Welcome to the Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. September is almost on us again, and with it the 30th anniversary of the Endless September, the date when the internet changed forever. Join me on this deep dive on the Implausipod.

So if I told you that a video game service developed for the Atari 2600, back 40 years ago in 1983, had implications for the future of social media in 2023, you'd be like, okay, that sounds a little implausible, but uh, "give it to me straight, doctor, I can take it!" and I'm like, "alright...". That company, Control Video Corporation would about a decade later as AOL allow its users unfettered access to the nascent internet, especially Usenet, and that has direct parallels to the mass migration of users that were seen in 2023 due to the social media meltdowns of the former Twitter and Reddit, and researchers that are investigating the user experience of that migration are uncovering some things that have parallels to that transition in 1993.  So the lessons learned back then are still relevant to us today. 

So this episode will cover all three, the history, the recent research, and how we can apply those lessons learned. So to begin with, let's take you back to a dark and scary time called the eighties. Ooh, frightening.

In 1982, the Atari 2600 was the absolute market leader in home video game entertainment. It was pretty much everywhere. They had sold about 10 million copies of the VCS in North America, and while there was competitors like ColecoVision, Atari still had like 60% of the market. Now those who know their video game history are aware that 1982 was not the best time to be getting into the market, but at the time things looked rosy. There was an upcoming game called ET that was due to come out for Christmas that year, and things were looking pretty good. Pacman had just sold like 7 million units, and while it didn't quite replicate the arcade experience (to put it mildly), you know, sales are sales, right?

And it was into this tech landscape that Control Video Corporation was born. What the company was working on was developing a system that would deliver games over telephone lines for the Atari 2600 video game console. The service called Game Line would allow the users to download the game and keep playing it as long as the console stayed on.

It was basically they sold a modem to the users and allowed them to use it. And it's a reminder that there was a lot of really interesting things happening with computers long before the era of the internet. I mean, you also had like the Mintel system in France that was contemporaneous with this, and I think Mintel will absolutely deserve its own episode in a little while.

But while CVC was getting the product up and running and actually delivering games to customers, they hit a bit of a road bump, and that road bump just happened to look like a landfill out in the New Mexico Desert where all the unsold ET cartridges were dumped. So as the video game console market came to a screeching halt in 83 and 84, CVC began to hemorrhage cash, and by 85 they had reformulated into Quantum Link Corporation, or Quantum Computer Services, and they began to leverage and market their online technologies, which were innovative by all means. And they provided these online services to other computing companies and manufacturers with names like Commodore and Apple and Microsoft, and this ability of theirs to diversify and to provide services to multiple vendors allow them to thrive in a turbulent market where larger competitors that were tied to a particular vendor would fail if that vendor failed.

Quantum Computer Services was able to tailor their product to the various manufacturers that they were dealing with. So you'd have QLink on the Commodore or Apple Link on the Apple machines. And the product that they're offering was basically what we now think of as an online portal. They were like a BBS front end.  It had graphics and chat and you could do a little bit of research or play some games, which could max out at an amazing 320 by 200 resolution. But often the games were in the text mode version, which is usually 24 across and 21 down, and it just used a lot of built-in sprites and pixels, and it looked a lot like playing DwarfFortress or a retro game like that.

And we can see versions of this portal with a still and everything from Yahoo to Google to Facebook to any of the social media sites. And that kind of gives us a hint of where we're going with this. But in the meantime, Quantum Computing Services was having some success with the product, and in 1989, they rebranded it as America Online as part of their approach to attract new users to using online computing, and they're pretty innovative in this approach as well. I mean, there was other competitors like Compuserve, but they focused the AOL experience on the new user, and that paid off because there was a lot more people not using the internet in 1989 than there was anywhere close to it. Computer use, especially online computer use, was very much a minority proposition at this point in time.

