The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

I have never understood people who mourn the death of the "old" internet because I do not feel I have lost it. Particular communities come and go, as they always have, but I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too.

The thing that has changed is that a huge swath of new people have come online and, though some of what brought them online is wider access to connectivity, a lot of what brought them online are new kinds of communities. They showed up for social media and most of them just aren't that interested in the things that made up the "old" internet.

I put "old" in quotes because people have kept and maintained the parts they love. You can still play MUDs, you can still visit BBSes, people still run Hotline servers[1]! Many of these communities have changed because the world has changed: lots of people who played MUDs in 1990 have moved on to other online games, but lots have not! Critically - tools have continued to be developed. You can use IRCCloud (and be told it makes you a bad IRC'er), you can play MUDs on your phone, etc. These communities have changed with the times and improved for it.

My sense is that the absolute number of people who are involved in these communities has dropped, but not actually by that much? Maybe half as many people play MUDs now as they did at the peak - but it's a steady half. I think of it like the communities around vinyl or around film photography: less central than they once were, but healthy and vital.

I am really glad that people who were not online at all during their peak are discovering these older forms. We have kept them for good reasons. But don't call it a comeback, they have been here for years.

[1] https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Clients

I do agree that the "old" internet is not totally dead, but in my case communities I used to be in and even a couple I had direct involvement in were gutted because people left in favor of participating in communities via websites like Twitter. IRC channels I was in dwindled in numbers, draining instead to massive Discord servers.

The thing is, the "old" Internet was always somewhat anemic compared to the "new" Internet. It was never all that big. IRC channels I was in that felt like communities would stay dead for hours at a time, and sometimes topped out at under 100 members. Yet, they had a feeling of community that I rarely experience much on today's internet.

With how many people are on the Internet today, you'd expect that this standard could be upheld even with minimal participation, but I find that not only are there less people participating in the "old" internet, but also in addition to that, the people still participating have far less of their attention and time dedicated to it. As it was, the "old" Internet was, as many things are, powered by the unpaid time and effort of a relatively small number of people. Those people still exist, but their attention is far more divided. There's just more stuff going on overall. The "new" internet allures people with more "passive" participation vs the active participation that was often demanded by forums and IRC channels.

As an icing on the shit cake, you link to Fandom/Wikia as a community hub. Fandom and its behavior has torn apart a lot of smaller communities with its practices. See, for example, what happened when the Touhou wiki's community collectively decided they no longer wanted to be on Wikia: old administrators were banned, new ones were appointed by staff, and now the site is effectively forked. Apparently, if a wiki is too important for ad revenue, the admins will literally just fork your site. Of course, I'm not saying they did anything illegal, but what they did is a major fuck you to the community that poured hours of work into the site. It would be like a forum host that decides to ban all of the admins and appoint its own in their place. Maybe a bit like Reddit...

While I don't know exactly how much and why the "old" internet is dead, I do have my suspicions that it has a lot to do with the evolution of monetization on the internet. My hope is that the patron model can help here...

Hmm. I have pretty much the same kinds of interactions on private Discord servers which I had on IRC 20 years ago.

It's harder to find particularly skilled or like minded people in some niche areas or fields, but with simply more people online, this seems inevitable - more haystack to sift through. Of course there are worrying corporatization or centralization arguments vs. IRC, but ultimately the end result doesn't feel that different to me in terms of community.

I'm not really involved in any fan communities or anything a Wikia would involve, so I can't comment on that facet.

I suppose for what I do (reverse engineering hobby stuff, mostly), what would have been a "team" or "group" blog site, possibly with some useful collaboration plugins or the like, is now a GitHub repo, but that's more of a convenience than a drawback compared to the "old" Internet to me.

Overall, it does seem like things are more centralized and therefore a bit less unique, but at the same time, I have to spend less time securing bespoke web servers, buying crappy VPS hosting, and dealing with routine maintenance and setup to collaborate with like-minded people on projects.

Yah - there was a "collective social moment" that was how people came together around exciting new (at the times) forms. That's a kind of irreplaceable moment that is always happening for some community somewhere, but it never lasts forever and it always moves around with the times.

I know what you mean and I am also nostalgic about it - but my life has also changed and I suspect that my nostalgia for times gone by involves nostolgia for that moment in my life. Even if there was the same energy around the places I hung out in the late-90s and early-2000s, I would not be there as much or with the same aims.

