bring back forums when the internet was a proper country, if you wanted to talk to strangers online you had to find the set of strangers that read the same stupid webcomic you do and then create an account on their forum people do not belong all in the same pile like unsorted laundry - ThreadSky

jelenawoehr.bsky.social • 52 days ago

bring back forums

when the internet was a proper country, if you wanted to talk to strangers online you had to find the set of strangers that read the same stupid webcomic you do and then create an account on their forum

people do not belong all in the same pile like unsorted laundry

Reposted from erika

i don't want to hear your most boomer complaint. what's your most millennial complaint?

Comments

sarcasmorator.bsky.social•52 days ago

I never left my forum and it is an island of stability in a sea of endless turmoil

dawnlaurier.bsky.social•52 days ago

A fair bit of the online lapidary community is still on decades-old forum sites, which is awesome. It also led to a weird dynamic in which lapidary subreddits make it seem like an impossibly high percentage of lapidarists are using angle grinders & Dremels as their main kit.

sillyrookie.bsky.social•52 days ago

Reddit is ALMOST there conceptually, but has too many insecure insufferable assholes to be tolerable to humans.

mrdanielsir.bsky.social•52 days ago

That it's all collated on a central website also ruins the whole experience. Basically, every subreddit needs to be its own phpbb-website.

sillyrookie.bsky.social•52 days ago

I think that Reddit is structurally a forum mixed with social media. You have one account, but you join different boards with their own seperate communities.

If it had a better overall audience, it could be the best of both worlds instead of the worst it currently is.

sillyrookie.bsky.social•52 days ago

I get the feeling that the whole "federated" deal that Bluesky and Mastadon are trying to do will result in the social media forum hybrid I'd like, but we just aren't there yet.

anib.bsky.social•52 days ago

reddit exists :)

ingvbo.bsky.social•52 days ago

Made me think of Userfriendly, and how there would be a new forum every day.

mary-mcbride.bsky.social•52 days ago

IRC and mail newsgroups were fantastic back in the 90s.

jelenawoehr.bsky.social•52 days ago

you can't properly let your whole entire freak flag fly online with no mechanism for ensuring that your posts will probably only be read by at most 200-300 people who are defective in roughly the same ways you are but also very different from you in several ways that make for lasting friendships

jelenawoehr.bsky.social•52 days ago

nobody got main charactered on webcomic forums they just got regular old bullied and then if necessary they started reading a different webcomic and joined a different forum

max.is.a.cutie.fyi•52 days ago

bluesky has the potential to become a forum with gated community feel

it has the first ingredient already, which is custom feed (both algorithmic and curated) that can update dynamically

the second ingredient is likely going to be a twitter circle type feature that can also be tied to a feed

jelenawoehr.bsky.social•52 days ago

i still text once or twice a year with some of my webcomic forum friends from 20 years ago

one of them has me saved as Pinko Commie in his phone and he's Fascist Fuckwad in mine but I was the first person he told when he decided to propose to his wife, that kind of lovehate doesn't start on Twitter

glenatron.bsky.social•52 days ago

I miss that, but my equivalent community in this generation is the discord for a podcast which happens to have attracted just the right number and type of people to make it a real delight. Of course being dependent on discord means this too will be taken from us at some point. So it goes.

hareksu.bsky.social•52 days ago

Reminds me of when I used to get into furiously heated debates with some neo-nazi kid on usenet.
Couple of years later, he emailed me asking me for advice on what to study at university. Times were different back then.

mangababe.bsky.social•52 days ago

I am still friends IRL with friends I made on fan forums 20+ years ago. 😉

digitallysquat.bsky.social•52 days ago

It’s clear that boomers never had to worry about the banhammer.

digitallysquat.bsky.social•52 days ago

But hey, who needs to moderate content?

dr-internet.bsky.social•52 days ago

internet started going downhill when we made the goddamn robots into mods

thebenshaw.bsky.social•52 days ago

I feel this. I'm in a discord with a few dozen folks I met on an early 2000s webcomic forum. After 20 or so years even your most annoying antagonist becomes a certain kind of friend.

lazerfx.co.uk•52 days ago

Let's hear it for forums...

crispybart.bsky.social•52 days ago

I mean this is Reddit you're describing

mrdanielsir.bsky.social•52 days ago

If that we're the case, every subreddit would be its own website and there would be no central feed of all of your forums. The way forums are siloed from each other is an integral feature.

hareksu.bsky.social•52 days ago

Hell yeah. Forums were peak internet.

And also usenet and mailing lists.

johnnyapplememes.bsky.social•52 days ago

👏🏼

shampoochan13.bsky.social•52 days ago

We has dress up avi forums too

snarkysteff.bsky.social•52 days ago

I think my friend @rlayberry.bsky.social married the fella she met in a forum!

rlayberry.bsky.social•52 days ago

I did! Met @warrenlayberry.bsky.social in a writer's group on ye olde Livejournal, in 2006.

furbisms.bsky.social•52 days ago

They still exist! You can still join and make them!

neomonsterisland.bsky.social•52 days ago

I used to run one of those forums. It was legendarily well kept due to it's lack of flame wars and constant mod presence.

katarjin.bsky.social•52 days ago

Discord has its place..but a forum it is not, no matter how hard it tries.

enigmaxtreme.bsky.social•52 days ago

I miss the days of Invisionfree boards littering the internet

iddqd58.bsky.social•52 days ago

Eons ago two users of SomethingAwful's GBS forum were made to write diss tracks about each other to avoid getting permabanned, a contest that went on for far too long until the killer blow was landed involving WW1 tanks and the Valles Marineris on Mars.
You'd never get that on social media.

blaizev.bsky.social•52 days ago

Reddit is this though? Just you don't need to sign up for a thousand different seperate forums.

allwrongthink.bsky.social•52 days ago

Reddit's threading system and ephemeral nature of posts makes it very different from a traditional forum, where each thread can in effect become its own subreddit given enough time and users.

blaizev.bsky.social•52 days ago

true.

rantz.bsky.social•52 days ago

I genuinely have been contemplating bringing back a professional comic creator forum.

jelenawoehr.bsky.social•52 days ago

i so miss that pale blue and gray reply box and checking for the little NEW next to the good threads

eclectictastessa.bsky.social•52 days ago

Absolutely preach. I still use the SomethingAwful forums regularly, and it's a vastly better experience than any social media site. Like, Bluesky is nice, sure, but you can't really have the same sort of discussion format here as on a forum.

jmcanespy.bsky.social•52 days ago

I haven’t read through all of these but here’s a load of them collated

https://aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today

togindel.ngeneva.net•52 days ago

Forums are definitely on the wayside now, but yeah. Absolutely miss 'em. Especially the fun and interesting flamewars.

bethcasescenario.bsky.social•52 days ago

I met my bestest friends that I still hang out with to this day 25 years ago in a forum. A couple of them married each other having met in the same place.

wreybies.bsky.social•52 days ago

I ran one of those old-school forums for over a decade. First under VBulletin, then under Xenforo. It's not without it's flaws. The wrangling of human paradigms is an odious task, and the eventually incestuous nature of the citizens within such spaces gives rise to flamewars and meltdowns.

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