Osmose

I make websites and chiptunes!

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AKAs:
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DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

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.


estrogen-and-spite
@estrogen-and-spite

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.


ireneista
@ireneista

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.


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in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

i dont know that it is more complicated than "increased atomization and declining standards of living prevent people from investing in those methods"

the firehose didnt kill it, it supplanted the past forms the way an excess of processed food supplanted whole foods in the face of the pressure symbolized in "nobody has the fuckin time or money to cook" and suddenly sodium related health problems are everywhere.

social media is, as ever, the latest opiate of the masses and the world is geared to produce misery of excess as well as lack

I don't think that's true though because there's no cost here or there. I've pointed out in the past that a lot of those systems were maintained based on resources that are no longer available but why does that keep people from using the ones that do exist? Usenet has orders more capacity than it had at its height. It is easier and cheaper to establish a blog on any of a hundred services than it was in 2008. And so on and so forth. The quality of the food supply is an issue of cost and availability but that's not the situation here.

the social cost of moderation and time to dick around, mainly, eg when reddit and aol before it fucked over their many disabled volunteer mods. i hear that most usenet is inactive or drowning in spam from what ive heard but if that is true i cannot say.

people are squeezed for time so they have less energy to put into drinking at the bar so they drink from the hose instead

lol it’s also very nice! Going to the local dive bar to see your neighbors is great, no need to go to friends individually at their house. A newspaper has multiple sections, each dedicated to a specific topic, all bunched together in a compact package. I don’t see online communities much differently.

the difference is access and diversity of use. you need a bar AND a library AND a gym AND a etc. it is also a bonus for people who are on the wrong side of power to not have a single point of failure.

if you are, in your life, only reading one paper and only going to one bar and doing nothing else, thats cause for concern outside the metaphor vOv

if you are, in your life, only reading one paper and only going to one bar and doing nothing else, thats cause for concern outside the metaphor

I think this is besides the point I was making, but I feel compelled to say that this is/was the way for many people for many years. Personally, growing up, my parents didn’t subscribe to multiple newspapers, we didn’t go to multiple churches, we weren’t members of multiple gyms. I didn’t know anyone who did.

Did they die off? Half the forums I remember from the 2000s are still around and active, including shit like the Freespace modding forum. There haven't been a huge flood of new ones, but mostly afaict because every group who would make one or start a usenet group now makes a fuckin Discord instead. People can and do 'go back'; this is the first social media-ish place I've used in like five years, a decade if you don't count Instagram, and pretty soon I'll be back to just using little forums about shit I'm interested in again.

It looks to me like most of what draws people to these big generalized platforms is just that they are big; it's where everybody is. Mostly people you would never voluntarily choose to hang out with in a smaller community, but even in forums' heyday you'd have to wait all day for the worst poster you've ever seen to get out of work, log in, and piss everyone off, while twitter and tumblr promised a new worst poster every thirty seconds. That's not really a need you can build in and around and still have anything that was considered worthwhile about a more distributed internet

I wrote a rambly comment and then deleted it, I don't know either. I think there is something that newer platforms provide for at least some people, but I don't know if that effect is as big as might be assumed. Even an old stable social group has significant turnover over a long enough period of time, and I think societal changes that only slightly reduce the ratio of new people coming in vs old people leaving can compound on themselves over a few years to create a perception of a ghost town and from there the reality. Is that enough to justify altering how you operate the site from the get go? I have no idea

As someone on the Internet since (shortly) before the web existed, I suggest that the "small communities" were always a secondary characteristic, and cultural progress has mostly eliminated the need for the primary characteristic.

I don't see the forums, newsgroups, or mailing lists that I used to loiter on as communities-for-the-sake-of-community, but rather the only places where you could have in-depth discussions about a specific thing that interested you. At least back then, striking up a conversation on niche topics took a lot of effort of figuring out if people might act receptive, how to explain the topic so that you don't lose them, and whether you all have the time to get them up to speed on the thing that you actually want to talk about.

Fast-forward thirty or so years, though, and we've gotten people to the point where they've probably heard of whatever obscure thing that you have on your mind, and they'll either listen or tune out, depending on their level of interest. And so, for most people, there's no (current) reason to track down the dedicated Usenet group or resuscitate the old mailing list server to argue about musical theater or early board games or whatever. They'd need a new reason to stop posting about the things that interest them for "normal" people to read and pull back to a hard-to-find silo.