I used to run one named ArtGrounds.com between 2005 and 2012. It was one of those small and cozy Internet communities. Three things killed it: 1. I kept twisti

I used to run one named ArtGrounds.com between 2005 and 2012. It was one of those small and cozy Internet communities. Three things killed it: 1. I kept twisting knobs to make it grow faster until people got fed up and left. 2. Internet art communities were dying in general. 3. Sketcher, the Java applet I had developed for multi-user real-time collaborative digital painting using pressure sensitive Wacom digitisers — the main draw of the site — was rapidly getting outdated as the Web began to reject Java. HTML5 was still a few years away, making it impossible to implement high-performance graphics apps in the browser. By the time WebGL made the kind of rendering I needed viable in a browser, the site was long gone. That era of web development was a frustrating time for me. Java in the browser was abandoned without offering a full replacement for its number crunching, graphics and media capabilities. My strong suite was the kind of software you typically write in C/C++ and the web ecosystem just wasn't able to do that kind of thing at the time. I basically sat there and wanted WASM and WebGL and all these other rich web technologies to exist, but they just didn't.