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In the '90's, there were -- or something closer to this. E.g. IIRC, "prairienet", in Illinois -- run, again IIRC, by U of I or some affiliated organization. Perhaps there was State involvement. It wasn't a "social network", by today's standards, but you could get a free account. The "Internet" received a big boost with an government/academic initiative for high speed links between universities and perhaps some other, government locations. Initially, this was to be segregated out for use by academics and their designated projects and the like. But after a year or two, it was opened up to the general public. There's a phrase, "Privatizing the profits and socializing the costs." This connectivity had a lot of value to users. And private companies succeeded in inserting themselves and extracting it. Building upon the public investment that started the whole thing. This is part of why you don't see public social networks. Similar to how ATT, Comcast, et al. fight tooth and nail to limit and shut down any public ISP initiatives. And they have the bigger pocketbooks, as well as legislators in pocket. Why are there no public social networks? There are certainly other arguments, other pieces to that puzzle. But one primary one is, because there is money to be made. P.S. https://localwiki.org/cu/Prairienet |