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 evolution of expert communities
A look at how online forums grow, thrive, and then decay.
RIP social media. What comes next is messy.
As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair?
FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web un-workshop, 2026/03/02
The year we wanted the internet to be smaller
Why tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017
The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter
The common forum that Elon Musk destroyed will never be replaced—and that’s okay.
We can have a different web
Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet
Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.
Forum Design Research
As some may have noticed there are efforts to improve the support forums on WordPress.org. In addition to the backend changes, this seems like a good time to make some design upgrades as well. To k…
The rise of community-curated knowledge networks
The Internet put thousands of years of human thought at our fingertips, and enabled billions of people to create content. At least 2.5…
Some thoughts on Social Networking and Usenet
A little while ago, I wrote a thread on glitch.social about ephemerality of posting on social media as compared to Usenet. It got a little bit of traction, and one person asked if I could post more about Usenet clients. I haven’t gotten to it until today, and I thought I would post on my blog instead of on glitch. The original thread wasn’t really about Usenet clients; it was mainly about how posts on Usenet expired, which is contrary to people’s current expectations about social media, but actually worked very well.
It's time to rebuild the web
The web was never supposed to be a few walled gardens of concentrated content owned by a few major publishers; it was supposed to be a cacophony of different sites and voices.
How the Blog Broke the Web
I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flan
Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how
"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."
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…
