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...