When I was a kid I was pretty active on Neoseeker, between 2004-2009ish. I have very fond memories of the friends I had on there and I find it so cool (and mortifying lol) that I can go back and look at the posts I used to make when I was going through my formative years. I work in IT so I naturally work with a lot of folks that play games and they all are familiar with Neoseeker from back then. It’s so interesting to think of how many folks used to post on there because it has become a bit of a ghost town since places like Discord and Reddit seem to be the primary replacements for forums.
I definitely miss the community aspect of older forums and I catch myself frequently browsing older posts here because the posts tend to a bit more thoughtful and not snarky/quippy like on other websites. Posters being more thoughtful here is due to the kind of community Epos has cultivated but I’m also curious if the less “transient” (does that make sense?) nature of this forum has led to a better sense of community and overall more kind comments and discussion. I also enjoy that messages here don’t get lost in the ether like reddit threads/discord messages. I’m very excited at the prospects of more indie web related sites and forums popping up, it makes the internet feel as fun as it used to!
I always live/lived on the lurker side of social media: scrolling to read what other people wrote, but rarely posting my own thoughts. Most of the time, i just don’t care to discuss the news/controversy for (insert game of the week). Parroting the same thing other people say doesn’t improve the discussion in my mind. If I’m watching a movie/TV show or playing a game, it’s for my own enjoyment. And many times it’s months/years/decades after it was released, so the zeitgeist is over.
The only forum I remember using regularly was at MacRumors in the 2000s. It was a fun time to see early details of new Apple hardware. Or follow along as someone tries to overclock a 700Mhz eMac for beyond what it should be capable of doing. Or discussing gaming in an era where it took companies like Apsyr Media and Feral Interactive months/years to port Windows/Intel/DirectX games to OSX/PPC/OpenGL. Or finding some elusive item in the For Sale section, like my ATi 9800Pro Mac Edition. Alas, life has a way of changing and I moved away from forums as Apple moved away from PPC
I’ve also mostly been a lurker on social media. Mostly reddit, but hearing people get nostalgic for the golden age of the old internet makes it sound like we’ve really lost something. All of the fediverse stuff has sounded neat, but I haven’t really found much to engage with in the places I’ve looked. That might have something to do with my level of engagement though. I have to sit down and think out a post I make here, but I have enjoyed the level of community and good-faith engagement you all seem to have here. Do you think it has to do with the intention we put into what we engage with?
Also, have you guys found any other indie web sites or forums that you’ve enjoyed? Or maybe had thoughts on what you might like to find?
Most of my early childhood years I was stuck with dial-up, which resulted in me not really surfing the web until around middle school. By that point though, Facebook & Reddit were already becoming established platforms and gobbling up much of the internet, so forums were really not a part of my core internet experience.
That being said, around early high school I got my own PC with a wireless USB stick so I could use it in my own room, which also lined up with me dipping my toes into PC gaming a bit more. Even though I was running purely integrated graphics on some i3 chip of the time, I really was fascinated with Team Fortress 2 and would hop in and lock in Scout even though I was playing what was essentially a power point presentation at the worst of times. A couple years after that, after building my first PC after scraping together a couple paychecks from my first job, I ended up getting super involved with a community server group and forums were the primary source of communication for the group (outside of the game & Steam Group to push event notifications.)
I really enjoyed the way that it helped bridge communication outside of the game (especially across smaller per-server micro-groups), and can recall really looking forward to getting home and checking for any conversation updates before hoping on the server after dinner. In many ways, the community aspect that you outlined that exists here existed there as well too, although maybe a little less thoughtful and more so a space to continue silly in-game conversation or organize play. I really enjoyed the space and community, it’s sadly not really around too much nowadays due to Valve changing the matchmaking and much of the core group just getting on with their lives— but I hold a lot of nostalgia for the game & community, and truly think that the forums had a big part in that. I used to check back from time to time over the years, the forums stayed up for a good 10 years or so after the heydays, but now days the URL just redirects to a Rick Roll, which in a way is just a good way to ride off into the sunset with it.
I’m definitely keen on the, as you put it, less "transient nature” of forums. I think the lack of infinite scroll is a big part of that (one of the worst progressions in social media, I really like a definitive “done” spot.)
Everything was more insular back then. That made it easier to make friends, even IRL friends. But it also meant that you didn’t get much outside perspective. And the flame wars on forums were just as fierce as on social media (which also wrecked a few friendships).