this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
54 points (100.0% liked)
Chat
7500 readers
27 users here now
Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I loved them, I miss them dearly, but no, I don't think they'll come back.
A lot has changed and the internet is not the same, for better and for worse. For one, it's just a lot bigger. You'd think that'd make it easier, but it seems to make it harder. There's too much noise for the communities to stand out, so what usually happens is one or two get huge and the others dwindle and die. Even just look at Lemmy, through no fault of your own, Beehaw is becoming one of the largest instances and it requires active work to spread the weight across the rest of the federation. People gravitate I guess.
Plus, because it's so much bigger, there's less of an identity in the spaces that do survive. Post in any reddit thread, then go to another. Chances are nobody'll be the same (except for a few superusers) so there's no real sense of belonging or community that the old forums had. Back then you trolled your friends, not strangers.
Like you said, with so many people online now keeping communities healthy is this precarious balancing act of keeping it just hard enough to find so that it doesn't get flooded yet still discoverable enough for some new members to find it.
definitely feels like if you wanted to make this work these days you'd be relying 100% on word of mouth. search engines seem basically useless (and perhaps irreversibly so) for finding small, independent communities