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I'm really loving how Mastodon has become a refuge for all the grizzled seafarers on the ocean of the internet. They pop up in my feed and their bios all say something like
"I've been online for longer than the internet. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. 56k modems on fire in the light of Usenet. I watched IRC forks glitter in the dark near the Gateway 3000. All those moments will be lost in slop, like tears in rain. Time to deshittify."
@Janeishly I'd thought at first you meant actual seafarers (on boats, posting via LTE or satellite links), and I'm fairly sure there's *at least* 3-5 of those on here..
@vfrmedia Don’t know about boats but ships, yes. When I retired we were using InMarisat for Company only email. I understand that today there may be some internet activity allowed but these connections were very expensive and coms were restricted. Maybe StarLink has changed the playing field.
@jfharrison Interestingly about 12 years ago I was helping run a popular online radio station and we had one listener who was using Inmarsat from the ship he was on, and whoever was paying for the bandwidth tolerated this (a 128 kbits/s stream), and this didn't upset the Internet availability for everyone else on the ship so the tech must have improved at some point..
Near the coasts, most people nowadays can get an LTE (mobile) link from the nearest country..
@vfrmedia Adding: When we were within eyesight of the coast many crew members had access to their phones w/ sim cards purchased for the specific area. It was not unusual for someone to have 5 or 6 sim’s to cover the various countries visited. And this was before LTE, 3G was most common.
@jfharrison our listener was on some ship doing marine research in the middle of the ocean - the radio station would have been a constant 128k stream on top of anything else they needed the Internet for (which included sending high resolution pictures and videos of whatever they had discovered back to a University). He said there was plenty of bandwidth for all of this, and it wasn't that much slower than using a fixed ADSL/VDSL circuit (this was in the early 2010s)