Chris Northwood2d ago

When I was young, I was an active user of what would now be called social media. vBulletin and phpBB boards, IRC channels, LiveJournal... I made lifelong friends this way, when I get married in a few months time, two friends I met on IRC and still switch between thinking of them as their handles or "real" names will be my bridesmen.

I know modern social media is not the same as it was then, but a lot of that is down to less active moderation than you had in these smaller communities as a result of centralisation by Silicon Valley tech firms combined with algorithms and incentives that intentionally or not resemble the same rush as gambling. This does not just affect children, and a ban is the wrong answer to this problem.

Show threadDick Armoire2d ago

@laser An interesting thing I've noticed before is that most of the examples you cite (along with Usenet and mailservs, which older nerds like me used) were topic based, not centred around person-to-person relationships.

I do wonder how much that shift between "people talking about a Thing" vs "people talking about themselves" has had on the nature of online discourse. Not like older platforms were free from trolling and abuse of course.

Show threadChris Northwood2d ago
@diffrentcolours I think some communities, especially IRC once established moved more to friend groups and conversations rather than being strictly topic based. Especially LiveJournal! Even on forums, the "off topic" boards were usually the busiest
Show threadDick Armoire2d ago

@laser yeah, LiveJournal was the specific exception that you listed - while it had communities, they weren't its focus.

And some IRC channels have definitely devolved to friends groups, but I think that's at least partly an artefact of the smaller number of people who are still hanging around on IRC. Bigger channels like #debian on various networks remain topic-focussed.

Show threadAlex Schroeder2d ago
@diffrentcolours @laser It would be interesting to see stats. I used to be on the Emacs channel a lot and still lurk there, but all my socialising has moved to smaller IRC channels and servers. I suspect that’s the exception but who knows.
Show threadDick Armoire2d ago

@alex @laser Not "stats" as such, but I'm currently in 6 IRC channels; two are #Debian support, one is for #EMFCamp, one is the old Netgoth IRC which is basically an idle game at this point, one was for Manchester geeks but is basically a small clique now, and the last a private channel for a bunch of people who worked for the same startup which got bought by IBM and we all quit.

So 3 "community", 2 "friends groups", 1 "undead undead undead".

Show threadAlex Schroeder
@diffrentcolours As long as we're doing anectotal info: I run an IRC network with a bunch of friends and there I am in 25 channels; I'm in one channel on a private IRC server by another friend; I'm in 7 channels on Libera.chat, all software related, and only the room about my own software has a social aspect to it; and I'm on two channels on Tilde.chat; and I recently left a server where I was on a single channel.
Jun 16 at 12:19pmWeb
Show threadAlex Schroeder2d ago
@diffrentcolours Also https://social.alexschroeder.ch/@alex/statuses/01KV864NXJQ3286G3MF4NRQW59
Alex Schroeder (@[email protected])

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social.alexschroeder.ch