I've got to say, I think it's really fucking unfortunate that people seem to have un-learned
exploring the internet, and never re-learned that even now. Small independent forums could easily flourish again with what's going on, but that's not what's happened - instead, we've got a situation where even sites like this have, quite frankly, a disproportionate amount of JIDF and fed op posters and no real increase in usership to make up for it. A lot of the people who still regularly use interactive sites are still hooked up to Twitter, Instagram, fbi.gov, etc. … because those sites are still more active and they, unfortunately, seem to not have the willpower to go somewhere else.
What's more, sites like this, because of the persistent (even if very small compared to twitter) zio/glowops posting can turn a lot of potential users off. I remember, unfortunately, hesitating to join .net during its best years because, on .org, people would always post screenshots of the catalog with a bunch of Nazi & reactionary shit in it. It was misleading as to the real nature of this site, but also… you, know, I kind of wonder sometimes if we don't have a problem with a bunch of Nazi/eugenics/pedo shitposters whose entire purpose is to shit up the catalog and make us look bad to people who come here from other sites.
I personally believe the Bunkerchan coup which created .org as we know it today was a trick by feds, not that I can prove it… but shit like that did happen with 8ch and 4chan, so maybe!There was also this, frankly, very strange thing that happened around 2015-2016 where leftist and left-leaning online communities just started suiciding for no apparent reason. The most prominent example was RevLeft - really fucking absurd how that happened. Other boards closed, too, using a lot of, in retrospect very fucking obviously astroturfed, talking points about how
too much free speech was bad, which inevitably only benefitted reactionary propaganda when this whole fake-ass talking point was pretty much exclusively peddled by lapsed liberals masquerading as leftists and contrasting themselves with communities like 4Chan (where the right-wing turn was itself astroturfed in the 2010s, in significant part by rich pedophiles). It's really fucking contemptible the level of idiocy displayed by the fucking fools (if they didn't know what they were doing) in the early-to-mid 2010s, t
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