>This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet.
This has been my lived experience with a few places the past couple of years, and I love it. It's a completely different experience from the "pop web" that most people use and it's amazing.
>Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore.
I know that my example can't speak for most/many other places, but the regional hiking forums I frequent (same places I alluded to above) come up a lot on search engines. Whether you're looking for "[region] hiking", or looking up "[name of] trail", or anything related to it, the pages pop up towards the top quite frequently. It's how I found them, and there does seem to be a steady number of new users joining.
Maybe it actually can be alright for a niche as relatively large as hiking, but I think it has done some real damage to smaller niches, which seem to struggle to maintain active forums.
This has been my lived experience with a few places the past couple of years, and I love it. It's a completely different experience from the "pop web" that most people use and it's amazing.
>Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore.
I know that my example can't speak for most/many other places, but the regional hiking forums I frequent (same places I alluded to above) come up a lot on search engines. Whether you're looking for "[region] hiking", or looking up "[name of] trail", or anything related to it, the pages pop up towards the top quite frequently. It's how I found them, and there does seem to be a steady number of new users joining.