• 512 words
A lot of folks in my bubble of interests are starting to flock to a revenant of a once beloved site. You know, the one that was murdered by Muricas upcoming first lady. Well, this time I won't join the party, not only for the many good reasons outlined by Cory Doctorow, but also because I need to be protective of my time.
I have fond memories of a time, where durable public conversations on the web happened in significant parts in a wealth of forums, many hosted by an enthusiastic admin (who usually also doubled as moderator). I've spent quite some time on several of them.
Yet, all good things come to an end. Most, if not all of them ceased operations over a decade ago. It was death by a thousand paper cuts. The instances usually ran on something like phpBB, and had quite an attack surface and admin tax, then the search engines stopped sending traffic, and the para-social media platforms sucked most of the remaining oxigen out of the room, and a few of their other great deeds managed to wake up even the sleepiest regulators, which in turn made laws, that, although these laws are rather reasonable, had the sad byeffect of making a legal minefield out of running a simple forum as a hobbyist. So forums went the way of the dinosaurs. Those who are still around resemble their ancestors like a sparrow resembles an archaeopteryx. The Big List of Small Forums (note: big != exhaustive) currently lists 89 of them.
As an active participant, it always was a sad thing to see years of discussion threads gone from one day to the other. So, I've probably starting to resemble what Kevin McGillivray has dubbed a homesteader on the web. In his fantastic map of the web he writes:
To the east is the Archipelago of Personal Websites and the less densely populated frontier of the Open Web, dotted with isolated islands and woodland cabins with one inhabitant each, lonely as a single player Minecraft game, sending messages to each other in archaic RSS and email bottles. These homesteaders are traditionalists. They see the ever-expanding borders of Big Social as the end of a way of life. They want to see the return of the vibrant early web, or of what they think the early web was. And they're out there, building and hoping others will dismantle the city and join them on the frontier. [..]
The homesteaders are reviving buried patterns that had promise but are now extinct or endangered. For the homesteaders, the danger is in distrusting all new patterns by default, becoming blind to the shortcomings of the old patterns, and finding themselves all alone in a web ring of one. What we can learn from the open web homesteaders—what works, what's missing, why nostalgia won't help.
Indeed, nostalgia doesn't help. And genuine communities on the web are one thing clearly missing. If you have thoughts, by any means, send a message in an archaic email bottle to my isolated island.