I just found this place on an idle lurk through /r/slatestarcodex. As far as I can tell, it's a surviving remnant of the more iconoclastic elements of the rationalist/postrat/lesswrong sphere, similar to the community surrounding Scott Alexander in the pre-AC10 days.
I've visited a lot of similar communities that splintered off of Reddit and Twitter during purges or censorship escalations, and seen them live out their lifespans. Voat, the original, was the most interesting, since it started out in the era when free speech was still acknowledged as universally a good thing, and had majority support, with Pao being seen as a single bad actor acting independently. Unfortunately, it coincided with the crackdown on the entire infrastructure stack, and it eventually became too expensive to keep online.
Since then, a bunch of other communities showed up, each with technically interesting stories.
- .win, anchored by The_Donald's still fairly sizable userbase, is reasonably healthy but has one big community, a few minor ones that are semi-active, and little else.
- TRP and its surrounding subreddits all made independent sites, some of which came together under the banner of TRP.red. It doesn't really seem active at all, though the big subreddits in it are still not banned, even after everything else was.
- A number of Voat clones, all pretty unremarkable, cropped up here and there. Poal.co, which gradually petered out, Voat.xyz, likewise, and Ruqqus, whose admins decided to ban edgy speech after journalists doxed one of them and closed the site due to lack of interest shortly thereafter.
- On the infrastructure side, Kiwi Farms deserves a mention, surviving attacks (both DDOS and infrastructure loss - related) that would have killed earlier attempts handily, rolling their own DDOS mitigation system when Cloudflare backed down.
- During the peak of Twitter censorship, something called the Fediverse cropped up, aiming to solve the fundamental coordination problem of countless tech-savvy dissidents all being willing to throw their hats into the ring, but no one individual having the pull or funding to do it singlehandedly. A number of servers, all set up and branded independently, could connect with each other and aggregate their posts and users. In practice, a few servers exist, but Gab would have been the flagship and it shut off federation early on. Poa.st is the current flagship, largely hosting a core group of imageboard-adjacent users, but the vaunted robustness of the system didn't count for much when it briefly went down a little while ago and, as far as I could tell, most users just went quiet in the meantime rather than jumping to other instances. Most instances don't have open signups, even. Kiwi had its own instance at some point, but no longer does.
- Nostr took the Fediverse idea a step farther, using a bunch of cryptography to establish a protocol that lets users tie their accounts to a file on their computers, and use it across a wide variety of services. It had all manner of very impressive guarantees against censorship, but the onboarding friction was high enough that the only users I could find were a small handful of diehards talking to themselves and each other.
- Amusingly, a bunch of lefties whose views weren't remotely targeted by Reddit's administration made a bunch of federated Reddit clones during the API fiasco. As far as I know, they still exist and are 90 percent low-effort political slop, with the remaining 10 percent amounting to low-effort memes that aren't very good. I'd expect that activity is largely botted, simply because it doesn't pass the Turing Test.
By virtue of sheer stubbornness and dedication to the (worthy) cause of free discourse, The Motte seems to have a core group of devoted users who followed it here from Reddit, but most of what I see is automatically-created weekly discussion threads. I've certainly seen many individuals out there who share its demographic and general sentiment, but all of them are basically individual bloggers or Twitter users who established themselves pre-Closure of the Internet.
All of that said, it seems to me like the survival of our culture depends on finding a way to not just preserve an archipelago of different communities' remnants, but to find a way to re-create the frictionless, organic internet that could easily onboard new people. It seems like that would be a common topic of discussion here, and that people would have opinions on how to achieve this.
As it stands, my best proposal would be something like the ill-fated Dissenter extension, which added a separate comments section to every website as a tacked-on sidebar, but done more elegantly. Dissenter's failure case was that it was banned from Google's app store, but Brave is used widely enough, especially among our core demo of tech-savvy 20-something men, that sideloading a browser extension is no longer a huge hurdle. As for doing it more elegantly, I was thinking of something like:
- Every major social media website gets its own custom integration, bundled with a bunch of quality of life features that users ask for. E.g. region-blocking and a chronological timeline on Twitter, better post filtering on imageboards, and so on.
- When users post to these social media sites, their content is mirrored to a separate, federated service of their choosing (with a default for users who don't want to set up their own), and users of the extension can see when another Reddit/Twitter user is a fellow user of the extension, as their posts will be highlighted in the native view. This provides a backup of their posts and OC, limiting the chilling effect of a high-effort post potentially being removed or deboosted. Additionally, posts can be made exclusively to the extension's Fedi instance, visible to other extension users but not ordinary users of the social media website being interacted with, so that conversations can be had on e.g. Reddit without the local moderators stepping to say that "Y'all can't behave".
