Post

Mike Keller
@realitytourist.bsky.social

This so much reminds me of GEnie, Compuserve et al, around 1989. We were "online" on these services that delivered forums about interests like finance, gaming, real estate, and our jobs as sysops was to provide content that would keep people online paying $5 or $10 an hour to browse...

Mike Keller
@realitytourist.bsky.social

what the services had to offer. As far as customers were concerned, that WAS the internet. AOL didn't change that much, except it was free to access. But eventually people heard about the World Wide Web, and web browsers, and they wanted access to that stuff...

Mike Keller
@realitytourist.bsky.social

and eventually, those walled garden services died off as people were able to access websites with news, forums where they could ask questions about their cars or investing or whatever, and it usually didn't cost anything, and they got ISPs that charged a monthly fee for faster service...

Mike Keller
@realitytourist.bsky.social

and then about the time we got DSL and cable internet and smartphones so we didn't have to use our phone lines to connect, along comes Facebook who eventually sucked everyone back into that walled garden where you don't actually have to access the internet to be "online"...

Carol Fields
@fields3.bsky.social

Dude ? We saw that movie : He was a lonely looser that stole another students intellectual property . Then ? Lonely boy cheated. End of story. He’s an imposter. A Fool . But rich as fuck , because? He was a looser and cheated . Kinda like most of our government now . 🤦‍♀️

Tom Lastname
@ohyeahbaby2.bsky.social

Got it. You cannot possibly emphasize enough the degree to which Facebook is *the internet* in Myanmar. Large Myanmar companies’ online presence is frequently a Facebook page. Even multinationals maintained Facebook pages to represent their businesses in the country.