many people who have joined have related their extended stints on communities Reddit, Dig, Slashdot, or even older places like Usenet, and i’m super interested in what your best memories and favorite experiences on places like that have been in your time using them
I miss the days when sites would run their own forums (remember phpBB?) and we had huge, organic communities for everything.
I think the mobile web killed most of that off or at least struck the final blow. The sites weren’t particularly mobile friendly and they’d ask you to install an app like Tapatalk which nobody wanted.
IRC. Having a ton of inside jokes and situations funny enough to post on http://bash.org/
… also reading bash org for hours on end
I really wish IRC survived. I was in a small IRC community a few years ago but, once everyone got jobs, there was little activity because it’s not mobile friendly. The apps mostly suck and there’s no push notifications.
Now we have a discord which is bridged to the mostly inactive IRC and, to be honest, I kind of hate it. We don’t own it anymore and it’s a proprietary app like the rest of them. I’d rather have a Signal group chat.
Matrix is dropped to be new IRC essentially
True and Matrix isn’t bad. I wish we went there instead of Discord.
Sounds like someone needs to create a Fediverse version of Discord soon. :)
IRC was somewhat federated in its construction, but yeah it’s not mobile friendly at all. It’s barely Windows friendly, as it was designed to be ran on console/shell/terminal level.
The forum on TheEnvironmentSite.org 20 odd years back was really good. A lot of very informative and intelligent discussion and debate of subjects and some really friendly and supportive regulars there too.
I don’t think that I can pick out one particular incident or anything, but I do have very fond memories of the conversations altogether.
There was a time about 3 or so years ago that I was a part of a meshnet over the internet, basically it’s a hidden internet and we had file share servers, reddit clone, search engine, tor routing, email server, and so forth in that meshnet. It was an invite only and it was pretty amazing place. Anything you want to find (barring illegal stuff) could be found there, the network connectivity is pretty fast, because we had a few VPS servers that acts like a router so we had like 3 GBPS bandwidth for 200 people on that network.
The network kind of die off as people lose interests or moved on after a few years. I always have a fond memory of that place.
What kind of meshnet was it? I really enjoyed the time that I spent on a distributed chan that existed on tor! It was very slow and not like 4chan etc at all.
It was on a CJDNS meshnet program where it connects to note/router via UDP on public internet but when you are connected, you can connect to computers via IPv6 addresses that basically tunnel your connection through end to end encrypted meshnet protocol.
Originally, we had Hyperboria network (it also have a reddit clone that is used to be called Uppit.us) and eventually there were a splinter group that set out to create an archivist meshnet where we can share and distribute academic papers and documentations. It basically stagnant as alternatives crop up for archiving documents and people peruse that network less and less.
ah CJDNS! Heard about it, but never used it.
If we have used it everywhere on the Internet, advertisers would get booted off of it so fast. Meshnet is basically friend to friend network, so it is self regulating in a sense that if someone abuses the network, they can get depeered.
Probably Barry’s world back in the day when I played Dark Age of Camelot and Day of Defeat. The online world was smaller then and communities felt more genuine although that may just be rose tinted glasses.
My favourite memory was when I was working for Blueyonder on the night shift in 2002. I took a call and a lady was having connection issues for an online game…turns out she was also playing DAoC on the same server and faction that I was.
I used to be extremely extremely active on an old message board for a gaming website, I was young so I constantly got into shit, but I don’t think I’ll ever be so invested in a forum that I could post over 200 posts per day. It was great, you’d have incredibly long threads with tons of posts from the same set of people.
Something that I remember doing was basically proving that one forum user absolutely could not have gone from cart pusher less than a year prior to owning a house with no transition in between through nothing but me remembering like everything everyone posted on there
I don’t think I’ll ever be so invested in a forum that I could post over 200 posts per day
This resonates with me. Whenever I’m posting I ask myself, “is this contributing to the discussion?” If the answer is no, I won’t post anything. The old forums that had a comment count under a username made me want to increase that so I posted on every post. I feel this lead to a lot of unnecessary and dull engagement.
Haha probably right? But it definitely also lent it a very conversational atmosphere, occasionally just small posts that didn’t get much attention or getting really, really engaged with a discussion. Also it was the last time I knew basically everyone I was posting with at least a little bit.
deleted by creator
Early 90s (like 92-94, just after the first undernet forking and while EFnet was still in one piece) IRC and getting to know like-minded people enough to talk to them offline as well and even meet them IRL.
My favorite old social media experiences include old pre-Digg-downfall reddit, and the youtube comments on certain very small gaming channels.
I’ve had some good recent experience with Tumblr, but some bad too. Not sure what to make of that place yet - for me, I think it requires careful curation to make sure it stays constructive and not just rage-making. But like, there is cool art, and photographs, and lots of cool marine biology content.
My actual top spot goes to archiveofourown.org, however. It’s not the type of site you meant, probably, but damn if I haven’t gotten a lot out of its massive library of free, ad-free, entirely volunteer made, supremely well organized (its tag system puts libraries’ to shame) fanfiction. It blows every other internet community site I’ve participated in out of the water when it comes to creativity and user-generated content.
I also have a soft spot for Drawception, which somehow still exists despite all the odds. People play a telephone game with drawings and prompts. It’s great for a laugh or three, and for art practice, though games take days to complete now there are fewer users and apparently the site owner is AWAL. It may be on its way out. But I hope not.
This happened on the RuneScape forums when I was 11.
I was a pretty active forum user at the time, and I joined a Star Wars themed clan that role played as Jedi. It was primarily forum based with some in-game events.
I got really into it. So into it I applied to their “council” which was basically a team that led the clan. Every member of the council chose a Jedi name from the canon, but the only one I knew that wasn’t taken was Anakin. I was accepted, and this became my clan name.
Not long after they decided to split the council in two, the upper council did actual leadership things and the lower council basically moderated. Power-mad 11 year old me was not happy with being placed in the lower council and threw a bit of a tantrum, ultimately leaving the clan to immediately go join a Sith based clan instead.
The irony was lost on me. It was not lost on anyone else involved.
Looking back I think it must have been quite amusing to observe.
Love the story. I’m glad you mentioned this because when I joined Beehaw it gave me a lot of nostalgia about those old forums in the early 2000s.
I’ve had great experiences as part of some old-school blogging and website-building communities, making zines and collaborating on articles, that kind of thing.
As a teen, I used to have a static site on a platform called ‘Freewebs’ (it was kind of like a late-Geocities knock-off) and would spend hours exploring the little websites people made there. Communication was limited to sending messages via guestbooks (anyone remember those?), email, and a little webmaster forum, but the community vibe was great anyway.
And now I realize how much I’m showing my age…
I wish so badly that all those geocities sites hadn’t just vanished off the face of the internet when geocities went down. I never got to experience them but they always sound cool when people reminisce.
I’d second Neocities as the best modern equivalent to static web communities. It’s not the same experience, but its kind of evolved into its own unique thing. Also, the marginalia search engine is a great tool if you’re looking for other weird and wonderful personal sites around the web that Google ignores.
it’s not the same but some of the modern experience can be replicated by browsing neocities–it’s a nice simulacrum of what could be, if nothing else
IRC, for sure. Having a group of people with whom I’d chat every day while working was such an emotional boost.
