• Salvo@aussie.zone
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    9 hours ago

    Slashdot and Segfault.

    At the time, all my online friends used it to discuss techie things.

    First social network with real people in my local area? Whirlpool.net.au

    It started as a site for peer support for one ISP but became a forum for local and regional technological issues.

    There were also other niche forums for niche interests, including a Nissan Pulsar forum; we would organise cruises IRL and share technical information.

    Most of these communities have been subsumed by Meta, which I believe is a terrible thing. Their platforms are not as conducive for that sort of socialising, without significant amounts of friction.

      • Salvo@aussie.zone
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        9 hours ago

        I will admit that segfault was not a great community. It was a humour site, a parody of Slashdot similar to The Onion.

        One of the features of Segfault was a poll. Due to how it was coded, it was trivial to add custom answers to any poll. Due to the nature of the Internet (with a capital I) at the time, quite a few ‘netizens’ were very deviant. Any time a new poll was created, one of the options would be “Natalie Portman Topless”.

        I am pretty sure all the people responsible for this have either grown up and learnt the errors of their ways of gone to 4chan.