We used to do the same thing in Newsgroups. It was a sad couple of years when the ones I used to hang out in slowly hollowed out as people migrated to web forum

We used to do the same thing in Newsgroups. It was a sad couple of years when the ones I used to hang out in slowly hollowed out as people migrated to web forums, which was inevitable, as more and more people came onboard and chose the "easiest" route to other people who were into whatever obscure interest you suddenly had a community for. Usenet was limited to nerds and nerd-adjacent people who were shown, on a one-to-one basis, how to use it. My uncle logged me into the local university's mainframe when I was a kid in the mid-80s, absent that influence I would've jumped onboard with everyone else in the late 90s, probably. After the extreme efficiency of desktop Usenet clients, where I could traverse and keep up with many communities in one easy interface, with exactly the text size and font I wanted, I never really joined any web forums to speak of. I would've had to create an account on a different site for every single interest, most web forums had appalling crayon interfaces with zero sorting options or anything like that, they were all functionally corrals rather than intersections. There was no way to efficiently cover that many communities anymore, and the act of engaging had become detestable, but only in the context of what was lost; for those just arriving it was brilliant. I wish there was a word for the expression on my face right now. Once you've been on the internet for any length of time, you start looking back to a better one in the past. It's probably one of those internet laws, like Moore's.