Don't Mind Me

Yeah, the coin example was a terrible one, because both r/AskHistorians and wikipedia answer those kinds of questions really well. Just take the basic concept and extend it to, well, anything, especially fairly specific questions that wikipedia wouldn’t answer. Wikipedia can’t have everything, and other sources will become rarer and rarer.

I don’t know, sorry, it’s been a while I used reddit myself.

Right, but I’m thinking less “experts weighing in” and more “havers of info sharing it.” I only (but perhaps confusingly) used the history example because most people won’t have that info lying around.

Generally they didn’t -it was a barter economy- but there were two exceptions. The first is the Roman solidus, a thin gold coin about the size of a US quarter, but those show up mostly in the context of extravagant royal transactions (“and king Childebert gave 6,000 solidi to the monastery of St. Martin,” that sort of thing). The second are various small copper and silver coins minted locally but in very small quantities. I’m not sure if there is a consensus as to whether they were genuine currency or mostly tokenistic.

Thanks to enshittification and cracking down on pirating, it will become more and more difficult to find reliable info online. I’d like a community where people volunteer to fulfill simple research requests from other users using their own privately-held sources, maybe providing a few PDF pages for verification.

E.g., someone could make a post asking “What kind of currency did the Merovingians use?” And I, a historian, could provide them with a short, scholarly excerpt that answers the question.

Yes, I do think the mainstream internet will get that shitty.

I’m trying to move as much of my online activity as possible to the Fediverse, mostly because the internet sucks now, but also because I’m excited at the idea of users forming communities and sites of resistance on their own terms, free of capitalist meddling and surveillance.

Edit: don’t forget that even decentralization isn’t free! Put aside a few bucks each month to support your instances!

Another edit (sorry, I’m just brimming with advice today): if you’re a US resident and reading this before joining, consider joining an EU-based instance. They have much more rigorous privacy and data protection laws.