General

I miss the Internet forum. Discord or FB groups is a step, or a couple steps back. Forums were indexed by search engines, threaded, searchable. It made collecting large information banks much easier.

I go on a few old school forums. They are the equivalent to a quaint town while social media is like a busy and loud city full of bitter people.

On a related note I am tired of Reddit and Quora monopolizing the search results.

What forums you recommend?
About Reddit and Quora: Reddit is Okayish but Quora looks like an AI-generated website these days.
Btw does anyone here still use Usenet?

+1 on forums. Thankfully, we’re on one right now.

Up until the last few years, there were still quite a few independent forums with their own looks, feels, history, etc. Most of the ones i went to got swallowed up by VerticalScope Inc. While i’m grateful to them for keeping the forums going as forum founders got worn out, bored, age out, etc., they consistently nuke what made each of the sites unusual or unique, to shoehorn into their XenForo Fora standardized platform. Yeah sure it’s all well and good for one learning curve across many forums, but it’s a sad loss. For one example, try a Wayback Machine view of automaticwasher.org vs. the current site. For another… Dimensions!

Some things that used to be, say Yahoo! Groups are now on groups.io. The Tektronix oscilloscope group is the one i discovered was still alive there.

I miss Usenet Newsgroups. Got off track on those in the early 2000s, having trouble finding a server with the switch from dialup to broadband Internet. So much more sane to have the basic text rather than all the HTML (and later CSS) overhead of a WWW forum.

(12 Dec.: Fixed the Wayback URL. Originally used decimal instead of hex escapes. I was tired.)

One of them is an autism community (Wrong Planet) and the other one focuses on lost media. (Lost Media Wiki)

I have often deleted my Reddit accounts. I might keep my current alt but for now I am thinking of finding an alternative. In my case it impacts my mental health with all the doomerism.

;: still use NNTP (usenet) to read news. There's a gateway called gwene.org which can convert any rss feed to an Usenet group.

I've been listening to the radio recently. I like using Radio Garden which lets you listen to stations from any location even outside of the US.

I can remember seeing a dumb YT comment questioning why do people still listen to the radio when there is YT and streaming services. Personally for me, I have gotten tired of my playlists and want to expand my music taste by listening to various songs from a station.

Not to mention I find that way less distracting instead of being unsure what song to play next.

I miss the actul community of online sites. I miss rping and posting. I miss geting to discuss things and how people used to not be so rude. I can't do alot of fb groups now a day cause of the drama. I miss faning over writing and sharing things that make me happy and your friend being generally interested and happy for you. Now its all like blaaa. I also hate that online you dont matter unless you're an influencer. That took the fun out of making content. I still make it for me. but then, if you don't have a whole bunch of views and followers, people make comments about not having that and call it a waste of time. The interwebs where to have fun back in the day not a profit margin.