> you link to Fandom/Wikia as a community hub.

Oh man, I was not intending to link to them as a community hub. It was the first source I found that indexed some current Hotline trackers and clients. But I think the Fandom treatment of communities is informative of how the times have changed.

I think, 20 years ago, this information would have been stored on a server maintained with the sweat and love of a single individual. Sometimes real collectives existed, but I found them to be rare. Often, if that person got distracted, or found new interests, we could lose a useful source (and for people in the community enough - a friend). Now there are commercial entities that will "preserve" that information while cutting the community out entirely. Like you I am not sure that is "better" - but it did allow me to find a list of Hotline clients in ~10 minutes of searching, and I suspect the "real" Hotline community is still on hotline as it was before.

So...I do think it depends on where you see the old internet. People do different things as passion projects now. I have found that I can go back and find many of the things I see other people mourn as lost, and I am sorry to hear that you have not had the same experience.

Writing my first post made me go find this - it's a web player that collects thousands of keygen MIDIs: https://keygenmusic.tk/# (using the hard work of the good people at http://www.keygenmusic.net/?lang=en - donate if you like the music!)

I agree with you in that there are still any number of small communities pretty comparable to what was on the "old" internet, including as you say, on the servers still running on the old applications.

The main difference would be on accessibility, where the "old" internet were mainstream services that people just flocked to almost by default, while now you have to do your homework to join communities that will match the same criteria.

It is not old at all, but to me Reddit is a good representation of that: at some point it was small enough you'd just go there and find something interesting. From there the communities stayed, but you had to heavily filter what you wanted to see. And now you'll be using specific clients, disable the crap in your settings, force the old interface, or any of the trick du jour to keep having a sane experience.

> I have found that the I can find the same sorts of gathering places for the same kinds of people I always have - in about the same numbers too.

My personal experience does not match that. There was a time (2010-2012 or so where I used to live) when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities.

One of these communities was niche enough (and I was involved enough) for me to personally knew all the regulars - they are mostly still online and still care about that thing which brought us together, but there's no meeting place for us online anymore. Facebook groups and Twitter wars do not facilitate meaningful discussion, and the old forum... "Who uses forums nowadays anyway? We have FB and Instagram and stuff", I hear from them, but I believe they're deeply mistaken and it's the other way around. FB has them, and it kinda took them away from me.

old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg

I'd say, with a very exaggerated tone :), it would be like saying you can still find trees in New York, so really nothing has changed since settlers came.

I don't think this is an apt analogy because trees were bulldozed to build the city, not true of the internet which has essentially infinite real-estate. Nothing was bulldozed to create the "new" internet, the new internet was created and new people joined it, the old internet just never achieved "web scale" and never could because it isn't a corporate product being driven by growth hacking and marketing spend.

I mostly agree with your points, but I click upvote for your last sentence.

I think while tech is always known to be in constant change, a lot of the things have settled down since it started I guess. The practices, protocols, the conventions, browsers etc.

For all the communities that we have lost, there are still a ton of IRC servers. I came back to IRC a few months ago after like 10ish years or so. There are new platforms like Activity Pub platforms, Matrix and others.

> when communities were migrating from older "forums" to new and shiny "social networks" - and inevitably ceasing to be communities.

I forgot who wrote the post. But I read this tweet or blog post long ago that people who are using social media to create communities will eventually grow out of it. This has been a accurate remark by her who wrote the post. I recall some communities who have started off in social media but eventually created their own website/platform to create unique experiences that are needed for that particular community.

Forums are making a come back. Manjaro Linux's forums was my social media for like 5ish years. Discourse has been dominant in this area but I like Flarum which is promising - https://flarum.org/.

Social media can cater to a large array of communities but if the community needs to grow, they will have to create their own platform. Cos social media platforms are general. Many will be happy with it. But indie folks, self hosting folks, power users and tinkerers will always be there to shuffle things up. ;)

There are more to be hopeful than there is for not to be as messed up as things might seem. :)

What's the deal with these wiki sites that seem to consist entirely of user generated content, but absolutely bury it under mountains of ads? How do these places exist, and why do people continue to contribute to them?