We might wanna say that everybody at this point was an early adopter of the internet. I mean, that's not precisely true based on Roger's diffusion curve, but it's close enough, especially when compared to the size of the market now. And one of the ways they approached getting these new users was probably their biggest innovation, which was the mass distribution of their software through the floppy disks.

And I wanna be clear, that was an innovation because marketing innovations totally count. And AOL wasn't technically superior to any of its competitors, especially the ones on like university campuses and government departments. And the funny thing is, it totally worked, it allowed for a ton of new users because at the time, I mean the floppy disks was still a useful, you could rewrite on them and they cost money at the store. So gather them up and you had something that you could go with. But for a new user that's unfamiliar with the internet, it was software. All you need is a modem, and here you are, you're connected and going on the internet as quickly as possible. And when I say “internet”, I wanna be perfectly clear because I'm not sure the air quotes that I'm currently miming are coming through clear over the podcast, but you know what I mean. 'cause it was a walled garden. Using America online in 1990 was a lot like logging on in 2023 and thinking Facebook is the entirety of the internet. I mean, for some users it may as well be, but you know, there's a bigger world out there. But that being said, Quantum Computer Services was incredibly successful with their America online product and rebranded the company after the product.

In 1991, it became AOL, and at the time AOL was super successful with their floppy disc campaign. They were maintaining growth of anywhere between 36 to as high as like 197% year over year. That's amazing. For a lot of people, America Online was the internet, but one of those other parts that was outside of its walled garden was Usenet.

Usenet was a distributed discussion forum, think Reddit, but not really owned by anybody and people just ran their servers for it. It used the NNTP protocol, the network can use transfer protocol, and it was really similar to like email, which was using the SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. So similar but with like a few extra features that allowed for grouping and threading and, uh, distribution of the messages. Servers running the software would store and forward the messages to other servers in the network so that everybody had a copy that was pretty much local. Now there was rules for it, so not everybody carried everything, but by and large, you could get news or information from around the world depending on what, what the users were posting.  So it was all user generated content in a way similar to TikTok and Twitter and everything else nowadays. It was almost the original social media network, but there was a lot of academic stuff on there as well, because a lot of the servers were on universities. There weren't that many ISPs out in the world at the time.

One of the big things within NNTP over email was it allowed for threaded communication, so if you're ever wondering where Facebook got the idea for their current app, well there's a hint. Over time, the group self-organized based on topic and interest and a culture of the internet kind of grew up around it.

There was a hierarchy to it where you had higher level domains that were structured around broad interest groups like comp or sci, or news or rec, and then lower-level domains that were more specific to a given topic like science fiction or wrestling or Linux or whatever. Some of these news groups were moderated, but most weren't, and because of the way they were structured, they were very much those recursive Publix that we talked about in the last episode. NNTP was originally proposed in 1979 and became the dominant form throughout the eighties. It was basically what the internet was, along with bulletin-board systems and a few other servers.

And because of this, it developed a culture all of its own. A lot of the things that are still central to how we deal with things online, like flaming and spam, and FAQs all came from Usenet. The fact that some of those enduring elements are kind of negative maybe speaks a little bit to what the culture was like. Even though it was all text-based, it could be on occasion incredibly toxic. The lineage to 4chan is probably closer than a lot of your more highbrow forums. And when I say all text-based for the purpose of this discussion, I'm not getting into the binaries news groups at all. We're just really focusing on the conversation now because these servers were mostly academic and a culture had developed around them.

Every year something wonderful happened, and that is in September, there was a bunch of new admissions to university who got access to the internet or to Usenet for the very first time, came online and started talking like they owned the place. And all of a sudden, the Flame Wars started developing again, as people got told. In a text-based forum, your options for communication are somewhat limited, so the communication could be somewhat terse, and your options for going to another server or rolling your own are well, “Hypothetically” there: you could engage with the protocol, set up a server; but at the time, and especially given the cost of these things, it was highly unlikely and there's few limited commercial options.  

