{"id":26331,"date":"2023-05-06T12:59:45","date_gmt":"2023-05-06T19:59:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=26331"},"modified":"2023-05-06T12:59:46","modified_gmt":"2023-05-06T19:59:46","slug":"san-francisco-keeps-spinning-up-internet-communities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/05\/06\/san-francisco-keeps-spinning-up-internet-communities\/","title":{"rendered":"San Francisco keeps spinning up internet communities"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfexaminer.com\/users\/profile\/Owen%20Thomas\">By Owen Thomas | Examiner columnist |<\/a><\/em><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>May 4, 2023\u00a0<em>Updated\u00a0<\/em>19 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com\/sfexaminer.com\/content\/tncms\/assets\/v3\/editorial\/b\/4d\/b4d8e8aa-eb6d-11ed-b6b5-5bb249dde3a1\/645542899d4ca.image.jpg?resize=400%2C272\" alt=\"1312807736\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>ONYXprj\/iStock<\/em><em><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>For me, the streets of San Francisco are a web of memories. I dragged two friends of mine the other day around a corner off 16th Street to show them the Mission District apartment where I lived in the 1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Blocks away, on Ramona Avenue, was the flat where a loose group of friends gathered for weekly dinners. They called themselves the Cyborganics. I started dropping in and getting to know them \u2014 sometimes only by the same handles they used online, like Sonic, Rocky and Spudboy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the things you got for being a Cyborganic was a homepage, a rare privilege back in the early days of the web. If you worked somewhere like Netscape, Wired or a university, you might get space on a server where you could upload a picture, quote some lines from a movie, and post your favorite links.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It might sound quaint now, but conversations that shifted from a shag-carpeted living room to an email list and then got written up on a website were novel enough at the time that everyone from&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/archive.cyborganic.org\/people\/cool\/rs_photos.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rolling Stone<\/a>&nbsp;to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/style\/article\/THEY-MEAN-TO-COLONIZE-3307416.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">this hometown publication<\/a>&nbsp;took note.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cyborganic petered out, but people kept coming to San Francisco with the idea of turning the online community into something more. There was Blogger. Flickr. Six Apart, which bought LiveJournal.&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/tribe.net\/\">Tribe.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The best way I can explain it is that there was something fertile in the air, like the microbes that gave rise to San Francisco sourdough \u2014 or maybe a lingering loneliness of all those newcomers, a hunger to connect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Among those newcomers was Ev Williams, who started Blogger and later hired Jack Dorsey. Along with Biz Stone and Noah Glass, they founded Twitter, which its present owner, Elon Musk \u2014 the occasional resident of a bed in a Mid-Market office \u2014 seems intent on burning to the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO who once backed Musk\u2019s takeover of his company, has turned on his friend. He has not tweeted since January, a longer hiatus even than his famous vipassana retreats. Lately, Dorsey has been favoring Nostr, a decentralized social network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While running Twitter, Dorsey also helped start Bluesky, another decentralized effort that\u2019s been taking off among some of the ex-Twitterati, though it only has some 55,000 users and remains invitation-only.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What people like about Nostr and Bluesky are the ferment and chaos. Bluesky attracted some celebrities who have grown tired of Musk\u2019s blue-check games. It\u2019s also got a lot of users&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2023\/5\/2\/23708385\/bluesky-weather-report-moderation-app-store\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">who seem intent on posting photos of their rear ends<\/a>. Why? To prove that they can, which is part of the point of these decentralized networks. No central control means no army of moderators and no capricious CEO making up the rules as he goes along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Back in the 1990s, you could show your ass on your homepage if you really wanted to \u2014 but that didn\u2019t seem like the point. The hope was to announce your presence and find other people, maybe even make conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was hiking on San Bruno Mountain with a friend the other weekend, looking down at The City, flooded with memories etched into its streets. He told me that, however improbably, a trace of Cyborganic had resurfaced in a private Slack group. I got an invite \u2014 and there were Sonic and Rocky and other old friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s why I tell people not to worry too much about the death of Twitter, or which new social app to join. These are all overlays on top of the real network, which is a set of human connections. Our profiles, our homepages, our posts, our tweets, our skeets are all fragments of ourselves, traces we leave behind as we fumble toward each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cLive in fragments no longer,\u201d E.M. Forster wrote. \u201cOnly connect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For a bunch of awkward nerds, San Franciscans are awfully good at forging links. And not just those of hypertext.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfexaminer.com\/users\/profile\/Owen%20Thomas\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com\/sfexaminer.com\/content\/tncms\/avatars\/b\/6f\/58f\/b6f58ffc-b469-11ed-a906-df7a9990d167.5f7a62e5887f0b8dec23624f0c06480b.png?_dc=1677262264\" alt=\"Owen Thomas\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfexaminer.com\/users\/profile\/Owen%20Thomas\">Owen Thomas<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Owen Thomas is a journalist and a longtime resident of San Francisco who has thought about tech\u2019s relationship with The City since the first internet boom brought him to town. His columns appear weekly in The Examiner.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For me, the streets of San Francisco are a web of memories. I dragged two friends of mine the other day around a corner off 16th Street to show them the Mission District apartment where I lived in the 1990s. Blocks away, on Ramona Avenue, was the flat where a&#8230; <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/05\/06\/san-francisco-keeps-spinning-up-internet-communities\/\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[544],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26331"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26331"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26335,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26331\/revisions\/26335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}