[dartos]

You may be pleased to hear that those kinds of communities are actually alive and well, they just live on places like discord now.

Places that largely can’t be indexed by google.

My hope is that eventually these groups migrate to matrix, but we’ll see.

[treyd]

That's exactly the issue the parent poster is talking about. It's not the web in the strict sense, it's the siloification.

[dartos]

> It's not the web in the strict sense

It kind of is though. Maybe not with discord specifically, because it’s a closed platform. but communities on open ones like matrix are just as much part of the web as any forum.

It’s not a big platform with all users in one space. There are dedicated communities with passionate people talking, sharing ideas, helping each other out.

Would you’ve considered IRC chat rooms on freenode part of the web?

[treyd]

> but communities on open ones like matrix are just as much part of the web as any forum. [...] Would you’ve considered IRC chat rooms on freenode part of the web?

For IRC, absolutely not. IRC (1988) even predates the web (1989). Freenode offered a web-based gateway that ran on their servers, that doesn't make IRC a web protocol.

As for the rest it's slightly fuzzier since in practice they rely on HTTP, but you can't just use a normal web browser to interface with them. You have to run a specialized client that understands the protocol to interact with them. The practicality of the firstparty clients for these platforms/protocols (or in Discord's case the only one you're officially allowed to use) being shipped in a web browser doesn't make the systems "part of the web". The server doesn't give you HTML that you can see in any browser, you make API requests for JSON in a non-W3C-standardized format and interpret it with specialized software. You can't send someone a URL to a message and have them be able to open it in any web browser without additional software.

[dartos]

> You can't send someone a URL to a message and have them be able to open it in any web browser without additional software

You actually can with discord and with certain matrix clients as well.

The clients for those protocols are built on top of web technologies, even if the protocols may not be.

That would discount IRC from being part of the web though.

[treyd]

I am well aware that it's possible to have a link to a discord/matrix message, but it only works if you're already a member of the group and you download the custom software client.

[jjav]

> You may be pleased to hear that those kinds of communities are actually alive and well, they just live on places like discord now.

But that is exactly what it wasn't. Discord is a proprietary walled-garden like too many others today. I tried to access a forum there once and it demanded both registration and a phone number. No thanks. That's not the open Internet.

The open communities were defined by the openness. Using standard protocols like SMTP, NNTP, HTTP (on public websites, not walled gardens).