What We Lost When We Quit Using Crappy Old Web Forums
Old web forums were poorly coded and rough around the edges, but maybe we gave up on them too quickly in the social media era.
The Forum Doesn't Remember, and Doesn't Cumulate
The forum has more and more contribution. Almost none of it cumulates into insight the movement can use together.
The evolution of expert communities
A look at how online forums grow, thrive, and then decay.
The Attention Forum: October 23/24th 2025
The internet was initially sold to us as a force for connection – a borderless, democratizing set of technologies that would amplify voices, allow us to spread ideas, and strengthen civil society.
Trust: Foundation of Human Knowledge yet online Platforms won't allow | David Karger | TEDxMIT Salon
14 Theses on Online Political Violence
The old world of content safety practices is dead, and the new one is struggling to be born.
Governing Online Speech: From 'Posts-As-Trumps' to Proportionality and Probability
Online speech governance stands at an inflexion point. Platforms are emerging from the state of emergency invoked during the pandemic and lawmakers are poised t
They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.
Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.
The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter
The common forum that Elon Musk destroyed will never be replaced—and that’s okay.
this is really great, and i'm glad that you're thinking about it!! I just started building @atmobb.app and wanted to build a way for it to pull in topics from similar forums and landed on subscribing to a "topic" for those forums. very excited to see what happens!!
new: Blacksky People’s Assembly conversations display embedded inside posts on blacksky.community In our next conversation, you’ll be able to vote on People's Assembly topics while scrolling the feed and without leaving our app. 🗳️
Rude1 Haunted Badness. ⁂
Our next @blackskyweb.xyz People's Assembly will have you login with your atproto account to participate. On login we'll match your handle/email/DID to our subscribers, open source supporters and check for Blacksky membership (in feed or blacksky.app) Badge + profile will show next to statements.
People are misunderstanding what happened here. They mostly did not go back to twitter. They went to linkedin or substack or threads nowhere and so interesting technical conversations simply didn't happen that could have.
Ryan Moulton
Lots of people tried to reconstruct the ML/AI/stats community over here. 90% of them left because the random abuse they got for just posting ordinary research results was too much. bsky.app/profile/jwherrman.bsky.social…
I wish the Atmosphere had content warnings (like on the fediverse)... because I'd like to show you the limits of free speech absolutism and the kind of content that is allowed on #WSocial: blatant racism, xenophobia and transphobia. X vibes... but hey, it's "hosted in Europe" 😒
