Thanks to @simontatham I can now browse the Fedi like it's 1994 again!
#mastodonochrome
@davoloid
Check out gomphotherium — it can even display images on your timeline as pseudographics 😄
https://github.com/mrusme/gomphotherium
@davoloid
And if you would like TUI Fediverse experience in general, check out tut — it's quite a full-featured client: https://github.com/RasmusLindroth/tut/
It hasn't been updated in quite some time, but it still works fine.
@m0xee Can't see response from @pyrate@nicecrew.digital
*shrug*
@davoloid
I see, it recreates the things specific to that BBS faithfully. Nostalgia value.
In my dialup-modem-BBS days the modems were already more performant and ANSI art was quite widespread, gomphotherium displaying images using blocks and ANSI sequences for colour kinda reminds me of that — that's why I mentioned it.
@m0xee Yeah, that was an option on mono, in fact ASCII art was the first reason I joined it, then stayed for the banter. In fact, there's an interactive programming language within the BBS to create animations and games. Limited refresh rate, of course.
That flexibility and ability to customise sections was what made it a fairly diverse crowd.
@davoloid
Yeah, dial-up BB systems I had frequented had some card games and text mini quests, some systems even had specialised GUI software that you had to use to access that BBS instead of terminal, it was almost Web-like 🤩
But then people somehow transitioned to FidoNet and later to Internet and the Web, the culture died out. TBH I didn't even see Gopher being used in my early Internet days — I knew that the protocol existed, but I didn't even know what it's for 😅
@davoloid
I think modern Gopherspace (which somehow survived) and Geminispace are in a way reincarnation of that culture — I see people even experimenting making interactive games, and I've seen Geminicapsule designed as a piece of interactive fiction using hyperlinks, you don't see stuff like that often in Webspace anymore — it's too vast to find something interesting and too commercialised.
@m0xee I figured. For mastodonochrome, lack of emoji support is a feature not a bug. In the mono bbs client which it's emulating, there's not even £ signs. We always type GBP.
But the other features that we're used to, like . on a line to finish post, reedit comment before sending, a keypress context-dependent menu, those are the things that have kept it alive for over 30 years :)