I’ve seen online communities you noobs wouldn’t believe. Attacking comments in the forums of Usenet. I’ve seen Geocities blinking under a million construction GIFS, and threaded flame wars spanning hundreds of LiveJournals. These memories will be lost…like tears in rain…
This is probably part of why everyone on bluesky is 38 years old: 38 year olds are basically the only people who consider it totally normal to flee a sinking ship and then just casually resume the conversation on the tropical island they end up on.
They've outlived dozens of ships.
"threaded flame wars spanning hundreds of LiveJournals"
And spilling over to Journalfen, and off to the comment threads on Whatever and to Making Light and eventually to FFanon...
If you wanted to try to hook up with someone from iscabbs, you had no idea what they looked like unless they had mailed you a photo. Usenet didn't even have a Star Wars group. I've seen some shit, man.
It was the guy who made my "GIRL SPOTTED" thread in FYAD 🤣 he spent the entire date making fun of furries at me but I needed to date a guy real quick to get the are-you-gay heat off me. He showed me his dick right after meeting my parents when he came to pick me up for our first (& ONLY) date 😩
I came here to say this... I'm 60.
there was also gopher, ICQ, URouLette, Prodigy, blogger, many search engines, dozens of "better bulletin board" attempts, music and movie pirate sites, and the heyday of aggregators like Slashdot and Boing Boing. They flared up like supernovas, then we moved on.
