Today, I shared one of my Mastodon posts with friends, one of whom commented, “Weirdos posting stuff to social media 😂” So I took a few minutes to explain to them why I like Mastodon.
I do like Mastodon. I get more and higher quality engagement with what I share on Mastodon than anyplace else these days. But, more than that, I really just like it. It’s peaceful and relaxing. And a few months ago, I realized why: It reminds me of Usenet.
Usenet was a kind of terminal-based messaging system that scientists and technologists used in the earliest days of the Internet and the before times (i.e. when it was still “NSFNet“). It was an amazingly interesting and useful community of people having high-level discussions of topics both academic and non-academic.
My brother, who was an Unix systems-engineer at the time, had told me about Usenet. Honestly, the main reason I decided to go back to graduate school, was so I could gain access to it. Even at my university, it wasn’t easy. The campus IT group didn’t make it available to the general university community, so I had to request a guest account from the computer science department. As a doctoral student, my request was honored and I used that as my primary computer account, and email address, the whole time I was a graduate student. That was also why I started learning Unix, which became a key factor in landing the job that became my career.
As a student, I used Usenet professionally to further my academic career and research. I had high-level conversations about science education and life science. I used it to recruit subjects for my doctoral research, developing a model of expert performance in phylogenetic tree construction. But that wasn’t all I used it for. I also lived in soc.culture.esperanto, the newsgroup for Esperanto speakers, where I could have conversations with samideanoj from all over the world. This was a genuine novelty at the time, where you otherwise might have to sign up with a penpal service to exchange paper letters with people to have similar contacts. (I did this, in fact, and had interesting correspondence, but it often took many weeks to get responses whereas Usenet allowed you to have conversations in just days — or sometimes even just hours!)
Usenet began to die when AOL came online and there was a constant influx of new non-academic people. People called it “eternal September“. The Usenet community worked for busy academics and professionals because most people respected the conventions. You could use it for high-level discussions because it was high signal and low noise. Once those conventions broke down, the really interesting people mostly abandoned it because it wasn’t worth trying to wade through all of the irrelevant crap that novices tended to post. It was very sad.
Thirty years later, I was surprised to join Mastodon and discover that it reminded me so much of Usenet. It has the same high-quality engagement by interesting, thoughtful people. And it has social conventions that make the environment functional and useful. But then I realized that Mastodon didn’t just remind me of Usenet: It’s literally the same people. There’s Gene Spafford. And Steve Bellovin. And many, many others.
A whole bunch of the old, interesting people I remember from Usenet are here! We are pretty old, too. Most of us are retirement age, if not retired. But it’s been wonderful to reconnect with so many of these folks after so many years.
It’s not just that it has many of the same people, though. It’s the thoughtful design of the software environment. And the social conventions that favor high-quality engagement and reduce both the “copypasta” and the viral “oh, snap!” types of engagement that have come to characterize most social media. It’s always a pleasure to immerse myself in a thoughtful community of people engaged in creative pursuits, whether it’s taking pictures of mosses and lichens or sharing story fragments or responding to prompts about writing pursuits.
It’s not for everyone. But I like it a lot.
