>open thread about a problem I'm having
>first reply is by some obviously "respected" guy
>avatar is some incredibly choppy anime gif
>all caps red name, underlined
>VIP member - top contributor
>some other custom subtitle about the sites culture or some shit
>40k posts
>[SITENAME] clan
>Recent achievements: 1000 hours online, 10k posts, achieved years ago
>joined Dec 2005
>10000 Karma
>like 20 fucking red stars under his name
>From: the Underworld or some edgy shit
>MSN, Facebook, E-mail, Skype, AIM, literally everything
>personal website that has the same name as his nick, just a bunch of gifs
>signature is like 4 paragraphs, 2 quotes, like 20 fucking toolbars or irrelevant shit like nvidia user, coca cola drinker, air breather, removed etc
>some edited anime image at the end of his signature with his nick stylized on it
>read his post
>"i dont know lol"
They're nostalgic to me too but I definitely don't miss them
They kind of were what the fediverse wants to be without the bonus featrues. There were thousands upon thousands of small decentralized communities with tightly knit communities. If a board simply sucked, you could go to another one. Of course they did not federate, you had to create different accounts for each of them and information was only passed on by users being in multiple ones. However, they had traction. Unlike with lemmy today, there were hundreds of active communities for every topic I ever wanted.
A webring is as close as you could get to federating. No SSO, but you could use different sign-ins just like going from lemmy to kbin or so.