I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I figured this community was exactly the right place to bring it up.
Remember when going online felt like going somewhere? Not just opening an app, but actually arriving somewhere specific. You had your car forum, your home theater board, your little corner of the internet where people knew what they were talking about and genuinely wanted to talk about it. There was a texture to it that’s hard to describe if you didn’t live through it, and nearly impossible to find now.
What we have instead is… the feed. An endless scroll of content optimized to keep us looking at it, not actually connecting with anyone. Facebook, Instagram, X, whatever you want to call it today. They’re incredible at pulling you in and terrible at making you feel like you belong somewhere. You’re not really in a community, you’re in an audience.
The old forums weren’t perfect. Don’t get me wrong. There were arguments, there were trolls, there were threads that went completely off the rails. But there was also something genuine underneath all of it. People were there because they cared about the specific thing, not because an algorithm served it to them.
I wrote a bit more about why this has been on my mind over on the blog if you want the longer version of that thought: The Internet Used to Feel Like Home
But honestly, the reason I’m posting it here is because you all are kind of the proof of concept. This forum exists because I think that feeling is worth trying to rebuild. Not out of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, but because the way we used to connect online actually worked better in a lot of ways.
So I’m curious: what communities or forums from back in the day stuck with you? And do you think something like that is still possible to build today?