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Inspired by Catherynne M. Valente's excellent "Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media", I've been thinking a bit of the communities I've been a part of that subsequently languished, blew up, splintered, or otherwise died.
Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things (Valente)
For me, only some of them met the fate she describes, of capital sucking the life out of major platforms because community doesn't ROI. The rest of it has been other forms of entropy: technological change invalidating an entire platform or protocol (BBSs and Usenet fall into this category); or inter-personal issues, with squabbles or disinterest bringing down forums as admins deleted everything/people left. One could even argue this is the natural end for web forums in the pre-Reddit age, the sites operated by people with enough money to stand up a domain, but not enough time for moderation or to put in the attention required to let things thrive. I only belonged to a few forums that met a capitalistic end, that were "acquired". Most spun up, found communities (or not), and were eventually shuttered.
And thinking about it further, I've only had one community survive against all odds, through two full decades and parts of two more: I created my main character on a particular MUD in 1998, my alt in 2005. The MUD itself has been around since 1996 or thereabouts. Arguably it was at its most vibrant in its first ten years, but, it's still there. There's an average of over 200 players online at any given time. I still log in daily. I still play both chars! In September, my main will be a quarter of a century old.
This is incredible longevity (surviving the general collapse of MUDs, the rise of MMOs...), the sort of exception that proves the rule. The software running on some server somewhere on the US east coast, listening on port 22 and serving ANSI text since 1996.
Valente's argument is bang on regarding the lifecycle of social communities, or to be more precise, platforms, talking about how capital feeds and siphons and value-worsens. She writes,
... I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers.
The earliest online connection I still have is with a guy I knew from the local BBS scene. We talked online a lot. Got together once and saw a movie downtown. I've got him on Facebook, where I was able to confirm he's as much-smarter than me as I always suspected, graduating from Waterloo, getting a PhD from Stanford, doing the smart-person tour of the Bay Area tech scene (Square, Google, etc). But the rest of the people I knew then are lost to me, mostly. A few names. A few boards. Memories of a very particular time and place. The local online gone with technological sea-change.
BBSs mostly avoided the bad-actor/capital fate Valente describes, being run almost exclusively as solo projects by sysops out of a closet, on a beat-up computer with a dedicated phone line. I'm sure big cities had the commercial ventures, but where I lived they were mostly a thing for hobbyists, something people did because that's what the technology was able to do at the time. Because it was a way to expand your life past the people you saw every day, to meet interesting people. Because it was fun.
Which speaks to their death: once home computers were able to connect to the early internet, the BBS' days were numbered. I went on to the early web in 1994. I was famously unimpressed by my first time browsing the web ("...that's it?!"). I got a home internet connection. I changed my opinion. The first year was entirely text-based, dialing the local freenet at 2400bps in my cracked version of Telix, my access out via lynx and pine and tin. Another email address accessed on a BBS via a WWIVnet/email gateway. Then my shift became graphical: Windows, PPP, Pegasus Mail, Opera and IE. For a few years I did both side-by-side, minding my hours on my metered monthly internet, thirty hours every month, being careful not to go over, spending the rest of the month calling the handful of BBSs that held out despite declining call volumes.
In retrospect, this era was a lot of fun. I made a homepage on GeoCities (<body bgcolor="black"...), and posted to Usenet; I played inter-BBS door games and posted messages to a dwindling set of people. Every day checking my hit counter and guestbook, then planning my empire's moves in Falcon's Eye.
Somewhere in grade twelve, when it was clear that BBSs were basically dead, I threw myself into the web headfirst. Made an online journal. Met friends I'd keep up with a quarter century later. But this was my own introduction to the churn of communities and platforms Valente describes, the user-created forums hinging on the interest of a key person or two, the corporate forums and platforms slowly getting worse, eventually dying, then being replaced. Twitter feels like the end of something, for me. Unlike Valente, I'm not sure I can platform-hop forever. There's got to be something better than putting my data and creative output at the mercy of people and corporations that fundementally don't care.
As I've watched platforms get funded and loved and then used for awful purposes and then crumble, why would I come back for more. LJ became an arm of the Russian government, the servers moved overseas, used to hunt and crush dissidents. When I search for glasses on Google, I get Clearly ads on Facebook forever. Most of my Facebook feed these days is stupid crap: videos, ads, sponsored content, dreck, dreck, dreck. I haven't been active on it in more than a decade but I remember when it allowed me to talk easily with my closest friends. When it was about connection, not engagement. Of course I realize now it never was. Zuckerberg originally started it to rate women on campus without their consent. It was there all along, its end state in plain sight from the beginning.
In the two months since I created this Gemini capsule, I've also created a new website, under a new alias. I've started using Mastodon more. Twitter less. I use cohost, too: the admins seem explicitly not shitty, but, you know, famous last words, and I guess we'll see. My online presence these days is altogether less centralized, with pockets of text routed according to my mood and where I think they'll fit best. The key thing is, what I'm doing is mine. It's intentional. I'm having fun; I'm taking control.
I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again.
Here's something I've felt for a while: that as technology's progressed, or as it's transformed into a model of consumption (which is what a phone favours over a traditional computer with keyboard), it's become harder to find a long-term home. In the new computing model, of trusted apps distributed by a blessed store, apps come from companies and companies need to make money. Valente observes that this is the true driving force: the actual community, to the company, doesn't matter. Communities don't make money. It's the user data they're after. Either to use themselves, or to resell. If you're lucky, it's just to make money. If you're a dissident, and the wrong people get the data, well...
Since the collapse of LiveJournal I've tried to be mindful of how quickly things can change, and that I should try to hold on to whatever data I can. So many memories tucked away in posts and entries that help me remember things that might be otherwise lost. Last year I grabbed my LJ archive. Facebook. Twitter. My presence on various little forums is long gone, but as for Gemini, as for my website (for all my websites), I back everything up to private repos in the cloud. Just in case. Or to come back to later. You never know. I wish I'd held on to all the websites I'd made. Because like so many other people, Valente included, I learned my lesson the hard way, decade after decade. You never know when the thing you love will die. When the people you care about will be gone. But in the meantime, my capsule's here. No corporation behind it. And most importantly, it's mine. To make or to move. If the server dies, you'll find it someplace else.