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 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.

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

I'm genuinely curious.

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.

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.

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.