Finger: Social network that never died

(en.andros.dev)

22 points | by andros 5 hours ago ago

10 comments

  • lode 2 minutes ago

    Related fun site: plan.cat (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29248368 )

  • zaik 17 minutes ago

    > No encryption, no headers, no sessions. Pure simplicity.

    AI smell?

  • crmd 20 minutes ago

    Fingering was huge at my university in the late 90s and seemed very focused on relationships. Passive aggressive and extremely emo .plans was very much a thing when some people’s feelings were hurt. If you were interested in someone you were definitely fingering them to see from where they were last logged in (we used to call this finger stalking).

    Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.

    We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!

    • andros 8 minutes ago

      I'm dying! Using Telnet to flirt. The father of Tinder XD

  • Multiplayer 26 minutes ago

    Ahhhhh memories. As far as I remember this didn't really spread beyond the PC game developer world. Back in the day we built an automated finger puller (poller) to grab all the game developers .plans and post them on PlanetQuake, etc (depending on which game they were working on). At the time it was considered a core feature for hot game news! Certainly the twitter of its' time for direct from the horse's mouth news.

    • andros 9 minutes ago

      Fantastic! How lovely to read these stories. And what influences Id has had on Finger.

  • smalltorch an hour ago

    I like it.

    Just one cell.

    Heck, you could probably make a little program for HN to use the about box as the service and achieve the same thing.

    • andros 6 minutes ago

      the bare minimum!

  • ur-whale an hour ago

    finger is the best-named utility of the Unix world.

    • andros 11 minutes ago

      Second place is Cat