[indigochill]

> Pre-facebook basically means a 90s style forum with highly specialised zed communities. You don't need decentralised approaches for that.

For a number of years I was a forum moderator for a game forum called Uru Obsession. Eventually that wound down and the forum closed, meaning all those discussions have also been lost (unless someone backed them up - by the time they closed I had moved on, so I dunno), and that community as far as I know has mostly dissolved since its closure.

A gossip protocol means there is no host - clients communicate directly with each other and also store the conversation locally so someone else deciding to stop paying hosting costs becomes a non-issue.