So the past of the internet?

Basically forums

It is for me, but I have my doubts that the majority will avoid the corporate-owned spaces.

I think by now we have figured out the majority of people are garbage and you only want to spend time with a select group. Discord seems to have this figured out.

I wasn't too early, but I joined reddit around the Dota 2 beta, so circa 2012, and damn the site became more and more garbage the more people it had, most comments became nothing but karma farming one liners, references or snide shit.

Communities grew into massive echo chambers, quality of discussions went down the drain.

Check out Neocities, a great community of indie web fans, built in the spirit of the old GeoCities sites.

Some really great sites there, it really captures that late 90's to early 2000's internet vibes.

Real issue is how much effort are people willing to put to maintain those communities.

The future is the past!

Just like as it was in the past

Sounds a lot like the past. And, actually, a bit like the current internet. Custom websites, feed syndication, etc. didn't disappear, they just shrank in the face of behemoth platforms.

Small communities where one can talk about specific subjects? Man there's something like that already and people can run it from their own computers too, forgot the name though.

I do not hold with this, at all. After leaving Twitter two years ago, and going to Mastodon, and Mbin, when the world started to come to an end three weeks ago, when Trump flipped to making the US and ally of Russia against the world, I needed to be plugged in, so with years of reservations against supporting anything fucking Jack was involved in (he's still the largest single shareholder of bluesky stock, so fuck off telling me he stepped away from the board), I finally signed up for Bluesky, because when shit is going down, I don't need to be browsing some lefty tankie currated community for realtime news, I need to be jacked in to the widest collective there is, so I can parse and disseminate information for every source possible.

Is there something like a masterlist of forums. Id like to join some but dont know where to look.

It costs money to run these things so monetization always rears its head.

Thank fuck the corporate silo era is (slowly) coming to an end. And they tried so hard to turn it into TV 2.0.

yes, but where could we find something like that?

First the internet needs to rise against techno-fascism!!

The future of the web may be relearning the browser (and other tools)

Curated experiences are the reason we're in the shit right now.

But yeah, maybe boutique curated exepriences will somehow be qualitatively different, and not just finer market segmentation.

One might suggest that it should have always been that way.

https://tildeverse.org/