The relief when I open up Lemmy or Mastodon. It feels like coming home to an experience I didn’t realise I was missing. Lemmy has grown enough now that I can look at my feed throughout the day and there will be interesting posts, all with engaging comments and conversations. It’s like the internet I grew up on, only better: it’s ran by the people, for the people.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean the fedi isn’t plagued with issues. But it feels fundamentally more culturally healthy than whatever the fuck is going on in big corpo social media.
Before internet access was common, and for a while after it did become common but still dialup, you could connect and log-in to a Bulletin Board System that people usually hosted out of their home. It would have a theme, usually, and host a mix of discussions, curated and moderated by the owner, plus file sharing, often piracy or a library of resource material.
It wasn’t unusual to belong to a few of them, and because you were dialing in via phone lines, they were usually in your city due to long distance charges, which meant you could meet up in meatspace.
There was an overlap period where they became internet connected, and a kind of federation developed, and similar internet-only services developed like Hotline that were quite popular for a while (small comeback under way for hotline servers btw).