spending a month re-discovering early-web-inspired forums
this month will mark 1 year since i began work on my early-web-inspired message board basement community. the idea behind it was to create a community with a platform that emulated message boards from the early 2000s, but improve upon the features that came out-of-the-box with the software that was offered at the time. early forums from that decade were based on software like vBulletin (or some variant of that), which lacked some basic features such as notifications for someone quoting your forum post. xenforo is a forums software which is more modern and powers a lot of boards that i've seen around the web, but made some bad decisions (like the ability to "like" posts). so that is all to say i thought i could make something better, and i feel like i accomplished that.
basement community was launched last month and since then, i've spent time trying to dig around and see if i could find some other communities to join and learn about what works, what doesn't, and about the people who post on these boards - what drives them to post, etc. here are some cool sites i've found that have niche little communities:
yesterweb
this board is latest one i've found and popular among web development hobbyists. a lot of people on other forums (that i'll talk about later) mentioned they post there, and from what i can tell, there's a strong userbase. the idea of the site is to promote self-expression and creativeness in both the discussion on the forums and showcasing cool websites the users have made themselves.
a couple of their mission statements (source):
To advocate for a no (or low) cost self-expressive and creative hobby (building websites).
To unlearn antisocial online communication techniques, and re-learn to develop meaningful connections with others
the discussions themselves are fun to read - a lot of topics about building websites and asking for help, and more general discussion around the web and other media. if you're going to check out any of these forums, i recommend this one. it's fun to visit the users' sites and see what they're making
melonland
this guy melon has a boat-load of different websites, and you could spend a few hours just jumping around his content. other than his forum, he's got a blog site, a webring which is automatically generated from forum users' websites they add to their profile page, a main site which itself is a very interactive experience, and a game where you explore different planets using your mouse to move around and jump from planet to planet
i don't even know where the best place to start is but i recommend going to the main site and just clicking around
as for the forum, this community is pretty small but friendly. this site also has a lot of places to talk about web development and making things online, but has more spaces for general discussion than yesterweb, so you might find more topics to chat about. the userbase seems a lot younger here, but it's cool to see a lot of people get really hype about web development.
agoraroad
agoraroad is a lot different than the last 2. for one, the userbase seems either a lot older or just less polite, so you might find this place funnier if you're used to sites like Something Awful or any of the chans. the entire site is an ode to vaporwave, and interpret that as you want - you can think of vaporwave as a mood, media, an aesthetic, but honestly if it means anything to you, you'll probably fit right in.
this one has been around for a while and is the biggest in terms of userbase, so you'll have no trouble visiting this site a few times a day and seeing some new content. there's less of a self-promotion vibe on this site, but there is a lot of effort-posting, so if you're looking to get into a involved discussion about the internet and how it affects peoples' psyche (for example), this is the place to post
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