We didnt have giant tech companies saving every search, every click you do, selling/giving your personal and private information to advertising and intelligence agencies.

We also didn't have this kind of massive centralization where most of the global internet traffic goes to Google, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc.

Sure you can find tiny spots on the Internet with 10 people. It's still not the same at all as to what is used to be.

An analogy that works here is "used all the oxygen in the room".

I don't think this is an apt analogy either because it still suggests that something was lost, when that's not the case, rather the internet grew in new places that have come to dwarf the places that came before. The overwhelming majority of users on the new internet didn't exist on the old internet.

I do feel nostalgic about old days (I got on Internet in mid 90s) but as Internet has grown and matured so have I. I've never played MUD but I've used IRC a lot :)

Internet is now so much more than it used to be. Before you had to have much more knowledge to accomplish some things. It was not hard to learn but it was not accessible to everyone.

I see it like fetching a water from the creek or turning on the tap in your kitchen. You will get water in both cases. The first one requires more effort.

Well, the old internet was much about communities and enthusiasm. And these communities were diverse. It was feasible to operate your own blog server, where original content was published.

You either knew your communities through hear-say or search engines (read "The" search engine) found them. For a long time advertisement or the "attention economy" was not a thing.

Nowadays original content is hard to find and very much concentrated: Reddit, Stackoverflow. As search engines no longer seem to find relevant content from sites which do not pay add fees, there is no traffic to these sites.

In a sense money made the internet thrive and ruined a lot at the same time.

I do understand such people. A lot of forums died, they were moved to Facebook groups, since this is so simple to create a group. As a result some communities are not accessible or annoying to use for those without Facebook.

In Europe GDPR was the last strike, nobody is going to maintain forum while being forced to be responsible for "Integrity and confidentiality" of registered user's data. Who will risk huge fines because phpBB has some bug and "precious" user data like first and last name were leaked? Who will deal with "right to be forgotten" requests, who will respond with requests to download user data and so on - even if software has such capabilities, responding to user requests is time consuming and big no-no for hobbyists.

End result is that everything that is happening, is happening on Facebook, maybe Reddit, obviously there are niches, like HN, but there is less and less of them.

For me the enthusiasm part was very important in car DIY forums, communities of which nowadays moved not even to facebook groups but to messengers. Which in a first glance sounds great, since you can be assisted in real time. But in reality what was created in messengers remains there never being indexed by search engines so the knowledge cannot be shared with non-members.

> I don't think this is an apt analogy either because it still suggests that something was lost

Here we disagree and you are wrong ;-)

Of all the old forum lore most of it is lost for the overwhelming majority of internet users.

Some copies exist on old drives here and there, some exist in the internet archive but nothing has been migrated to newer platforms.

Mailing lists were for a long time conserved by Google but forums just disappeared.

None of what you mentioned sounds particularly onerous. Just don't ask for personal data and advise users not to post it. Let people delete their own posts and have a way for an administrator to delete a post if it might in some way be illegal (probably nothing to do with GDPR), and if people want to download stuff, tell them to use "wget --mirror". On othe other hand, dealing with spammers and eccentric/mad troublemakers could be a real headache. The frequency of such people probably depends on the topic of your forum.

Ah, I love that the top voted comment is someone mentioning Hotline. I'm logged into my friend's server - one I've been frequenting regularly since it was started in 2001 - at this very moment! I also ran my own server for years, of course. I really want to build "IRCCloud but for Hotline" sometime. I mean, just a basic self-hosted thing to start with. One of these days... haha

Recently I've started noticing people hosting gopher sites and I've actually noticed two different people specifically mentioning they have finger support on their servers! This was especially surprising since I haven't heard someone mention finger since the 90's. Very cool.

The SomethingAwful forum somehow survived the migration and keeps going strong. Goons do populate Twitter and Discord, but it did not empty the forums.

I think that the strong moderation has helped to make the forums offer something you cannot easily find on the newer social platforms.

The moment you are forced to install WhatsApp because it is the way the community decided to communicate about the topic for which the group was created, instead of just signing up to a site self-hosted by a member via phpBB or some other forum software, you'll know what this is about.

Now I'm granting information (IP-Address, rough location with it, content of the group) to Facebook without having the slightest desire to do this.

