If we ever want to figure out how to reestablish smaller communities online, we need to figure out why they kinda died off in the first place and just saying "social media killed them" isn't really satisfactory. There are pressures, and network effect, and that explains to some extent why they stopped growing by bringing in new people but not why people abandoned smaller and closer communities that already existed. There's nothing preventing people from using forums, there's nothing preventing people from logging into eternal-september or any of the other free Usenet text providers and going back to newsgroups, there's nothing stopping anyone from logging back on to efnet. There's complaints but all those systems are still there.
And I don't exclude myself from this. I'm a tilde enjoyer and I maintain my own webbed site but I'm also here more than anywhere else. It is entirely facile to say, "well just go back to forums bro" because the same problem exists: Why? Complaints are legitimate but I have not seen a satisfactory answer for this and I don't have one and it's not going to be solved if we don't come up with one, and if that answer is that firehose social media provides something people generally need, that we need to build in and around that.
I say this as someone who grew up online on BBSes.
Smaller communities have a shelf life. Let’s say you get a tight nit forum of 50 people. But then two members dated for a bit and broke up and one of them left. And three other members had a fight and two of them left. And then someone logged off one day and never logged back in. And then some people? Well you see them online but they don’t post anymore.
So of course the active users see this and try recruiting. But the most active threads are the “why is this place so quiet?” thread, and the “we need to recruit more members” thread, and new members who do join are now part of conversations that reference events they missed, and often just feel like outsiders.
Social media offers persistence and constant shifting of members. Sure individual groups or subreddits or tags might die out, but you can always find someone to talk to once you’ve established yourself some. New friends are actively made as old ones fade away.
If you want to create small communities, you need them linked to a larger platform. Honestly Reddit is so close to being what would work best, except they keep trying to be like every other social media platform, they offer zero discoverability for smaller communities, the upvote system is toxic as fuck, and they don’t ban fucking Nazis or toxic mods. But it gives you that persistence while also giving you those smaller communities where you can meet people.
I can see a vision for how such a site would work. Use BBS style forums, but link them together in a larger feed like Reddit, and have a tagging system as robust as this one, and avoid all algorithmic methods of discovery but instead allow you to follow users like they are forums and see where they are active to help you also find new communities. It would be messy and chaotic but it could work.
Or maybe I know nothing, idk. Just one person’s theory.
we feel like we have a comprehensive understanding of what the fuck tbh but it's a big topic and we haven't tried to explain it before so it may take a year or two to come out of us in bits and pieces
but anyway here's one piece
sure, yes, small communities have shelf lives (so do large ones btw, but they often linger on as undead due to sheer inertia...)
but that's been true throughout human history. the novel thing with the internet's phase transition to larger sites was that people looking to make NEW small communities, first-timers who'd never done it before, mostly found the big sites when they went looking for the way to do that. and they mostly decided that trying to make their small thing as part of the big thing was reasonable and went ahead and did it.
