Introduction Finger

Introduction

Today I stumbled on an article about the Finger protocol (Finger: the 1971 social network that never died, written by Andros Fenollosa at en.andros.dev) and learned there was a social network back in 1971, and my Mac had the client preinstalled all along. The article mentions happynetbox.com, a site that turned the Finger protocol into a social network. I signed up for an account, wrote a script that syncs my local ~/.plan file to it, and set up a morning job that translates updates to Chinese for me. This post covers the whole process and the pitfalls.