- Users can go directly to a given instance's URL and see (and message) other users across all platforms, with extension-specific notifications visible in the notification feeds of all augmented sites.
- As far as onboarding, I think the various anti-censorship social media people have missed the mark by treating friction as a weed-out. People are exhausted with the state of the world, and aren't going to take an hour of their day to figure out what Nostr is on their own. Instead, a simple, memetically-transmissible onboarding image outlining the process in simple steps, flattering the user as a cyberpunk hackerman rather than a refugee or tech enthusiast, could do a lot better. Dating myself, I remember the fun of the first days of 8chan, where users reveled in being technically hardcore and somewhat exclusive while still being happy to get new lads up to speed. I think that kind of culture is vital to anything that wants to bring back what was lost.
Essentially, the minimum viable product is the equivalent of being able to draw a fish in the sand back in the early days of Christianity - a way to indicate to fellow users on Closed websites that they aren't alone, and that there's a place they can get in touch with you if you get b&.
Do people have other ideas, in this general direction? I feel like we're in a critical time, where enough people remember the free internet that it can be brought back without the need to remake everything from first principles.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
The open internet is alive. You are on it right now. I think you are overgeneralizing from Reddit dying. Yes, reddit was once open and is now closed. I would say substack is its inheritor in that it's corporate but it's basically open. Because of AI it's easier than ever for you to contribute to the open internet. AI can now spin up a website for you but fears of impersonation of humans have not yet been realized. What is the issue, exactly?
I would agree the open internet is still alive though. Just that it's lost some flavor. AI especially. Like you google something and my go-to is to collect anecdotes on reddit to get the nuance on something. I don't trust the automatic AI response. But most people no longer Google, they just ask AI. Similarly, most people don't or can't anymore due to closing look at niche forums, they just look on reddit. Great and even superior for 90% the time, but that 10% of the time it is inferior.
I will point out that, while guilty of this, I continue to be thankful the system can cite its sources. It's kind of the ultimate extension of the "just type your question into Google using natural language" thing that I've witnessed a bunch of, well, lower-tech users do back in the 2010s and its implications for searching a wide body of knowledge really should have been something Google was first to market with given that I believe this is what the typical user actually wants their computer to do.
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"The Amur leopard is not extinct, your are looking at one right now"... ok bro, but it's critically endangered, and there used to be way more of them.
How did there use to be more of them? If substack is open that makes up for reddit more or less. I think you are noticing people unfit for open internet flooding the walled gardens without realizing the people fit for the open internet are all still around.
It used to be impossible to throw a virtual rock without it hitting some niche internet forum. "They all went to Substack" only proves the point, it's a pretty permissive platform, but it's still a single platform in the hands of one company.
When was that? In 2013 it was all reddit. Do you want to go back to 2005? What internet forums are you talking about? Were they of any quality whatsoever?
In 2013 it was not all reddit. I know of many amazing forums that disappeared around the pandemic or shortly after. They were moved to chat services instead like disc**d. I hate that platform so much. Yes it enables real time communication but years of history and information on forum threads was gone. Nobody archived it. Just gone. I managed to archive some things on wayback machine.
Scientific forums and discussion, a bunch of niche shit. All gone, either moved to a chat/real-time platform or just plain retired. Gaming forums too.
I still stand by the fact that you can find THE MOST niche content on internet discussion boards. Reddit is pretty amazing because of how much it's used don't get me wrong, you can usually find some niche experience on there for whatever use case you are after. Like if you're foraging and you want to see other people who ate the same plant as you etc. Niche like that.
But you want that hidden 0.01% edge information? It's on a discussion board, or was at least. People used to share research-level science shit in such a...understandable? way on discussion boards. Idk I can't describe it. I'm not that old, being Gen Z, but I've been on internet discussion boards since I was 4, you'd have to be there on the discussion boards to know what I mean. I probably wasn't even there for the peak of forums tho.
Edit: To be honest though, Reddit is probably BETTER for most things (put aside discussion quality of course, I'm just talking content availability). It's just that I dislike the retiring of forums. There was unique and distinctly valuable info on them. Generally you'd find what you need on reddit, and won't even find it on the forums. Reddit has more info than the forums ever had. Forums had SOME info reddit will never have tho.
In my experience, 2016 was the golden age. Maybe 2012-2017. Most legacy forums were not yet retired or deleted from the internet. Some were still active. And you had all the major platforms like reddit. It was all coexisting for a brief period.
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Before around 2011 when Reddit became much more popular. Reddit essentially replaced tens of thousands of smaller online communities about every niche hobby, interest, career or identity / culture / faith community that you could possibly imagine, which is what @ArjinFerman is saying. The heyday of this world was probably around 1995 to 2007, which was when large numbers of people were online, web hosting was an established industry and premade forum packages and standards allowed a semi-competent person with a little coding knowledge to relatively easily set up and host an online forum.
