The Forum Doesn't Remember, and Doesn't Cumulate

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.

atmoBB Forums

🤟 bringing back forum culture

atBB Community Forum — atBB Forum

Statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol

Foreword This statement was originally published on the swicg/general repository after I had been granted approval to merge. Since then one community member has raised that it did not follow the Community Group's processes, and consequently the document has been taken down from the original location. When publishing,

The evolution of expert communities

A look at how online forums grow, thrive, and then decay.

Claude carries memory into work - Sensemaker

Chat and cloud Cowork now share remembered topics; continuity improves, but so can the reach of a mistake.

Permissioned Data Shapes: Forums - Nick's Blog

A forum with public categories, private categories, and one set of record shapes across both: members own their posts, the forum owns the submission wrappers that admit them into categories, and moderators deactivate into tombstones instead of deleting.

Introducing AI to an Online Petition Platform Changed Outputs but not Outcomes

The rapid integration of AI writing tools into online platforms raises critical questions about their impact on content production and outcomes. We leverage a unique natural experiment on Change$.$org, a leading social advocacy platform, to causally investigate the effects of an in-platform ''write with AI'' tool. To understand the impact of the AI integration, we collected 1.5 million petitions and employed a difference-in-differences analysis. Our findings reveal that in-platform AI access significantly altered the lexical features of petitions and increased petition homogeneity, but did not improve petition outcomes. We confirmed the results in a separate analysis of repeat petition writers who wrote petitions before and after introduction of the AI tool. The results suggest that while AI writing tools can profoundly reshape online content, their practical utility for improving desired outcomes may be less beneficial than anticipated, and introduce unintended consequences like content homogenization.

ViewSift

The web's evidence-based discussion platform. Built on ATProto!

ViewSift

The web's evidence-based discussion platform. Built on ATProto!

Mnemonic convergence in social networks: The emergent properties of cognition at a collective level

Significance Human memory is highly malleable. Because of this malleability, jointly remembering the past along with another individual often results in increased similarity between the conversational partners’ memories. We propose an approach that examines the conversation between a pair of participants as part of a larger network of social interactions that has the potential to reveal how human communities form collective memories. Empirical evidence indicating that dyadic-level conversational alignment processes give rise to community-wide shared memories is presented. We find that individual-level memory updating phenomena and social network structure are two fundamental factors that contribute to the emergence of collective memories. , The development of shared memories, beliefs, and norms is a fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent outcomes are thought to occur owing to a dynamic system of information sharing and memory updating, which fundamentally depends on communication. Here we report results on the formation of collective memories in laboratory-created communities. We manipulated conversational network structure in a series of real-time, computer-mediated interactions in fourteen 10-member communities. The results show that mnemonic convergence, measured as the degree of overlap among community members’ memories, is influenced by both individual-level information-processing phenomena and by the conversational social network structure created during conversational recall. By studying laboratory-created social networks, we show how large-scale social phenomena (i.e., collective memory) can emerge out of microlevel local dynamics (i.e., mnemonic reinforcement and suppression effects). The social-interactionist approach proposed herein points to optimal strategies for spreading information in social networks and provides a framework for measuring and forging collective memories in communities of individuals.

Bridging Social Movements and the New Social Web (working draft) - Variable Context with @CaptainCalliope.blue

On connecting movements, media, and new protocol ecosystems to rebuild the civic, cultural, and technical foundations of a freer, more self-determining society.

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.