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.
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Notes -
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.
I don’t think substack’s interface functionally replicates the best aspect of traditional forums. Part of the reason this community has survived for 10+ years now is because it moved from Scott’s comment section, which is very transient and best suited to short form (ie blog-commenter-style) comments, to Reddit. Obviously Scott still has a very active comment section, but beyond the occasionally interesting anecdote I don’t find much value in it and I read it only occasionally, it isn’t really suited for long discussions.
The ideal forum is designed for medium-sized text segments. Longer than a Tweet or an article comment, shorter than another tedious 4000 word essay by a Substack dilettante. The forum (in both nested and classic formats) is best for this length of post, which I find preferable.
Yeah, I agree completely, the best textual content on the internet (and therefore basically anywhere in the written tradition) is this medium-form content. It has to be long-enough to get an idea across and short-enough that everybody participating in the conversation can be expected to read it. Too short and nothing interesting can be said, too long and nobody is reading anyone else and the medium slips into solipsism. But when you hit that sweet spot you incentivize individual posters writing provocatively and the cross-pollination of debate and disagreement.
I almost always find the comments section to be more interesting than the article. Except for a very perceptive few, most writers benefit from having their ideas challenged in the comments. As a reader it's one thing to find an argument that e.g. civilization is older than 10,000 years -- and then another thing to read the comments and find counter-arguments that everybody knew this already 100 years ago, the dating methods used above are actually wrong, the definition of "civilization" is wrong, the author is right for the wrong reasons, etc. etc. etc.
Other platforms don't do what forums can. Twitter is too short and ephemeral but it does approach this dynamic sped up on crack. The best of 4chan could approach this despite itself because anonymity was extremely powerful when people couldn't put their names on the most interesting ideas. The Motte gets closer to the sweet spot of content length but is organized more like Reddit threads than forums so we don't get the long drawn-out records that stretch months and months. Reddit itself is very bad at producing this kind of content except for when it is heavily moderated, and mostly the moderators on Reddit are bad. Facebook and Instagram and TikTok are more oriented toward picture and video. Other platforms I can think of degenerate toward groupchats.
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Weren't you referring to the Motte?
...it feels like you're only proving my point...
I think the point of openness is that if I don't like a place, I can go somewhere else. You know how Scott and Moldbug seemingly independently came up with the same idea of the Archipelago / Patchwork? This happened because we used to literally live in it.
No I was referencing an old forum.
Independent forums are infamous for arbitrary moderation.
You can do that! It's easier than ever! It's a separate issue as to whether there will be anybody there. It being extremely difficult to get a forum running out of your house is a separate issue from whether you can force other people to grow some agency and stop using corporate platforms. The latter doesn't feel like openness to me. It feels like agency. Openness is more the intrinsic difficulty of doing your own thing on the internet. The average agency of an internet user is a different thing.
I don't believe that they were any more arbitrary than modern centralized platforms, but the advantage of the independant ecosystem was that you could just go to a different one.
Again, that's just not true. From the technical side it used to be no more difficult than it is now, and from the social / user acquisition side it used to actually be easier.
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