so i'd love an open discussion about something that i don't have much vocabulary for, if only because there are so few examples of it on the world wide web. anyone/everyone is welcome to chime in.

back in the mid/late 90s there were some attempts at turning web forums and chat interfaces into virtual worlds. beyond all of the 3d chat rooms and telnet muds, there were some 2d graphical sites like moo.ca. The Canada SchoolNet moo was a mud/moo that allowed users to add/remove/modify rooms in real time, in-browser.

snapshot archived here - click 'Web Walkthrough' to walk around:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010417181313/http://www.moo.ca/home

Furcadia went a hundred steps further and integrated a 2d tile-based world with a world editor *and* script editor, so you could build your own "dreams" (multiplayer instances) within the shared game world. the entire game was built around socialization.

both of the above games are not just fancy web chat terminals. building and decorating the game world is a critical part of the social experience. you create a dining room, put chairs in it, program the chairs to allow players to use the 'sit' command, and then invite people into your dining room for a make-believe dinner party.

we now have reddit and various web forums. they're effectively the same threaded conversation that has been around since the usenet days.

what i *don't* see anymore are graphical WWW virtual worlds built around socialization. we either lock down everything and only allow chat. are there web-based MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs that allow for both world building *and* conversation?

#moo #mud #smallWeb #indieWeb #worldWideWeb #furcadia

so i'd love an open discussion about something that i don't have much vocabulary for, if only because there are so few examples of it on the world wide web. anyone/everyone is welcome to chime in.

back in the mid/late 90s there were some attempts at turning web forums and chat interfaces into virtual worlds. beyond all of the 3d chat rooms and telnet muds, there were some 2d graphical sites like moo.ca. The Canada SchoolNet moo was a mud/moo that allowed users to add/remove/modify rooms in real time, in-browser.

snapshot archived here - click 'Web Walkthrough' to walk around:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010417181313/http://www.moo.ca/home

Furcadia went a hundred steps further and integrated a 2d tile-based world with a world editor *and* script editor, so you could build your own "dreams" (multiplayer instances) within the shared game world. the entire game was built around socialization.

both of the above games are not just fancy web chat terminals. building and decorating the game world is a critical part of the social experience. you create a dining room, put chairs in it, program the chairs to allow players to use the 'sit' command, and then invite people into your dining room for a make-believe dinner party.

we now have reddit and various web forums. they're effectively the same threaded conversation that has been around since the usenet days.

what i *don't* see anymore are graphical WWW virtual worlds built around socialization. we either lock down everything and only allow chat. are there web-based MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs that allow for both world building *and* conversation?

#moo #mud #smallWeb #indieWeb #worldWideWeb #furcadia

just stumbled upon an incredible piece of MUD/MOO history from the mid-90s web that disappeared in the 2000s and is now all but forgotten. it is a testament to the interactive and creative possibilities real people imagined in the 90s, before greed and pessimism spread through the world wide web.

MOOSE Crossing: A MUD for Kids was a mud/moo designed by Amy Bruckman at MIT as her doctoral dissertation project in 1996

"MOOSE Crossing is a MUD designed to get kids 9-13 excited about reading,
writing, and computer programming. It includes a new programming language
(MOOSE) and client interface (MacMOOSE) designed to make it easier for kids to
learn to program.

Kids have made things like pigs you can hug, light bulbs that tell light
bulb jokes, and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow that ask you a
riddle! They're doing creative writing and computer programming in their
spare time for fun, and meeting other kids from around the world."

(from a rec.games.tiny.mud announcement https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.games.mud.tiny/c/MhnTf0G3C_0/m/BKWIngCp440J)

while a moo wasn't anything new at all in 96, what i find incredible is that her team also built a custom graphical mud programming WYSIWYG client, for Mac and Windows. the clients - MacMOOSE.sea.hqx and WinMoose.exe appear to be lost to time (edit: macmoose has been found! https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115988260112466194), but i found this screenshot buried in the wbm. you can see how an object is broken down into verbs and properties.

i have about a million questions about how the client-server system worked because this is adorable and user friendly. but for now, i'm excited to just think out loud about what the world wide web could be made into today, if developers got more interested in user-driven interactivity

this is the original site for MOOSE Crossing:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981202051515/http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/moose-crossing/

Amy's dissertation in html:
https://ic.media.mit.edu/Publications/Thesis/asbPHD/HTML/

#mud #moo #retroComputing #macintosh #vintageApple #worldWideWeb #indieWeb #smallWeb #history #digipres

am overcome with gratitude. after hours of searching usenet, ftp indexers, ftp sites, archive.org, discmaster and every archival tool i know of and coming up with zilch, i jusssst found the MacMOOSE software buried in a professor's apache open dir! he worked in the same research group as MacMOOSE (Epistemology & Learning Group @ MIT) and had the foresight to make a tarball of the lab's FTP server before it died years ago

this is the kind of archival once in a million thing - that someone self-archived an incredibly important and obscure piece of software by accident, and left a copy on the web. thank you prof fred g. martin 🙏

this archive of the MIT ELG ftp server is going straight to archive.org.

