A case for smaller online communities
I randomly stumbled upon a concept I immediately wanted to participate in. The IndieWeb blog carnival and this months topic is small web communities hosted by Chris Shaw. An open ended stream of thought starter, which led me back about 25 years.
The first time I really felt like being a part of a community was when I joined newz.dk - probably around 2001 or so. It was basically a Danish version of Slashdot with tech news and discussions. Large enough to have decent activity, but also small enough that you could recognise many usernames and everyone together just formed a particular nerdy culture. Similar to many other tech oriented sites at the time. I was still in high school and not nearly as tech experienced as many other people on the site that had IT-careers, though I suspect the average user was probably only a few years older than me. I learned a lot from frequenting that site which led me to engage with the Linux and open source community in Denmark. This led to social gatherings, new friendships and some of us started to hang out on IRC.
All of these were very niche tech communities, which naturally was quite dominant before the Internet really became mainstream so to speak. I remember when things moved gradually to Reddit and Facebook groups, and for a while it was mostly the same feeling. People joined together by a common interest and most of us were just happy to be able to connect with people similar to ourselves. There is plenty of fully warranted criticism on social media now, and there is mountains to be said of what is wrong with it now, but I don’t think social media as a concept was a mistake. It just got too big and influenced by commercial algorithms that didn’t foster great community but engagement metrics instead. I no longer believe it is a good idea for practically the entire population of the planet to be part of the samme massive “community”. It is just too big and too many people to fathom, that all sense of individuality and sense of belonging to a group of peer disappears.
Smaller web communities still exist of course, and some of them even on the big media sites. Some sub-reddits and Facebook groups can still create a similar sense of small online community, and I think the “small” part is key here. These days I feel mostly comfortable on Tildes as it has the best elements of the classic webforum free from algorithmic manipulation, while keeping a respectful code of conduct for mature discussion. Because to be honest, looking back at many of these tech oriented web forums, the overall tone wasn't exactly friendly to outsiders and heavily dominated by young edgy males. There is plenty to be nostalgic about when it comes to the web of two decades ago, but not everything is worth recreating.