What killed forums? Reddit, of course, most primarily. But also Twitter and Facebook to a great extent. Reddit is by far the central culprit because it eliminated the three biggest points of friction for online forums:
The (minor but still extant) skill (or, alternatively, cost) required to set up the forum, find a host etc, then market it to a small initial user base. As time went on various middleware was created that made this slightly easier, but nothing was ever as easy as the current platforms. The same thing happened to voice chat - Ventrilo and TeamSpeak servers for each community were replaced by dedicated game voice chats (that let pick up or assigned groups or teams communicate) which were in turn replaced universally by Discord.
Hosting costs, which often had to be begged from users (people who created and moderated niche internet forums were often shut-in or unemployed and therefore quite poor) who sent money via questionable online money transfer platforms as they existed back then. Only the largest forums had viable ad hosting platforms back in the day, and before the ubiquity of Google Ads it wasn’t even that easy to set up an ad infrastructure as a hobbyist with a medium sized site.
User acquisition. Look at this forum, the only people who find it now are those bored enough to scroll through every last link on Scott’s current board, or maybe three people a year who stumble across the subreddit and wonder where we’ve gone. On a forum, you don’t just need to attract users, you also need them to spend 5 minutes signing up, to give you their email, create a username, and then for them to keep coming back. Reddit automates all of this - one account, every forum, all the updates on one homepage and in one app.
Combine these things and you have a recipe for the total fading away of the internet as it existed before the early 2010s. Only a few of the very largest old-school forums still exist in a relatively active form - places like Resetera/NeoGAF, LipstickAlley, Mumsnet, TattleLife, SomaliSpot, 4Chan, KiwiFarms, RPGCodex - and even they are mostly diminished from the height of their success. There are a few niche survivors like this, subject to unique circumstances.
I think you are right. I am going to Reddit exclusively for a handful of niche communities - and those could have existed on any platform. But they exist on Reddit because it's the default place, so I have to go to Reddit to read them. I'd happily not go there because the rest of Reddit is a toxic dump, but I have no choice.
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Y... yes?
Forums about atheism, forums about religion, forums about music bands, forums dedicated to video games in genral, or just a cult of one video game in particular, forums about conspiracy theories, forums about politics...
I don't know how many names I can remember, I don't know how many of the ones I do remember I would want to share, as that's a textbook example of "crossing streams", and I don't know what good it would do. They were pretty small, but not that much less active than this one, and the whole point is that though small, there was a tonne of them and you couldn't throw a rock in a random direction without hitting one.
They were superior to Reddit by orders of magnitude, way better than Substack.
You would like the open internet to «come back», but not enough to drop some links to open internet websites. Aren't those contradictory impulses?
maybe it's just nostalgia? I tried some one time and the people couldn't reason at all. the discussion here is often very boring leading me to leave for weeks at a time and I can't imagine a music band forum in 2005 was rocking higher IQs than this place.
Anyway I don't think it's changed much in the last 13 years so your issue is that you need a time machine. Probably the network effects of low IQ people clogging up the wires is just too much on top of a lot of the old people getting bored and moving on. The young high IQ people get distracted by tiktok which is still stimulating even at high IQ levels and this reducing the amount of time they have to spent chatting in an internet salon. Not much you can do about that. Maybe ban algorithms? Actually controlling addictive algorithms (which classic forums entirely lack) would be much better than the heavy handed age gating laws.
What would that bring? Most of those links are dead anyway.
Or maybe the desire to invoke nostalgia stems from the fear that some things may have indeed gotten worse.
Still better than Reddit or Substack
Even if you think the quality of these old-timey forums was not any better than what we have nowadays, the simple matter of how many independently owned fora there were back then vs now points to there being a massive difference.
Substack is much better than the place I was referencing. Reddit was better but they banned everyone capable of critical thought from the platform to cater to subnormies.
Does the difference matter for openness though? It makes no difference whether a forum which produces pure noise ceases existing. The point to openness is free thought.
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Most of them are literally dead - the php links to resources that no longer exist, if the forum site is still up at all, and wayback machine can't crawl them.
Plus, the nice thing about them was as @ArjinFerman said, you didn't have to share your toaster-fucking forum on your plumbing support and so on. But for a representative example, have some toaster-fucking with Across the Salt: a long-dead Battlestar Galactica fanfic forum specifically for shipping some combination of Helo/Boomer/Athena and literally nothing else. There used to be billions of these for every subject you can imagine.
I see nothing of value there. There's not even a general discussion forum much less anything for politics or philosophy in particular. Reddit right now can cover this use case, or discord.
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