[Okawari]

It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.

Group sizes were smaller and as such easier to moderate. There could be plenty of similar interest forums which meant even if you pissed of some mods, there were always other forums. Invite only groups that recruited from larger forums (or even trusted members only sections on the same forum) were good at filtering out low value posters.

There were bots, but they were not as big of a problem. The message amplification was smaller, and it was probably harder to ban evade.

[thesuitonym]

> I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.

So do it. Forums haven't gone away, you just stopped going to them. Search for your special interest followed by "Powered by phpbb" (or Invision Community, or your preferred software) and you'll find plenty of surprisingly active communities out there.

[Okawari]

Yeah, you are right! I have started going down that road the last year or so, but mostly in the IRC sphere. I started hanging out libera.chat, but found a smaller community on irc.inthemansion.com which I really enjoy.

I'm probably just jaded as most of the forums I visited back in the day became ghost towns during the 2010s. I should make more of an effort here

[KPGv2]

> It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.

IME young people use Discord, and those servers often require permission to even join. Nearly all my fandom communications happen on a few Discord servers, most of which you cannot join without an invitation, and if you're kicked (bad actors will be kicked), you cannot re-join (without permission).

[mycall]

It happens in some places like Russia (MAX App) or in China (WeChat/Alipay) but do we want to go down that authoritarian road?

[adzm]

You're describing Discord today

[Q6T46nT668w6i3m]

Bots are a major problem on Discord. I frequently receive messages to buy MMO gold.