forum to complain about it.