I do not miss the old internet per se, but I do feel sad that in 1997 I had a 56K dial in modem on a Pentium II running Internet Explorer and today I have a 1Gbps connection on a M1 MacBook running a modern browser, and web performance is still more or less the same.

Instead of spending our extra processing power and bandwith on useful stuff, we spent it on tracking and JS frameworks and other bullshit.

Websites with mountains of ads have simply become normal and accepted. It's sad, but it happened.

You’re describing the internet 15 years ago. Today you come to the kitchen, and it is full of people between you and the tap. Walls are littered with advertisements, and all those people ask you if you want to try their water. Look, my water has no asbestos, only 2.79$/lbs. Wait, wait, I know everything about water, it consists of hydroxidegenium atoms, which Archimedes invented 3570BC, so…. Wait, did you know you can make water yourself? I’ll show you but you must subscribe for great watering courses. No, stop all of that. iWater. Just water. A golden touch-tap that can only be on and off, that simple (30% of your pie is ours).

When you’re away in the creek, they are discussing whether using creek water and locking them in the kitchen is at all legal or moral. Do you even have any idea how much all that costs to them, freepourer?

Old internet is where entering the name of a product would yield reviews or discussions about the product.

New internet is where any useful information about said product gets buried in marketplaces and producer pages, following half a dozen paid-for ads.

I was referring to the fact is that Internet has become a basic infrastructure this days and people just use it. They don't ask or understand "where does it come from". They just use it. When you are born into something ("digital natives" as some call them) you don't even consider how it used to be. Current state is normal for you. This is your starting point and you build upon it. Same as electricity, you turn the switch and the light is on.

I had a black and white TV with no remote for most of my child hood. I remember it with nostalgy but I don't miss it. I had a TV with cathode tube until some 4 years ago. Then I switched to LCD TV but I had LCD monitor for some 16-17 years at the same time.

Is there any reason a subreddit wouldn't work for that community? Or is that not "forumy" enough?

I'm genuinely curious.

> sad that in 1997 I had a 56K dial in modem on a Pentium II running Internet Explorer and today I have a 1Gbps connection on a M1

Images took ages to download on 56k. Performance today is vastly better.

There are cases where progress has moved backwards eg. new buggy JS Reddit, but I by no means have rose tinted spectacles for the past.

Sorry if I’m interpreting inaccurately, but this seems nostalgic, anecdotal and ignorant of the gravity of social network effects. Certainly, communities are more online and connected than ever, but the claim from the article of “old internet” coming back don’t seem substantiated here.

There's a reasonable argument that we're actually in a golden age of forums. Subreddits have allowed many more niche communities than before and even traditional style forums have prospered in plenty of cases. There is definitely migration to newer platforms like Discourse and others.

If you think about it with an archivist mindset there are definitely plenty that was lost to time. But that will happen just from natural churn, even if the total is still healthy. And in this case as far as I can tell it is healthy. People talk about all kinds of things in hosted forums of various kinds. I'd be very surprised if the total forum traffic on the internet hasn't been on a steady rise forever, it just rises slower than the total.

Apart from privacy concerns like Twitter and Reddit sharing your data with FB (Maybe they share with Google too, not entirely sure), you create a healthier community in a forum than Reddit, Twitter etc.

This would be different if you are in a subreddit for a niche topic, sure. But there are higher chances of creating healthy online interactions in Forums than a subreddit. You meet with regulars more often. Knowledge transfer is better cos you know the skill levels of different people based on your interactions and experiences. This is opposite cos in a subreddit depending on the topic. There is a high amount of irregular folks. This means you have no idea how to rate the interactions than to take them on face value. These are all small but important things that are important when it comes to a community.

Think of forums like your neighborhood. You participate and nurture it. You know most of them and the rate of new people are less than you can catch up with the pace among other things.

PS: These are some of my thoughts, people have different ideas and opinions on forums.

One reason they continue to exist is because Google will often rank the add-laden Wikia site higher than the respective community-organized wiki.

fair enough, but even on the infinite web, i have a limited scope, and it's now filled with lots of annoyances, whereas in the past it was effortlessly chill all around

Pedantic aside: trees weren't bulldozed to build NYC, they were used for lumber and firewood far before the invention of the bulldozer.

