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Comment by rexer | Hacker News Reader

This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I help move along the transition to smaller communities?

The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?

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You only need two friends and a chat server to have a community. I've been running one for my friends, like a self hosted discord, for almost ten years. It is by far my most valuable online space. There's maybe a dozen users. Whatever. It's great.

> Self-Hosted Discord

How does one achieve this?

Downloads some forum software and runs in it on a VPS or similar?

There are also some FOSS Discord clones in various states of maturity

irc if you don't require any bells and whistles. matrix if you want attachments and encryption. zulip if you're running a company.

IMO Matrix is awfully heavy and impractical, when XMPP works just as well if not better.

I'm administering both Matrix/synapse and XMPP/prosody servers and I wouldn't do the former if it wasn't my job.

I don't mean to advocate for Discord (they sure don't need it!) but if the requirement is to host an exclusive space for a dozen people, Discord does that.. you just make a "server"/guild and only invite trusted friends.

This doesn't solve any of the other problems (what happens when Discord enshittifies? Is it acceptable that Discord updates basically every single day? Is it OK that they constantly advertise video games in the form of little notifications saying "stream 30 minutes of _____ to a friend and unlock an avatar for your profile!"?) but it does seem to solve the 'how do I have a platform for my friends and I to talk" one.

> stream 30 minutes of _____ to a friend and unlock an avatar for your profile!

Sounds like enshitifications has begun already

I'm on a couple of email lists that have a similar vibe. A dozen or two active participants. No ads, no giant corporation trying to push engagement or steer the narrative. You just have to ignore the occasional FOMO feelings and understand that no, trying to find "community" in a sea of 10,000,000 users on a giant social network is not how we are wired.

Absolutely. I'm in about 10 communities like this. I don't think I need global reach or hundreds or thousands of "friends".

For a wider net, I have a self-curated feed on Lemmy and Mastodon. It's super clean and positive compared to suggestive social media.

The old Internet will never be back, but The Good Parts still exist and can be remade. I don't have to visit the shitty parts.

The difference is that the communities like that mostly aren’t discoverable anymore like Usenet, web forums and mailing lists used to be, and their contents is hidden behind closed walls.

They don't need to be. Web forums and mailing list are useful when you want to form a larger community with a central idea or project. A chat group is mostly an online hangout place, kinda an equivalent of a favorite bar or a reading club.

What I don't like is when people wants to use a chat group where a forum would have been more useful.

By hanging out in the smaller communities and leaving the larger ones behind. You can't change the world, but you can choose how you live in it.

>The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?

It also takes a culture. The small community needs to have a culture that empowers them to exlude the enlargement of the community and to prevent those wanting to open it to those not fit for it get to dictate terms...

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