There's a strong part of me that thinks that a model not unlike BBSes with Fidonet might be the way to go. Everyone gets to have their own little bastion of the 'net that they control, filled with their own content (games, warez, text files, the good ol' shit) and global email/forums/chat provided in a decentralized way. When people are arseholes, you cut them off by blocking them from your server, and we all move on.

I keep toying with building a modern version of that using some of the existing fediverse infrastructure, but I just don't have the time or attention span for it. Partially because my attention span was fried by Instagram.

> basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s of known people. I thought about this recently… It was really better times.

I'm going to take a wild guess and assume this is how you grew up?

It's simply a better model to connected online. I use present tense because the "better times" didn't really go away: it becomes Discord servers.

The bad part, of course, is that Discord is owned by one single entity and not indexed like the open web is.

I did, and it truly was better. Threaded forums are far better at facilitating complex discussions, organizing information, and making the information accessible. Today, most communication is happening inside the walled gardens of Facebook, Discord, etc. That information is effectively being lost rather than being neatly organized and easily searchable.

Kind of, yeah.

IRC, simple php forums, no TLS, easy stuff. Nowadays we're full of technology and very poor content. In no way can mastodon (mentioning because it's the defacto decentralized social media) solve that problem. It's really easy to post stuff that shouldn't be posted.

On the other hand, crappy looking forums, slow internet connection, you really had to take the time to think about what to say and mainly why say it in the first place. It was more about the content than about quantity.

Just put a propagation delay on the information, like the physical world. Human socialization is evolved to handle the physical world.

> go back to old SMF/php forums

Some of us are old enough to remember when those were already the enshitification stage, and would prefer to go back to usenet

"Eternal September" was a more serious problem than we knew.

Ahahah I believe you! Some forums were really bad. :)