That's a very charitable assessment. The problem is the oversaturation of everything with politics (politics is the lowest-common-denominator subject that everyone can argue about). The loud politics minorities are so numerous now that they can easily sway the attention of even niche communities. You can see that most glaringly on reddit where pretty much all important conversations are destroyed by becoming the same old politics debates, like how /r/technology is politics or r/coronavirus is politics . Lots of people stay in HN exactly because it moderates against politics but HN exists because YC doesn't mind running an unprofitable site.

Most forums shut down because they are unsustainable, and the reason they are unsustainable is that the current mobile/social media vortex is hoovering all the attention. This leads to a negative spiral where people don't make good self-hosted forum software / community software anymore and so on.

Shameless plug: I recently wrote a gopher client library for Deno, just for fun. https://github.com/matt1/deno-gopher

I also cleaned-up the weird formatting of the Gopher+ protocol and put it on github as a formatted markdown file since it was never and official RFC so trawling through an unstructured txt file when trying to implement the protocol was a pain: https://github.com/gopher-protocol/gopher-plus

Hope it is useful for someone implementing new gopher code like I was! :)

Which Hotline client are you using out of interest? I have nostalgic memories of using Hotline as a teenager and just assumed all clients are now dead in the water.

Subreddits don't work well for long form stuff.

Like for example a project log where you are restoring some old car, solving problems and sourcing parts. In a forum it is cleanly self contained. On a subreddit it would be a bunch of scattered posts you would have to take the care to link to.

Reddit is as always a mixed experience.

I think any successful forum depends heavily on its mods (notably like this one) to maintain community and civility, to remove spam, abuse, brigading, and astroturfing. This works despite the corporation trying to monetize with both hands. Reddit still has some subs with good mod teams where kind, productive communities are carrying on. This could happen on any decent forum software.

And yeah the rest is commercialized filth.

Yeah, and I'll jump in with a contrary opinion.

I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.

My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in. The fact that this kind of thing gets quarantined to a downvoted sub-tree (on Reddit) or just scrolls into the past, accessible only by search (on Discord) helps keep these new community platforms a lot less toxic.

And yeah, the newer platforms (especially Discord) are maybe a little less valuable as pure stores of knowledge, but I think the structural resistance to domination by assholes is very valuable.

I agree a lot with this. I'm in a lot of niche groups of my hobbies and of those most are really quite trash (usually pedantic ideological battles) even if they claim to be otherwise. There's however one that has such a strong moderation team that it's become a kind of meme, BUT the discussions if they do happen are always strong and factual by a weird mix of industry professionals and hobbyists alike, with a good focus on citation and cross referencing.

There was a period between 1996-2000 where we had broadband and the old web and it was faster than today. But I remember an article in Wired around 2000 about two guys that owned a diamond business in Canada who moved to L.A. to start a dotcom for their business. They moved back to Canada after a year and their assessment was the web was nothing more than a massive direct marketing platform. I wish I can find that article because it was quite prophetic.

> HN moderates against politics

I would push back on this quite a bit. Many of the posts and discussions on HN are political masquerading as science.

I think parts of your comment and your parent's comment are correct.

IMO a lot of it isn't about technology, but the size of the community, the people within it, and the norms of that community.

For me, the biggest heuristic on whether a subreddit/forum/Discord has the potential to feel like a community is the size. For various reasons, subreddits tend to be larger than a forum. The larger the subreddit, the more it feels like yelling into the void of Twitter. It's hard to "know the regulars" when there are thousands of people talking in the same place at the same time.

Smaller subreddits have no guarantee to feel like a community, but they have the potential. If there are regulars that show up and moderators that fairly moderate[0], subreddits basically "fall back" into being a forum.

Of course, there is the elephant in the room of Advance Publications, Inc. [1] wanting to make economic profit and, therefore, push for Reddit to grow and overcome the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Most forums never really had/have the same dreams of world domination.

Overall, as someone who has been a moderator on a larger forum (about 10-15 years ago) and seen tight-knit subreddits and Discords, my advice is:

Regardless of the wallpaper, pay attention to the people and the customs of your community and strive to improve those. There's no guarantee it will flourish, but it cannot if enough people don't act similarly.

[0] e.g. delete spam, lock flame wars, and generally contribute to the well-being of the community. [1] The effective owners of Reddit.

Wikia started out very differently. It became what it was slowly, over a long period of time.

