Hotline was a thing!

In the mid-late 1990s (the realtime)

It was an intermediate step between FTP servers (which were themselves kinda continuous with direct-dialup BBSes) and p2p p2penis

It was an intermediate step between FTP servers (and Archie and… Gopher? I hear Gopher was a thing, that existed) and p2p p2penis

It was initially for Mac which was a distinction becauses in the late 1990s mac and apple shit was always about to die because Gil Amelio was not a Great Man

It was followed by Carracho but that turned out not to matter

On Hotline you would first sign into a tracker. The program came preloaded with 4? trackers but they kinda sucked?

The tracker would populate a list of possible servers that you could see in a list this was novel`

When you finally found a good tracker (outlaw) ~outlaw~ outlaw you would find some servers you might actually want to sign into

(you would hear about better trackers on better servers)

You could sign in in particular, username/password or as a guest without

There was a provision to serve you a particular text screen when you signed in this was novel and in continuity with FTP and BBS and in continuity

a lot of times it would tell you the rules to sign in as the ~real~ guest to sign in as

a lot of times this was “go to this webpage, click on this banner ad, use the Xth word of the Nth paragraph as user, something like that for pass”

this was Web 1.0 when a single banner ad click promised to pay out as much as one US dollar, especially if it was for a porn subscription site which had a decent paythrough rate because they were part of an industry that was used to clients (older than me) that were used to paying money for looking at naked women

also often the textscreen would say that by clicking “agree” you admitted that you were not a government police agent and renounced all powers according

I do not believe the government police powers accepted this as binding