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The thing is that before most of the Internet population was in those places, and granted the population was much smaller (with pretty good self-filtering). But now everyone is scattered in the social media meme hellscape, and those old cool places are mostly populated by greybeards (not necessarily old-aged, just old-timers). Don't get me wrong, they are very cool people, and usually quite welcoming, but superficially so. Once you start trying to get into these communities a bit more seriously, you realize is just a big pile of old drama, discursive substance has long left, and it's just a bunch of weird old friends you don't know hanging out. The most extreme instance of this are old MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). Oh man, I really want them to be big thing again, they are so deep and interesting. Like old bulletin-boards, IRC and forums, but embedded in a living world. The closest we've gotten to an actual social metaverse world simulation is in text-form. Some are still relatively active, but most users are not engaged with the world anymore, it's mostly just a small chatroom with a musky odor. I do agree that HN is a big exception to this, and there are indeed fresh federated platforms that are thriving. Mastodon is the main one, although I was never a big fan of the Twitter formula. And I couldn't get into Lemmy as a Reddit alternative, it's still too sparse and wild, the focus on semi-isolated server communities is both a strength and a significant source of disorientation. |
All the content comes from basically an m3u8 playlist, so you can scrape it if you like (which I do), but it's mostly older folks who just hang out and chat all day about old sci-fi/horror movies. Occasionally, someone I know from IRL way back shows up.