Miraheze is now the preferred wiki host of community-driven sites, I hope that it will not eventually transform into Wikia/Fandom.

Many of the other “wiki” sites on the net are just rehosting GFDL content and slapping ads on them, then trying to SEO to get ahead of real wikis. Blame Google for not coming up with a good solution on that one, IMO.

I find that community groups that started before Facebook, or have avoid Facebook, have done better/do better. With Facebook you get locked into using the platform and the group doesn't grow. In fact the group just get worse over time as original member leave. Content and group information is locked into the platform.

Even if a group just sticks to using email, it is better over the long term. People in the group are forced to take on responsibilities of maintaining the email list and content. Passing that information on as they leave. You can also scale up the organization, make it more formal. Start collecting dues, and paying for server space. People take pride in their roles, and the organization.

Old Internet was where the primary content was content.

Ads appeared as a curiosity in 1994 but didn't start taking over until around '96, which is when the ad networks started to become more industrialised with tracking and ROI metrics (of a sort).

New Internet is where the primary content is ads and behaviour mod. Virtually all big-reach content is only there to make the ads and behaviour mod work.

And of course the goal of Meta is to personalise ad delivery even further and make it even more intrusive and impossible to ignore.

This isn't just a technical difference. There's a huge difference in culture and motivation. Old Internet was about exploration, play, and sometimes debate. New Internet is about exploitation, driven by psychological and emotional manipulation.

i think they are referring what we use to be allowed to say in chat channels and on forums. it was a lot more raw, a lot of offended people starting getting online and treating the internet like it was real life, part of the beauty of the internet was how non-regulated it was, granted the quality has gotten better, safer spaces for things like business, finance and other sensitive information but we also lost the jokes that the internet use to have, on the main channels at least. back in the day you could get kicked from a mainstream irc channel but it too a lottttt to get banned from an irc network or even an online forum. which granted you can still find sub communities like you mention that still cater to hacking, off jokes and crazy information but it’s not tolerated on the main channels of communication like before, which is fine for people who weren’t into that stuff because it didn’t change for them. but overall there has been changes, not terrible but def not the same as irc/usenet/bbs’s during their hayday. information was widely accessible but a lot of it is a paywall these days, also torrenting was a lot more common and i could call someone a moron without getting flagged. but yeah we still got some freedom and there are better quality services in some ways, i guess it just depends on your personality and how much it has limited expressing ones self authentically.

> I have never understood people . . . because I do not feel . . .

I think I've spotted the problem!

You caught me! I am actually a terminator. :)

I mean, of course "something" was lost? But...things were lost all of the time at the height of the old internet as well. No tech change needed. Communities would rise and fall, maintainers would move on and stop making things available, etc. It seems to me That is just how things change over time.

Like...if IRC was still the height of community, many of the IRC communities that were the most popular in 1998 would still be dead and gone now. Their archives would probably still be lost (it's not like we were better at archiving then). Like for any particular community that you can look back on and see people moving away from it into something else, I suspect people would still have moved away - they just would have moved away to a new IRC instead of...twitter or github or discord or whatever.

It just seems, to me, that people see normal cyclical community transition and blame the fact that it happened at a time when new kinds of communities were rising. I am not convinced that the two have much to do with each other.

When I was a freshman in college I ran into an elder geek who was dating one of the dorm RAs. They were super cool, had neat hobbies, seemed much smarter than me and I was desperate to impress them. The only thing I mentioned that made them seem to re-evaluate me was when I mentioned spending time on hotline. It was a fascinating place around the year 2000!

I do think that the way politics interacts with communities has changed over time, though I think that has been driven by how the US and Europe (where most community members live) political climates have changed?

> The loud politics minorities are so numerous now that they can easily sway the attention of even niche communities.

I kinda know what you mean, but my memory of the 90s / early 2000s is that loud political minorities were everywhere and commonly created a lot of drama in communities. It was just rare-er for...the moderators to step in? Often because they were the loud political minority who had opinions that people felt were divisive.

The old PHPBB software (or whatever it was called) was much nicer. You could have a thread about restoring your old car, and there might be 50 pages, in order, that someone could look through if they wanted to or just skip to the end so they can see what's currently being discussed. They can reference a comment on page 42 and it will always be on page 42.

