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 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.
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…
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."
idiot's guide to standard.site - leafy
blogs are back! but why are they different now???
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.
The Sites We Lost
A memorial to the weird little corners of the internet that lived on The Useless Web.
FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web:<br>An Online Un-Workshop
Since the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk over three years ago, the Open Social Web has been adopted by an enthusiastic community. People world-wide are building and using open social platforms and open social protocols to better interact with others online.
rhosf.leaflet.pub/3mqsznoy55k2s/ Such an interesting post by @tessa.germnetwork.com! I feel like I have a different perspective on the social network vs. social media terms having lived through that era, but I definitely think about this distinction a lot too!
People, Not Posts
rhosf.leaflet.pubPeople 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…
