solarbird | (Reply)

From:

As someone who, at the time, ran a news server (for the university I was employed by) at the time, the influx of people with a different culture was actually not the big problem. The big problem was that AOL's Usenet integration gateway had an interesting quirk. Roughly every N[1] days, it would suddenly decide that anything it had previously sent out had a new Article-ID[2].

Which, as it were, amplified the culture mismatch something fierce. Not only did you have the classic "a new batch of frosh get on the Usenets and make a stink of themselves until they settle down", there's also the "and it looks like they insist on repeating themselves, again and again, and again".

And, initially, it was actually damned hard to spot that it was due to software duplication rather than intentional. But, once that penny dropped, a lot of the annoyance (for me, but certainly not for everyone) shifted from people to shoddy software QA.

And at least (so far) I have not seen anyone botching the integration between the fediverse and a new non-mastodon platform to the point that every toot is re-tooted as a new toot every so often.

[1] I actually no longer remember exactly what N was (it's been, what, 3 decades), I am thinking it was "a week", but it may well have been "3 days". Essentially, there would be waves of posts that were "every single posting made from AOL since the integration started", and it was sufficiently spaced that it initially was not obvious. But once it was, people started calling AOL's tech team out in the more admin-y groups.