I agree. Kind of a tangential brain-dump: Fora on the old web tended to be nominally devoted to a topic, but each had a massively thriving "Off-Topic", "Genera

I agree. Kind of a tangential brain-dump: Fora on the old web tended to be nominally devoted to a topic, but each had a massively thriving "Off-Topic", "General Discussion", or "Random" board where the overarching theme of the forum served more as a background ambience. The userbase was small enough that one "knew" the different personalities, and membership in a forum felt more substantial than on big platforms like Reddit or Twitter, where you either become a microceleb or you're just a fly on the wall of the dead internet (maybe even both). Moderation was less formal, and since mods got to know users fairly well, even an egregious rule violation could be forgiven if you emailed them to apologize. You'd even have high-quality trolls who became accepted as court jesters. And since there was a lot more fragmentation and a lot less overlap in moderation, you'd be more comfortable holding your tongue in a particular setting since you had other outlets for speaking your mind on verboten topics (and usually those topics were better-defined, though power-tripping mods would still interpret and apply the rules creatively). I like a lot about the fediverse, but I don't think it can recapture that experience. I might just be old and curmudgeonly though.