The Internet's First Microblog Was Built on Trust. That Was the Problem.

Fri, 29 May 2026 23:00:00 -0400

If you used the internet in the 1980s (and “using the internet” meant sitting at a VT100 terminal in a computer science lab), you probably used finger. You typed finger username@hostname and TCP port 79 returned a few lines of ASCII text telling you whether that person was logged in, when they last checked email, and what they had written in their .plan file.

That .plan file was the internet’s first microblog.

Internet-History on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

The Internet's First Microblog Was Built on Trust. That Was the Problem.