Thanks. Very interesting. I’m not sure I see such a stark contrast pre/post 9-11. However, the idea that the US public’s approach to the post-9-11 conflict would have an influence makes sense and isn’t something I’d ever have considered on my own.

Me too, but I’d put Usenet in there before Slashdot.

The South. Just below Indiana, the middle finger of the South. And I say this as a Hoosier for much of my life.

If you can grok that we’re basically all on different, independent web forums, and there’s just an implicit agreement between the forums to cross-post and share content, you can better grok why somethings that will happen here happen.

I’m old enough to have participated in Usenet before web servers existed, with the idea that different Usenet servers carried different feeds. Now that I better understand it, that model is closer than my original understanding. I also realize it’s not a completely accurate model, since there’s no central hierarchy to the fediverse like Usenet had, but at least it works to get me to understand the idea that all interactions are going through the server I’m pointed at and that posts originating from other servers across the fediverse are being replicated to my server so I can interact.

Thanks. Based on some of the other answers, particularly in https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12511, I know understand better.

I appreciate everyone helping to explain some pretty basic questions in such detail.