Post #3970679

@b0rk@social.jvns.ca Yeah, it wasn't. But also for a hot minute, everyone who had internet access was also like 2 hops from those people at most. They were not hard to find. A couple years later internet access was more pervasive, and things started changing. We see a bit of that ethos poking out here on Mastodon, the community-minded but kinda hard-headed admin of smaller instances brings a lot of the same mindset. And in things like IPFS, too, trying to keep the good aspects without the bad, to mixed effect. I think one of the under-appreciated aspects is that it was FAR FAR cheaper to serve users who vaguely trusted each other and had a person who'd arbitrate abuse, vs the controls you needed to actually have people's accounts be separate and unable to touch each other. Some of that is for stupid technical reasons: FTP servers didn't have controls to confine someone to a root. Shell access was shared, unix permissions not containers as the security primitive. Giving real shell and FTP access was a risk! People broke into parts of systems they shouldn't all the time. Commercial hosts often did complicated chroot things to protect their systems, but that mostly made things slow and janky. So you got much better service if you made friends with someone than if you paid for it. That changed over time, as web servers and FTP servers grew features for mutually-untrusting users. But for a good few years, it was SUCH a better option. (the shared host as slow and janky continues to this day in the form of cpanel servers, which are a direct descendant of this. And the cheap ones oversubscribe their services heavily. The core disk and bandwidth are cheap enough, but the security design is still awful heavy-weight and causes issues. And it's held together by a zillion awful perl scripts. Just like the old days.)