Microblog Memes

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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

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If you are having a rough day (feddit.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/microblogmemes

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BlueSky.

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[–] AnUnusualRelic 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Gopher wasn't open source? There were linux clients.

[–] General_Effort 36 points 2 months ago (2 children)

In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server.[11][9] Users became concerned that fees might also be charged for independent implementations.[12][13] Gopher expansion stagnated, to the advantage of the World Wide Web, to which CERN disclaimed ownership.[14] In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU General Public License.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Decline

It's probably not quite right to call it an open source alternative, though. I don't think that gopher or anything was established in a monopolistic way, but that was before my time. Besides, the internet was all universities back then.

[–] AnUnusualRelic 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's true that Gopher never really went anywhere. It was convenient for what it was and it had Veronica (a basic search engine) which made it useful. But hyperlinks were a killer feature.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

But hyperlinks were a killer feature.

Berners-Lee didn't come up with that idea, though, did he? I thought he got the idea from Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Gopher itself is spec'd out in RFC-1436. It's not a particularly difficult protocol to implement. It's easier than HTTP/1.1 (though not necessarily pre-1.0 versions; those are basic in an under-designed way, and I'd say the same about Gopher). I don't know if that licensing fee claim holds up. People may have been worried about it at the time, but UMN never had a patent on it or anything, and RFC's are public. If there were fees charged, it'd be the creators themselves charging them.