The alt-text comment for folks whose phones don't play nice with that
The alt-text comment for folks whose phones don't play nice with that
And it doesn't pop up a box every time asking you to use your real name. In fact, there's no way to set your name at all. You just have to keep reminding people who you are.
Changing the www to an m (as in m.xkcd.com) gives you a nice mobile-friendly version. Tapping the (alt-text) superscript to the right of the title reveals the alt-text.
Changing the www to an m (as in m.xkcd.com) gives you a nice mobile-friendly version. Tapping the (alt-text) superscript to the right of the title reveals the alt-text.
Nice, I was able to get it on my phone, but every time xkcd gets cross posted somewhere I just think adding the alt text is nice. It's how some folks find out about it!
Nice, I was able to get it on my phone, but every time xkcd gets cross posted somewhere I just think adding the alt text is nice. It's how some folks find out about it!
That's definitely how I thought of the tildes minecraft server this season, especially considering how the iteration I joined took place alongside a pretty turbulent time of my life where I...
That's definitely how I thought of the tildes minecraft server this season, especially considering how the iteration I joined took place alongside a pretty turbulent time of my life where I legitimately needed such a little community. It's also genuinely pretty cool that, for me, it more or less helped foster several new friendships which eventually made it "out" of tildes and into other places - and I'm honestly really happy about that. It might not have happened for every person I really enjoyed talking to or admired, but it happened for a handful of folks and that's great too :)
That's a... genuinely good description and it's honestly 100% true. You get a gold star for this comment I really want to thank you for taking the time and effort to host it every time. I...
That's a... genuinely good description and it's honestly 100% true. You get a gold star for this comment
I really want to thank you for taking the time and effort to host it every time. I appreciate it a lot even though I never got to join the previous version. I think it really brings a lot to this place as a community.
I think it got brought up as a (very) rough idea a while ago but I like Project Zomboid and I know multiplayer servers exist for that game. I feel like I shouldn't really get a vote considering...
I think it got brought up as a (very) rough idea a while ago but I like Project Zomboid and I know multiplayer servers exist for that game.
I feel like I shouldn't really get a vote considering how hard I fell off the Minecraft server but I'd be down for that
Oh, a Tildes DayZ Server could be fun. Unfortunately I hadn't had the time for the Minecraft Server, but a relaxed DayZ community could be fun. What kind of flavour of DayZ do you enjoy?
Oh, a Tildes DayZ Server could be fun. Unfortunately I hadn't had the time for the Minecraft Server, but a relaxed DayZ community could be fun.
I already find myself missing it. It's nice to have some place where I can just log in and shoot the breeze with someone. Even though I didn't play very consistently at times.
I already find myself missing it. It's nice to have some place where I can just log in and shoot the breeze with someone. Even though I didn't play very consistently at times.
There's an old game from 2000 called Noctis, which IIRC was almost entirely written by one guy. Noctis was pretty much a pure exploration game, in which you'd fly a spaceship around a procedurally...
There's an old game from 2000 called Noctis, which IIRC was almost entirely written by one guy. Noctis was pretty much a pure exploration game, in which you'd fly a spaceship around a procedurally generated universe and land on planets, explore, take pictures, and write notes that other explorers could read (by way of manually emailing the dev your notes and downloading packages of compiled notes later on).
The game had limited visibility, but became a cult hit (for very small values of cult), and the dev had/has his own quirky hand-coded web forum where people could talk about the game and other topics, including the devs other interesting projects.
That forum became one of the first "internet homes" young me found, where I could share fanart I'd made in Blender, ask dumb questions, learn a bit about programming, play a MUD, and get to know some people I still recognize when I hop back on.
Unfortunately in the last few years it seems to have gone offline, but there's still a discord with a handful of oldtimers hanging around. It's not the same, but I'll always have the memories.
The Dwarf Fortress forums played a similar role, but that was a much more notable game and thus a much larger forum experience as the game got more popular.
ohhhhhhh fuckkkkkinnng AAAAAAAAAA I played Noctis a little bit ages ago and could never remember what it was called or figure out how to find it again. You just solved a mini mystery I've been...
ohhhhhhh
fuckkkkkinnng
AAAAAAAAAA
I played Noctis a little bit ages ago and could never remember what it was called or figure out how to find it again. You just solved a mini mystery I've been having for so long, thank you.
