| I've been a user of SDF for many years, and even though it may be irrelevant form a technical standpoint, even with all its faults I am thankful for its continued existence. At least in the case of SDF, it can be a "social" community just as much as a platform for various hosted services. It features a custom BBS of sorts called 'bboard' - which lets users post messages about any and all conceivable topics - from Unix to ham radio to philosophy and old telephones. It also has its own chatroom called 'com' in addition to various channels on its own irc.sdf.org server. There is an active ham radio "club" within SDF, and there are regular "partyline" voice chats (conference calls) offered through its VoIP service. It also hosts a huge gopher/phlog community - where users not only post interesting and unique content, but often make a point of writing posts in response to other users' posts. As someone who first got online in the mid-1990s via AOL on a Macintosh, I largely missed out on the early days of the Internet, before it came to be dominated by the WWW. I truly appreciate SDF because it is a nice space for folks to get a small taste of what life used to be like on the net, before it became dominated by commercial interests, relentless invasion of privacy, and proprietary services. I'd encourage all to create an account and take a look around. The one-time $36 donation to get lifetime ARPA membership status is well worth it, in my opinion. |