@darius @theuniverse yesss! voice verification was the DEFAULT setting for many BBS host programs

@darius as an autistic person with extreme social anxiety, the idea of onboarding via phone/video call is absolutely terrifying 😅 i'd much rather go through the UX onboarding and then poke around for myself to see how things work! 💜 :nd:

@darius @theuniverse

Imagine assigning new users to an onboarding buddy who's another user. :)

@darius great obscure recommend. picked up a copy last year after stumbling on it in a bibliography.

@darius @theuniverse If you haven’t read Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone, the result of many years of original research into the history of phone phreaking, it might make a really interesting counterpoint to Stacy Horn’s book. Very much to her credit, Echo was famous for its supportive vibe, unlike other early NYC ISPs, which tended to be more like the city back then, rougher, often a bit gnarly. But precisely because phreaking is *so* different, and such unknown territory, the stories he tells — most of all about how scattered misfits found each other on “the world’s largest machine” — you might find lots of strange resonances. Chock full of neurodivergence, too. I loved it, much more than the usual tech history. He’s a tremendous writer, and I never understood why the book didn’t get more attention.

@darius yes!! There’s so much to be learned, still, from Stacy’s incredibly commonsense approach to building community. That comes across also in this interview with her from the Echo days, which just popped up online a few years ago: https://youtu.be/lDQ2o_Prgas

@darius @theuniverse Tangent, but have you ever read Email Trouble by S. Paige Baty? It's a woman writing about, basically, dealing with the internet and being new to email AND being diagnosed with endometriosis, and it's an extremely weird but also very compelling book.

@darius @theuniverse This should be a good read, at the time I found that small towns were overrepresented in the BBS scene and major "world cities" off the map -- presumably because people living where the action was were too busy actually living it. Fascinating to find that this was not actually the case!