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ommunities
just got access here to tilde.town.
think a lot about internet communities and how things have changed over time.
nyone who was moderately active on the internet through the 90's and early 00's
as some kind of community they were active in. A forum (shoutouts to
nvisionfree), a chat, IRC or in my case, a custom rolled
logging-and-game-publishing website.
joined my community when I was 13 if I recall correctly. I'm 28 now, and so
hat group has been a part of my life for more than half of my existence. I
till sorta keep in touch with some of them, but the website and largely the
ommunity has since fallen apart, sucked up by what we now call "platforms".
t's strange how we went from small, focused self-governing communities to these
assive "platforms" who host as many folks as they can. Inside those platforms,
eople create their own groups, but it means that everyone from outside that
roup can see, participate and harass. Banning from a platform is a major impact
n someone. It can break your career. The term "deplatforming" is a thing for
hat very reason. In the past, if you were a dick, you'd get banned. I did my
air share when I became a moderator and then administrator on my community.
omeone would get barred from the one space. It wasn't a death sentence, but it
elped keep things running clean and positively. Maybe that person would come
ack in a few years, having matured a bit, and we'd let them back in. Maybe not.
hat era is mostly gone now, at least to the general public. But now we've got
tuff like tilde.town, mastodon, etc - we're seeing people self sort back into
laces they have some kind of control over and some sense of belonging. I've
pent years searching for that feeling of belonging to a real community again. I
on't know if I'll ever find it, as it may well just be nostalgia manifested,
ut I'm not going to stop trying to recreate the positive nature of communities.
