alt Hacker NewsWith old chat programs and forums I was talking to real people over a long span of time. On the modern platforms I’m just talking to the internet. It feels very different.
In 2024 I was looking for a place to see the eclipse, and someone I knew from a forum 20 years ago told me I could come to his house, as it was going right over it. It was my first time meeting him in person, despite having known him for 20 years. We don’t talk as often anymore, but for many years we talked everyday. I probably talked to him more than anyone else I knew for a good 5-10 years. I don’t feel like that stuff happens when people are just blasting out memes.
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This is what I quite like about Mastodon, since it's not inserting random users' posts into my feed (only people I follow, and then posts that they boost) you tend to have that experience much more like the chat and forums of old where you find a reasonably small group of active users who you mostly interact with.
Of course, 'influencer' kind of people tend to not like it because it's a lot harder to amass a huge following, but I'm fine with that!
One of the interesting things about how people socialize is that we tend to be less honest with those we're closest to, and more honest with people who have no impact on our bottom line.
Counter-intuitively this means we end up having better conversation with strangers than our closest friends and family. Which makes platforms like Facebook a lost cause for connection.
I've had the same experience. Many of my best friends have been found on forums.
In the past reputation matters. Accounts like "Endwokeness" would never work, because people would just make fun of him. "Why is he so obsessed with trans people?" "Does he have a job?". His whole persona would become an inside joke. You also can't just spam low effort opening post, because it will just be removed, so if he for example wants to hate on gay people he needs to write whole essays about it.
One thing that often gets overlooked is that 25 years ago, “the Internet” was essentially educated people from North America and Western Europe, with everyone else being a rounding error.
This made it very easy to connect on a level beyond just memes. Users had a lot in common personally, and that’s why they were able to engage on a personal level.
Today, the majority of the world’s population is online, and memes are often the only cultural language shared by all users in a community. Beyond that lie vast cultural chasms that make any deeper interactions nearly impossible.
That sort of connection making is happening in varying degrees of private discord servers today. You join the public discord it, you spend time with strangers, if you're likeable you eventually get told about less advertised public servers, or invite-only servers, and you go down a bit of a rabbit hole of loosely interconnected communities. Eventually you find communities that you settle into.
Good filters make for good communities. 20 years ago, being on the internet at all was pre-selecting for certain types of people. That's basically not true anymore. Today, the filters end up being invite systems.