Post by @mattsheffield@mastodon.social

2026-10-23 02:15 UTC

@lispi314@udongein.xyz @Farbs@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social I think this is broadly accurate. The internet in its early days required people to be smart and to go out of their way to use it, unless they were in computer-industry jobs. From about 1980 until the late nineties, most of the new posters to Usenet groups were new college students, so September was regarded as a terrible month because of the influx. Someone coined the phrase "Eternal September" to describe the masses entering the web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Replies (2)

@lispi314@udongein.xyz 2026-10-23 02:35

@mattsheffield@mastodon.social @Farbs@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social I have mixed feelings about a lot of it. Much of the issues are not the wider availability or accessibility (which are good things), but rather reflections of much larger problems with the society around it. Academia & industry at the time was very much not without its faults, either (we got to this surveillance capitalism nightmare through collaboration with oppressors, for instance).

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@MissConstrue@mefi.social 2026-10-23 05:42

@mattsheffield@mastodon.social @lispi314@udongein.xyz @Farbs@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social I was teaching seminars at comic conventions on "how to internet" from late 80s until about mid 90s. By then, graphic browsers made it pretty accessible and hosting platforms were already spinning up, so nobody really wanted to learn the nuts and bolts behind the pretty pictures.

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