You had your CompuServe, or Prodigy or Delphi, but really there wasn't a lot of options that you could use to get onto Usenet unless you had access through your institution, so people either learned and became accustomed to it, and over the month or two, you know, by November you became good net citizens or they left.  And when they left, they left. For other systems that had different cultures, either a BBS or like the private walled gardens, like the ones run by AOL. And that was fine. People could find a place where they fit in a cyberspace, where the culture worked for them and, you know, go about their business of being online.

This changed in 1993. As we said earlier, AOL was experiencing massive growth, and in September of 1993, they opened up the floodgates by allowing full access to Usenet for all their customers. So the influx of newbies far exceeded the capacity for the community to bring new people in and acculturate them to the process of the way things were done.  And so things kind of changed. Forever. 

This was the Eternal September, and for the rest of the nineties UseNet that was radically different than what it was before. 

So if that's where we were in 1993, what does that have to do with now? What does a 30 year old change in the internet have anything to say about social media in the 21st century? Well, let's run through it at a high level: 

We have a distributed system of servers, running communication groups that are mostly text-based with an incumbent population, and they're dealing with an influx of new users coming from various online communities that have different cultures, and they're struggling to deal with the changes.

Well, let me ask you, does that description cover Usenet in 1993, or Mastodon and the larger Fediverse in 2023 following the implosion of Twitter and Reddit? Right. Maybe they're a lot more similar than we think. So the lessons learned from the 1993 Endless September may have some implications for how the Fediverse can deal with incoming new users in 2023 and beyond because the Fediverse, and Mastodon in particular, are not without their problems.

It's a relatively young protocol with ActivityPub being developed in 2018, and for the most part of that, it's had relatively small user count, similar in a lot of ways to Usenet back in the nineties. And for the most part, the implementations that are built on top of the ActivityPub Protocol are trying to replicate various other social media sites or networks in a more open or friendly or accessible way to break out of the walled gardens of Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, in a similar way that AOL was a walled garden back in 1991. While some of these implementations are focused on videos or images like PeerTube or PixelFed, I'm gonna focus on the text-based ones like Lemmy, kbin, and most notably Mastodon.

Mastodon is one of the Twitter-style micro blogging implementations of the ActivityPub protocol in the FediVerse, and it's the most prominent one. In 2022, following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, it saw a significant spike in its user base. The number of people that were looking for ABE, or Anything But Elon, found Mastodon (including yours truly, even though I wasn't a significant Twitter user for the prior 15 years).

In 2022, not being on Twitter seemed prudent, but for people looking for ABE, Mastodon isn't the only option. There are other alternatives like BlueSky, which is a new Microblogging service currently in beta, headed up by Jack Dorsey, the former honcho of Twitter, and there are some users that have moved to BlueSky as an alternative to Twitter who found that Mastodon wasn't the thing for them, that BlueSky presented a more “Twitter-like” experience.

And for an example of some of the reasons why users might have opted for BlueSky instead of Mastodon, writer Erin Kissane did a survey of some of those “ex-Mastodon, now BlueSky” users and posted them to their blog. The piece is titled “Mastodon is easy and fun, except when it isn't”, and it's a really excellent piece that they posted up on July 28th, 2023, and in the Post, Erin includes some of the excerpts, the thick description that we'd expect to see in some qualitative research. And as I know from my own research in grad school that description is really where the meat of the responses can lie, and it allows you to uncover those insights as to what's actually going on.

Erin groups the responses in four main categories, as well as a fifth meta category. I'll give you the rough taxonomy right now, they are in order: 

One: Got yelled at, felt bad. 

Two: Couldn't find people or interests people didn't stay. 

Three: too confusing. Too much work. Too intimidating. 

Four: Too serious. Too boring, anti fun. 

And then the meta category is the complicated high stakes decisions that go into the choices that have to be made when you're engaged with the Fediverse. 

So let's look at those in order with an eye to everything that we've previously discussed about AOL and Usenet, as well as the idea of publics and communities online in the previous episode, and we're gonna break those four into two groups because I think there's a little bit of natural overlap between groups one and three and two and four. 

