I graduated just before social media took off, but for us everybody was on AOL Instant Messenger. You left it on on your computer all the time, people updated their status messages for all to see and it showed when you were idle.
It was so much better than online by default as we are now.
When I hear that kids now are leaving public social media sites for private chats with a network of friends, which I personally have never used, I am picturing the AOL IM/icq experience.
I fixed Facebook on my feed at least. I started aggressively unfollowing people who post or comment about politics constantly (even if I agree with them). Not unfriending, just unfollowing.
What’s left is a feed with pictures of my friends and family, important news about what’s going on in their lives, and trash talking about college football.
Didn't work for me. It barely even show me content that my friends create. It's all reaction videos and conspiracy nonsense. Even if you block those channels, another one with a slightly different name pops up.
I remember feeling the same way about Slicehost back in the day after Rackspace acquired them. Loved Slicehost. Not too long after though, Digital Ocean appeared with everything I loved about Slicehost and has kept getting better ever since.
I feel like that's Fly.io now. They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities...while improving on pricing, particularly for lower traffic stuff. Love Fly.
I was working for Slicehost at the time, we were a tiny team working our butts off in a loft office in downtown St. Louis, with a few remote employees.
To my understanding there was a runway-growth problem. Could the founders raise and spend (efficiently) enough money quickly enough to keep the business viable? It would be a big gamble and the alternatives were to shut down (no way!) or sell. So they sold.
Rackspace wanted to take Matt’s and Jason’s know how (plus customer base) and go big, really big! That defocused our efforts a bit, plus there were corporate integration headaches (though not too bad). Eventually Linode, already a competitor, and later Digital Ocean filled the void.
All I can say is thank you. I learned to manage servers because of Slicehost and the articles on it back then.
I remember being excited by the merger because well, Rackspace had such a fantastic reputation at the time. People still tell stories about their service. The Rackspace Cloud was just up against an absolute monster in AWS and never really became competitive.
Thank you for the kind words, brought back some fun and interesting memories. I spent a lot of time helping to write and edit those articles, as did my coworkers, glad they helped you!
Not sure why people love fly.io over all the other competitors so much. I myself prefer render.com, for the simplicity and predictability of their billing, and their deployment model is so intuitive
> They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities
I also love Fly, but they were missing easy managed databases (which always seemed like the main reason to use Heroku to me). And now they have them they're very expensive (even compared to Heroku). Which is a shame because their compute is very cheap.
If there was one thing we would all decide differently here at Fly.io, like if you gave us a time machine, is how we did databases. Someday Kurt and I will write the post about how those decisions came to pass and how they played out.
We're doing Managed Postgres now (MPG), which is what we should have done to begin with, but it took us for-ev-er to get here.
It's a simple question of economics and observation.
In a free marketplace, when a product, service or company is no longer useful...it dies. This creates a natural incentive to constantly improve, operate more efficiently or expand into new areas where it can create value.
With government spending, this doesn't happen because there's no incentive for it to happen. Programs are created and then they grow, perpetually, forever.
My goodness, I still remember Bill Clinton proudly showing a balanced budget. I remember George Bush Jr running with one of his biggest campaign points around fixing Social Security.
How we got from that era of energy for fiscal responsibility to $39 trillion in debt is...maddening.
I think a tremendous amount of people want value for their money. It's one of the reasons so many people talk about cutting government spending where it's wasteful, operating with a balanced budget and reducing the trillions of dollars in debt that we've accrued...which will eventually devalue all of our money.
It was so much better than online by default as we are now.
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