tl;dr the internet didn't used to be about making money, it was a place where people created all kinds of content, for almost no reason at all, and almost nobody was making any money, except AOL which blew all their money on CDs probably

Great post, thanks for taking the time to write this.

I loved the old forums, and couldn't quite see the point of Facebook when it came out. I thought it was just for self-obsessed 'models' and wannabe 'celebs' when I first heard about it! I joined it eventually of course, as all my friends did and I wanted to see what it was all about. Over the years I've had a love/hate thing with FB and only check in a couple of times a week now.

I liked Reddit, it reminded me of the old forums. I like Lemmy more though. It's still got that feeling I remember back in the old forum days before everyone and his dog got online on their phones and things seemed to go downhill.

VC backed user experience

the other users forced me to do it by moving

Hosting a forum costs money, and we ain't got that

Well written, interesting article.

Really getting momentum from Reddit will be tough though. Our main advantage is that we have the rest of the Fediverse as a potential user base, and existing forum apps that also activate apub; reducing network effects. If the Fediverse has momentum, so has the threadiverse.