Everything must end

If there is anything the internet has teached me and others who have dwell wed beyond mainstream communities it is that all things are temporary. I can think of several irc channels i used to go every day who are now inactive husks, i know of forums where the latests posts are getting older and older. Eventually everything reaches its peak. This site will pass to and remain only as a memory of its golden age. There are so many possibilities of communities to join. I could join an irc at any moment to dwelve into the friendly circl.e jerk and daily chat only for it to be reduced to the same status as all the previous channels i have frequented in the past.

Bump

All the good chans are practicaly dead but 4chan's R9K won't die. It's like that ugly disgusting cockroach who keeps surviving no matter what.

It seemed like it used to be so much easier to find new forums or new websites to frequent and try to encrust yourself in, it seems like more and more communities disappear and i dont know where to

>>10245 Everything is connected. Do not fret over the passing of momentary sensoria, they are like waves crashing on the shore of a vast ocean. Waves roll and break, crash and slide, sand and stone tumble and erode, rivers ebb and flow on their way, carving new paths as they go. If you take a look at matter wave interferometry as a field, you might take away some useful insights. What we perceive as an "end" may just be a translation into a domain our senses do not detect. In quantum mechanics information is always conserved, the exact limits of this principle are still quite hazy and a distinct possibility exists that everything that ever was, is, and will be are all really just the same information recast in new waveforms; Very similarly to how classical mechanics shows energy to be conserved no matter how many differing forms it takes. Of course, this is all still theoretical speculation at best, so take it for what you will. Just try not to get too down over the apparent passage of time and those sensoria that rely so heavily upon it.

>>10446 everything is going towards mainstream websites and then within those giant websites smaller communities form. youtube, reddit, facebook, twitter, instagram, twitch. Any of those are perfect examples of something that allows anyone to post whatever they want and then users naturally fracture into communities of their own

As for me, as for me the experience of being in a community made me to end my belief in a "good Community" or "soft community or "perfect Community for me" itself. I noticed that every community have a lot of demands and have a lot of rules that you should follow to be a part of it. Tthere is no community that will accept you just because it's you. Every community has "us" and "them" and if you change, so that you don't follow the demands of "us", you become "them". I don't believe that there is a community that will accept every my movement.

>>10647 >There is no community that will accept you as you are >You won't accept any community just as it is See? It works both ways. A community influences your behavior by trying to enforce its norms, but you also influence its norms simply by being around and setting a different example. There's always going to be some social tension. What distinguishes good and bad communities is how they deal with that tension.

Blog incoming. I apologize in advance. It's a well-known pattern that popular communities grow, dilute, and eventually split over internal differences, but I think the shift to centralized platforms has really accelerated that cycle. In the early 2000s, most online communities were small, self-hosted, and relatively isolated. Think forums, mailing lists, IRC servers, early chans, etc. You regularly interacted with the same people, so you formed stronger bonds, adopted a lot of each other's habits and tastes, and developed in-jokes, which established a shared group culture. Newcomers trickled in only slowly, so communities had time to "assimilate" them. As a result, group cultures remained pretty unique, which made communities harder to replace, and made users more willing to invest in them by donating, creating original content, volunteering as moderators, hosting events, etc. Over the last 10 years, most of those communities have migrated to centrally hosted mass platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Discord, because those are easier to set up and "free" to maintain. They appear conveniently alongside many competing communities on the same platform, their content is often jammed together into one central feed from users' perspective, and those users can join dozens of communities with the same account. As a result, there is a lot more cross-pollination, the group culture converges more quickly towards homogeneity and mass culture, and the most committed members abandon ship more quickly. To use waveforms as a metaphor: platforms have increased the amplitude and the frequency of that cycle. Communities now rise to great heights much more quickly, but also peak sooner, decline more rapidly, and are replaced more easily (often by a new one on the same platform, so the platform outlasts all of them). In that light, I'm pretty excited about the recent surge in adoption of self-hostable, federated platforms like Mastodon, Pleroma, and Diaspora. Federated platforms keep the advantages of easy discovery and aggregation, but give communities back a lot of autonomy over which other communities to associate with, which users to let in, what kind of content to allow, who should get to moderate, and how. (Not to mention the privacy advantages of ditching the botnet platforms.) Being able to link groups and accounts across nodes also make it easier for members to stay in touch if a community splits. (Maybe the smaller chans should set up an imageboard equivalent of the Fediverse, minus the accounts and usernames, of course.) Since change is inevitable, it's healthy to plan with that in mind. Keep what was good — the friends, the in-jokes, the experience you gained and the new hobbies you picked up — and take it with you to where the action goes.

Just make sure not to end up thinking that "the only constant thing is change" or something along those lines. Even everything being temporary is temporary.

>>10245 Man, I miss phpBB forums. Those were really fun. Even more fun than imageboards. I know - heresy. >>10651 That is so deep man.

mastodon is pretty good

>>10245

>>11131