20 years ago today.

[andybaio@xoxo.zone]

Ze Frank's The Show was self-hosted QuickTime videos on a blog with comments and an RSS feed. A community forum, wiki, and series of interactive web pages tied it all together. Social media was a bunch of blogs linking to each other. Facebook opened to everyone in September of that year, Google bought YouTube in November, Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone in January 2007. Twitter blew up at SXSW in March and iPhone came out in June, the beginning of the end for the dominant open social web.

[andybaio@xoxo.zone]

@davew my blog 20 years ago, I'd just gotten a C&D from Bill Cosby's lawyers https://web.archive.org/web/20060314164125/http://www.waxy.org/

[anemone@ebiverse.social]

@andybaio@xoxo.zone just setting up my X The Everything App

[nine@chitter.xyz]

@andybaio and it was all downhill from there

[pluralistic@mamot.fr]

@andybaio @davew I love that 20 years ago I was dutifully taking note of that fact and due to my daily practice of reviewing my posts from 5 year intervals over the past 25 years, I've been thinking about this for days.

[viss@mastodon.social]

@andybaio oh man

[ketakater@social.vivaldi.net]

@andybaio there's no way 2006 is 20 years ago!! No fkg way

[invadersil@mastodon.social]

@andybaio Ze Frank is my jam! I still watch him today with his nature videos.

[viss@mastodon.social]

@andybaio it all seemed so great at the time. we had no idea

[fiend_unpleasant@mastodon.social]

@andybaio who would've thunk in just 20 short years from this post the very same platform would become the worlds largest child porn creation and dissemination website. How time flies.

[ulrich_the_elder@thecanadian.social]

@andybaio I quit twitter 10 years ago this May. It was filling up with nazis and fascists. This was before I even heard of elon musk.

[sullust@techhub.social]

@andybaio yeah, I’m old enough to remember when AOL added this mysterious section called “the internet” with 4 areas of unknown use: gopher, ftp, news groups, and something called the World Wide Web.

The “open social web” was like a bunch of small towns. Wonderful if you were born in the right one but if not wandering the random human connections was hard and many gave up on the way. Early Twitter/Reddit made that discovery a lot easier.

So what we have now is rotten and terrible, but let’s not over romanticize our past silos.