Reddit follows this infinite scroll idea, that everyone now seems to follow, that I absolutely hate. You can search for a particular topic but you can't see what topics were around it. But I guess it encourages quick one-off posts which increases engagement or whatever.

Discussions would last days on the old phpBB boards. There wasn't that same pressure to spend all day on the same website. You'd make your post and visit every few days. This encouraged effort and reflection.

With reddit and other modern platforms, if it doesn't happen in the same 12 hours then it's old news.

A worthy pedantic aside. Thanks.

You get to decide the scope, so don't fill it with annoying things.

that's not true, even if I prune it's still leaking and i'm never far from a 'web 2.5' revamp ala reddit

Even with the relatively fast-moving ones you could still check in later and just quote a previous entry. Discussions tended to be deeper because of the format, less prone to quick little flurries of discussions that petered out once they were downvoted or not upvoted. Speaking of which, I don't remember any kind of upvoting of comments. The users on the board might show special icons if they were a mod and it usually gave an idea of how long they had been there or how active they had been. Discussions were expected to take a while, which encouraged more in-depth replies.

Yeah, IMO Discord (putting aside the whole open/closed software thing) is a pretty good upgrade on IRC. My problem is when a community that either used to have or would have had a forum 10 years ago is now using Discord as the primary communication hub. Discord's ephemeral by design, well suited for engaging in on-going conversation, but goddawful for finding past information, or longer ongoing conversations.

> I think people are much nicer on Reddit than they were on forums, and nicer on Discord than either.

The medium is different could be one of the reasons.

> My memory of forums is that you constantly had to scroll past long-running inline reply wars that would suck people in.

But that can be reddit as well. :)

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But you should also define what "nice" is to make sure we are on the same page. Arch linux forum is notorious for being known as hostile and rude. But they are just direct. They are damn helpful and cares a lot on helping. They expect you to do your due diligence before asking help is all. This is 100% direct towards help vampires which are bad for any community. But help vampires are going to rant on twitter and other places how horrible Arch folks are. Which is not true.

Usually Hotline 1.8.5 on Windows, Nostalgia or Frogblast on OSX. 1.2.3 on OS9 or earlier. hx on bsd/linux CLI :) I usually point people here to find a Hotline client to use: https://preterhuman.net/gethotlinekdx.php

In theory it would, but the practical answer is that for non-English-language community in 2010 migration to Reddit could not have happened.

The community in question was Russian, so it migrated not to FB, but to VK, which is essentially the same. It did not migrate there because members found VK to be a better platform for their community though - they just started using VK to communicate with their peers, were spending their time there and gradually stopped visiting forums.

Reddit never gained much traction in Russia, and in 2010-2012 it was for the nerdiest of nerds. One was way more likely to frequently visit some forum than Reddit back then.

The data protection requirements themselves are not onerous at all. But the path to compliance is scary and complicated to anyone who isn’t a lawyer or is retaining one.

What’s needed is a “fast track” compliance package for individuals, small businesses and online communities. Something like a cookie cutter privacy policy along with a rule book for simple applications without trackers and where all PII is personally and transparently entered, edited and extracted by the data subjects themselves, like in your example.

That’s good enough for most applications, and great for entrepreneurs to not have to think about GDPR until they have enough momentum to warrant getting lawyers.

Not to mention the customisation and level of commitment that went into your forum persona. There were signatures, user bars, and yes ranks that rewarded commitment with the number of posts rather than magical internet points. Compare that with the sparse stylings of reddit, this site, or social media profiles.

There were certainly conflicts and power-tripping moderators on those boards, but on balance I don't think the downsides outweighed the upsides. If anything, the conflict just made the sense of community more real. Being a regular carried with it a sense of obligation.

I have revisited the surviving boards from my past, most are limping on, but none of the regulars I remembered were to be found.

I still hold a vague hope that the old threaded bulletin boards might be revived some day.

To me, when communities choose a managed platform that didn't exist on the old internet, I assume that community would have just died if the managed platform didn't exist. It has never been easier or cheaper to run a phpBB instance than it is right now.

That is what I mean when I say we did not lose the old internet - it's more available to us than ever, but people choose not to use it. Like...it is not "lost," it's unpopular. I agree with you about all the drawbacks of WhatsApp, but it sounds like your community doesn't.