alt Hacker NewsThat 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.
I guess that’s sort of what happened with the forums. I was on a decently large one and eventually became a mod. Then a bunch of the mods and admins had their own smaller forums. I ended up being an admin on several of those. Over the years there were migrations and things.
However, nothing was “private”. Some of the smaller forums still had members who never found their way to the bigger hub forum.
I’ve never used Discord and the idea of starting that process and everything being like prohibition era speakeasies is more than I want to deal with at this stage of life. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I always had the impression that Discord was for voice chat? I liked that forums didn’t required everyone to be online at the same time. Fun when they were, but still useful when they weren’t.