So for groups one and three, the got yelled at felt bad and the too confusing, too much work, too intimidating group, w absolutely see echoes of Eternal September, the onboarding of new users to usenet and the acculturation process that took place. Now, what Erin captures here is a moment in time, and I want to stress that by way of example: between starting recording this podcast and wrapping it up, which sometimes takes me a day or two, there was a significant change to the Mastodon software with search being added (note: in beta), and that's been one of the things that's been discussed for quite some time as a missing feature, but that can also cause problems, s there's been a lot of debate. Anyways, the point being is that conditions may change, and what we're talking about at any given point in time may have changed by the time you're listening to this, whether it's weeks or months later. 

Now, a lot of the scolding that was coming from the incumbent Mastodon users was on content warnings and etiquette, things that have been a bone of contention on various servers and software platforms for forever, for at least the 30 years, since the Endless September, and honestly since the dawn of the internet.  Some of these may be endemic and some of them may be just people overreaching their authority on what other people can do on a given platform, as it may come down to the mods or administrators and what their particular preferences are, but the federated nature of the servers on just one implementation of the ActivityPub on, you know, Fediverse - Mastodon -  means you're gonna have a lot of different versions of what is acceptable and they may not scale across the entire thing, but finding that out, finding where your particular group is, is speaks to the second half of this, the intimidating and potentially confusing nature of it. But again, this is something that the devs and admins are aware of and making changes to, and in the nine months that I've been observing Mastodon, there's been remarkable improvements in that onboarding process, even though I don't think it's still a hundred percent where it needs to be.

Now, as for the second group of responses, the ones that I've grouped together, which are Erin's responses two and four, the “Couldn't find people or interests” and the “too serious, too boring, anti fun” groups. I think I've covered a number of these in my Locally Boring post on the blog, but I'll go into the details here.  

I recognized a fair amount of my own experiences in the responses that Erin captured in their survey, and what the survey captures is that notion of what I call locally boring, that absent an algorithm or the ability to import a social graph and have a preexisting group of connections, there might not be a lot of content there.  It functions very different, and “it’ being here, Mastodon, and the way it displays the information that's available. Unless you're following a specific hashtag or a specific group, you may only be seeing local information and depending on what's available on your server, that might be not necessarily something you're interested in.  Now, you're not tied to the feed from your server, but that might not be initially obvious. It's a lot like, you know, starting a new online role-playing game and all your friends decide to stay on World of Warcraft, you're gonna be doing a lot of questing alone, and depending on a combination of your personality and the software, it may be a lot more or less fun.

And if it's less fun, you're less likely to stick around. And if you don't stick around, you're unlikely to build a community or find one. So depending on your tolerance for these things, your ability to endure through the fallow period, or the “Desert of Boredom”, or whatever you wanna call it, it may be tough to get to the other side and actually reach the Promised Land, but there are some solutions that you can use to mitigate these.  

Now Erin gets into a number of these in that amazing blog post, but I wanted to get into it, especially in context of what we were discussing at the start of the episode: AOL and Usenet. You see, I wanted to provide that context because I think it's really important to realize that a lot of these issues are not new and that these problems have existed and that solutions have been tried over time.

What we're seeing with the Fediverse is a period of decentralization in response to the centralization that occurred with the walled gardens of the various social media platforms or what Deleuze would call deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and that this happens cyclically over time, and it's just the newness of the internet, (even though 30 years can feel like several lifetimes on the internet), but the relative newness of what we call new media on all of its platforms means we've only seen a few waves of this. Honestly, given the rapid developments of media as a whole during the 20th and 21st centuries, we often only see it once on any given platform like radio and film and television and the internet, so seeing it twice is kind of interesting, but I digress. 

