Good old online communities

I have been looking forward to writing something for this month’s IndieWeb carnival simply because the theme was so close to my heart. For May, Chris Shaw asked us to think about “small web communities” and I remember thinking to myself that I both knew exactly what I wanted to write about and had no idea where to begin. That explains, in part, why I only got around to writing this essay now, at the end of May.

To me, small web communities are dead. Others would argue they have simply transformed: Chris’s definition of this term includes “forum software, WhatsApp groups, Discord, Zoom, blog networks and many, many more.” While I like the inclusivity of this definition, I find it incredibly hard to think of any of these as “small web” communities because they follow the era of corporatisation of the web. They are, however, communities. Like the IndieWeb, the small web signifies a time when the web was, in spirit, small even if large by other measures like database sizes, complexity, user head counts and such.

That is why I think of RuneScape and Club Penguin, with their tens or hundreds of thousands of members as “small web” communities, as closely knit as a dozen-strong Call of Duty LAN party¹. Save for a WhatsApp group of your friends (and not that other group with half your town talking about the weekend park run) nothing today can qualify reasonably as “small” in spirit in my opinion.

I am, like several others, on numerous Discord servers, each dedicated to something I like. A cursory glance tells me I am a member of a few flight simulation groups, a server for our county, an FC Bayern server, servers of a couple of CMSes I frequently use, and a few app-specific servers I have not visited for months now. I know I can talk to people on these servers anytime and that they will respond (likewise too) should I have anything to share or ask; but despite engaging in every way possible, and despite ‘knowing’ popular commenters, I have hardly built any special connections with individuals that would make these communities feel close-knit. There are more lurkers today than participants because we no longer think of these places as intended for participation at all but instead as transactional zones.

Compare this with RuneScape which I joined in the early 2000s, long before Club Penguin even existed, and a year or two shy of the dawn of MySpace. You tended to know even less about a fellow RuneScape player than you might about someone on a community today but the shared experience—rather than mere verbal exchange—you had, for anywhere from ten minutes to a couple of hours, stayed with you much longer, felt more fulfilling and left you with plenty of positive memories. I still think back to the fun I had back then.

Today’s communities are more about information exchange than shared experiences.² With every community we have a well-defined purpose and a businesslike approach to engagement.

When you decked your igloo on Club Penguin and invited fellow players over for a game, and when they left a note appreciating your work, there were rarely any strings attached. Today, there is always a corporate overlord. There are ads, there are privacy concerns, people are used to a system of reward that fundamentally cripples the possibility of anonymity unless it also drags with it a veil to hide indecency. We have come from a time when the “small web” community did not care for your identity to a time when showing your identity in the open is a singular sign of trustworthiness.

But why is this the case? We used to view communities as welcoming places³ where experiences mattered more than the people. We now view communities as fundamentally flawed and needing individual verification to show any hints of trust. Today, the person matters more than the experience but in a bad way: some people choose to look at the person jut so they can decide whether to subscribe to everything they say or reject it all outright. This is fundamentally why small web communities are dead today. There is no longer a presumption of good faith.

The last thing I want to do is put a dampener on this month’s IndieWeb carnival theme; not least because terrific people have written terrific things about it already, but they do have things that—if indirectly—also recognise my own arguments.⁴ For example, Juhis’s reflections of his communities are in fact communities he has himself nurtured with people he has known or met, and he expended time and energy as the nucleus around which strangers transformed into acquaintances; Ruslan reminisces about the web that was; Loren’s favourite small web community shut down; Yordi’s time on the GTA community is a thing of the past; and Britt and Jeppe acknowledge that small web communities no longer truly exist and call for new, even better, ones.

In each case the “small web” is either undeniably history or requires constant, effortful nurturing. There is no longer hope for organic growth because they always become too big, too capitalistic or simply become all about a platform instead of the exchanges they enable. Think of the early days of MySpace where you were encouraged to do things on your page that made it uniquely yours but would probably be frowned upon today, like adding background music. And it was normal to visit and interact without a quid pro quo arrangement. Rarely did we think, what do I get in return? Because the act of interacting was its own reward.

Instagram recently introduced something comparable but who ever spends time on anyone else’s profile today? There is plenty of overstimulation on our home page streams that we rarely bother to visit individuals. And interaction is no longer a reward; we always have to ask ourselves, what do I get in return? What does it cost me to do this?

As Jeppe rightly points out, though, there is a heavy dose of nostalgia in all that we have discussed so far. There were things that were problematic back then too, which we would do well to get rid of. But are today’s communities any better? We have worse problems and none of the charm. Small web communities, to me, are dead. But they are also precisely what we need more of today. The only question is who is going to build anything like it? Who is going to expend time and effort and money? And of course the question every entrepreneur starts with: what do I get in return?