[freeflight]

Tho it hasn't always been like that. Mid-90's Internet feels like utopia compared to our modern social reality dominated Internet.

When you met somebody online back then, you were just happy to have found somebody else. They didn't have profiles and pictures allowing you to put people into boxes before even talking with them.

People actually had to talk to each other to find out more about whom they were talking to, it required actual back and forth interaction and not just browsing a half-invented profile page to use that as "ammunition" to put somebody else down for their listed views/positions.

[ams6110]

There were rudimentary profiles. If you "fingered⁕" someone, you could see the contents of their ~/.plan and ~/.project files, which formed something like a profile.

⁕ FINGER(1)

NAME

     finger – user information lookup program

[lscharen]

Back in the day John Carmack's .plan file was my social media feed.

https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/