Any of the solutions that have been introduced over time have come with their own host of associated problems, and this is common with any study of technology we see this time and time again, regardless of the sphere. If the problem is discoverability or lack of content in showing up in people's feeds, then you can use an algorithm to drive that content, but that could be gamed with potentially tragic results.

Similarly, if there's low engagement, then you can add tools that increase shareability or spreadability, but that can lead to the development of parasocial relationships and potentially stalking and harassment. So there's always a trade-off, and this is what Erin Kissane notes in their commentary about the meta-topical issues that we see in these spaces, that the divide between health and safety, and personalization and control, can lead to compromises being made that end up satisfying no one. So choices need to be made and in the Fediverse, that often happens at the server or instance level rather than at the aggregate level. Though that can happen as well when changes are made to the software or the apps or the overall user experience.

But it's an ongoing and recursive process as we discussed last time. So for those making the decisions at those higher levels, maybe - just maybe - something can be learned from America Online of all places, about how they improved on the Usenet process. Back in the day, one of the things that AOL did was basically a process of “McDonaldization for the internet”, to borrow George Ritzer's term, and what that process is, is a process of rationalization, to borrow a very Weberian approach, and it happens along four main dimensions, which are efficiency, countability, predictability, and control. 

What AOL did was really cultivate the experience for that new user, catering to them and developing something that a complete beginner would be able to get working with minimal effort and make it easy enough that they could share it with their friends, becoming Spreadable Media in an era before Spreadable Media. The service had large, easily identifiable buttons and a very predictable interface from the standpoint of the customer. There was very few major version changes and even the minor version changes didn't really have an appreciable difference in appearance.  

The most unpredictable thing was the connectivity issues that plagued dial up in the nineties, and part of that was just due to the rapid growth that they had and having to bring onboard new servers. But even then, a lot of the service was calculable and knowable. They (the user) could know how much they were gonna be billed for based on time, and engage with it, uh, to the extent that they needed to. AOL minimized the number of options available that were presented to the customer, but still made them available under the hood if needed. And a lot of this beginning experience could be totally ported over to the Fediverse. And here I'm gonna stray away from the site its sources a little bit and talk about more of the overall view of the Fedi verse.

A lot of the existing implementations of the ActivityPub protocol are replicating already existing apps, programs or platforms, there's a point of confusion, not just on picking the right server on Mastodon, but whether they should be on Mastodon at all as opposed to kbin or Lemmy, or PixelFed or PeerTube or whatever.  From the outside viewer's perspective, a lot of the different implementations appear to be a distinction without a difference. And if they can all talk to each other, what does it matter that you're choosing one rather than the other? So it's a stressor, it's a point of confusion. 

And the other thing that I'd like to point out is an observation. We've talked before about how the social web and online platforms in general treat the audience as a commodity and present ads to them. And for the Fediverse that lack of the commodification of self may be the very thing that the audience is missing. It lacks the warm all-encompassing goo of what Michael de Zengotita calls the “blob of post-modernity” or late capitalism.  

Now, I'm in no way arguing for the introduction of advertising on the Fediverse. It is perhaps not a thing to be wistful or nostalgic for. But the Dumpshock that can be felt can be very hard to take, especially for those who have grown up swimming in the flood of capitalist realism. Now, this isn't a call to action, there's no need to introduce that. It's just an observation that the people experiencing that might be feeling something very different when they enter the Fediverse for the first time.

So as September draws near, this has been one of our longest episodes yet. If you've made it this far, thank you for hanging around. Hope you've enjoyed it and maybe learned a little something. I'd like to give a shout out to some of the sources that I've used, including Kara Swisher's work on AOL from the nineties, Erin Kissane's blog, as well as a number of other academic texts that I've referenced in the bibliography.

As always, I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. The show is licensed under a Creative Commons, share-alike 4.0 license. Music is by me, production is by me, research is by me. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausi dot blog or on whatever Mastodon instance I happen to be on this week. If there's anything you found interesting or would like me to expand on, please let me know.

But in the meantime, have fun.