#archival #digiPres #worldWideWeb

just stumbled upon an incredible piece of MUD/MOO history from the mid-90s web that disappeared in the 2000s and is now all but forgotten. it is a testament to the interactive and creative possibilities real people imagined in the 90s, before greed and pessimism spread through the world wide web.

MOOSE Crossing: A MUD for Kids was a mud/moo designed by Amy Bruckman at MIT as her doctoral dissertation project in 1996

"MOOSE Crossing is a MUD designed to get kids 9-13 excited about reading,
writing, and computer programming. It includes a new programming language
(MOOSE) and client interface (MacMOOSE) designed to make it easier for kids to
learn to program.

Kids have made things like pigs you can hug, light bulbs that tell light
bulb jokes, and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow that ask you a
riddle! They're doing creative writing and computer programming in their
spare time for fun, and meeting other kids from around the world."

(from a rec.games.tiny.mud announcement https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.games.mud.tiny/c/MhnTf0G3C_0/m/BKWIngCp440J)

while a moo wasn't anything new at all in 96, what i find incredible is that her team also built a custom graphical mud programming WYSIWYG client, for Mac and Windows. the clients - MacMOOSE.sea.hqx and WinMoose.exe appear to be lost to time (edit: macmoose has been found! https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115988260112466194), but i found this screenshot buried in the wbm. you can see how an object is broken down into verbs and properties.

i have about a million questions about how the client-server system worked because this is adorable and user friendly. but for now, i'm excited to just think out loud about what the world wide web could be made into today, if developers got more interested in user-driven interactivity

this is the original site for MOOSE Crossing:
https://web.archive.org/web/19981202051515/http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/moose-crossing/

Amy's dissertation in html:
https://ic.media.mit.edu/Publications/Thesis/asbPHD/HTML/

#mud #moo #retroComputing #macintosh #vintageApple #worldWideWeb #indieWeb #smallWeb #history #digipres

‘It’s not too late to fix it’: web inventor #TimBernersLee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul’ of the #internet
Founder of #worldwideweb says commercialisation means net is ‘optimised for nastiness’, but collaboration and compassion can prevail
It wasn't until polarization of 2016 election that he had enough with Web's toxicity, something that reportedly left him "devastated." He acknowledges #socialmedia does not represent entire web, but is "optimized for nastiness"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/29/internet-inventor-tim-berners-lee-interview-battle-soul-web

‘It’s not too late to fix it’: web inventor #TimBernersLee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul’ of the #internet
Founder of #worldwideweb says commercialisation means net is ‘optimised for nastiness’, but collaboration and compassion can prevail
It wasn't until polarization of 2016 election that he had enough with Web's toxicity, something that reportedly left him "devastated." He acknowledges #socialmedia does not represent entire web, but is "optimized for nastiness"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/29/internet-inventor-tim-berners-lee-interview-battle-soul-web

This is the Web of the 1990s and, to some degree, the early 2000s — that some of us experienced and remember.

The Web that some of us want to make a come back.

#WorldWideWeb

This is the Web of the 1990s and, to some degree, the early 2000s — that some of us experienced and remember.

The Web that some of us want to make a come back.

#WorldWideWeb

The HTTP-protocol is (also) a de facto layer-4 transport-layer-protocol.

It might have been intended to be a layer-7 application-layer-protocol, but — look at how people are using it.

Applications are built on top of the HTTP-protocol somewhat similarly to how people decades ago would have built applications on top of the TCP-protocol.

Even the Fediverse uses the HTTP-protocol in this way — as a layer-4 transport-layer-protocol.

#HTTP #WorldWideWeb

1/

The Web of the 1990s and early 2000s (then called the World-Wide-Web) was different (in quality) from the Web of today.

One interesting thing from that era was that — there were many individuals who (on their own) created whole web-sites about some (narrow) topic each of them obsessed over. Something that each of them raged to master and document — and then published to the world (via the World-Wide-Web).

...

#smallNet #smallWeb #smolNet #smolWeb #WorldWideWeb

7/

I think some of the hopes for Small-Net & Small-Web from its fans, enthusiasts, and advocates is —

• the return of individuals creating and publishing niche narrowly focused sites,

• removing the modern Gate-Keepers.

These obviously aren't the only desires from those in the Small-Net & Small-Web scene and social-movement, but — I think these 2 are interesting because they are related to the origin of the World-Wide-Web.

#smallNet #smallWeb #smolNet #smolWeb #WorldWideWeb

6/

The Web wasn't the start of the social-movement to get rid of these (historical) Gate-Keepers.

(The social-movement goes back to at least BBS and other similar networks — i.e., what, for regular people, was before the Internet.)

But the Web did have a big impact on removing these Gate-Keepers. A BIG one!

...

#smallNet #smallWeb #smolNet #smolWeb #WorldWideWeb

5/

Prior to the Web, if you wanted to publish something you created and reach a mass audience or a community — most of the time you would have to go through the TV industry, the film industry, the radio industry, or the newspaper industry.

These were the Gate-Keepers of the time.

In practice, only those with wealth or power were able to get permission from these Gate-Keepers.

For most of the people in the world — this wasn't an option

...

#smallNet #smallWeb #smolNet #smolWeb #WorldWideWeb