I remember that thing, it was PHP held together with frames and I think furries, and everyone was lucky it wasn't coded in 386 assembly or whatever the actual game was. That game blew my mind, you...
quirky hand-coded web forum
I remember that thing, it was PHP held together with frames and I think furries, and everyone was lucky it wasn't coded in 386 assembly or whatever the actual game was.
That game blew my mind, you could type on a computer in the game and do stuff. I still remember casting things. Somehow despite Rodina actually coming out, and many other space sims, nothing was ever as good.
There's a forum that I'm still a part of that is an reboot of a reboot of a reboot of an offshoot of a larger forum going back to the mid-to-late 00s (when all of us were teenagers). There are...
There's a forum that I'm still a part of that is an reboot of a reboot of a reboot of an offshoot of a larger forum going back to the mid-to-late 00s (when all of us were teenagers). There are only a few of us that check in from time to time and it's mostly just little "hey here's what's going on in my life" stuff or complaining about politics and Star Wars. We're in our 30s/40s now, so obviously life happens and people drift apart and all that.
I do miss the golden age of the forum, but I'm glad I've still got the memories and old posts to check out :) Plus I believe there's at least one person from it that posts here (I shared an invite a while ago). So hi, it's Anti if any of this sound familiar.
I will steadfastly maintain to the end that Reddit Was Never Good™, but I still do miss the Reddit of a decade ago. You could have genuine conversations with real people with actual knowledge...
I will steadfastly maintain to the end that Reddit Was Never Good™, but I still do miss the Reddit of a decade ago. You could have genuine conversations with real people with actual knowledge about interesting topics. (Or you could get sexist and/or racist screeds. Reddit Was Never Good™.) By the time I nuked my account a year or two ago, there was very little of that left, and based on admin's actions and explicitly stated goals, I'm sure the situation is even worse now.
The ESO guild I was in, Wings of Kynareth, was run by a very pleasant and helpful Argonian player. I played more of that MMO than any other, completing the main quest of all three factions and...
The ESO guild I was in, Wings of Kynareth, was run by a very pleasant and helpful Argonian player. I played more of that MMO than any other, completing the main quest of all three factions and exploring every single province except for the very centre (which was reserved for PVP). Thanks to his Histy tutelage, I managed to get a good build and buffs sorted out that made a lot of the game much easier.
I'm currently head of a medium-sized community dedicated to a survival game, The Long Dark. It's a generally decent community, but it sometimes feels like it's been taken over by a younger crowd...
I'm currently head of a medium-sized community dedicated to a survival game, The Long Dark. It's a generally decent community, but it sometimes feels like it's been taken over by a younger crowd than when I started there.
I've also been a part of another community that's been ongoing for the last two decades. It began as a forum in 2002, which still exists and is running, though most folks have moved on to discord now. It's been amazing meeting some of those folks IRL, and seeing the courses our lives took from when we were young teens all the way through to our adulthood and middle age.
There was this matrix themed mod for half life called Existence. It wasn't super popular but I liked it. Their forum was the first online community I ever joined and I stayed a part of it long...
There was this matrix themed mod for half life called Existence. It wasn't super popular but I liked it. Their forum was the first online community I ever joined and I stayed a part of it long after I stopped playing the game. It was small and friendly.
Unfortunately the site went down sometime in the early 2000s and I only really engaged through the forum itself. So I instantly lost touch with the whole community.
Space4k, an old German browser game had a forum I used to frequent with others. In the spam section. Was really fun until a new admin came and policed the spam section too
Space4k, an old German browser game had a forum I used to frequent with others. In the spam section. Was really fun until a new admin came and policed the spam section too
Back in the 90s I hung out on IRC a lot, including a #weird-al channel (on EFNet, I think?). It was notable because Weird Al's drummer John "Bermuda" Schwartz was a regular in there. It was...
Back in the 90s I hung out on IRC a lot, including a #weird-al channel (on EFNet, I think?). It was notable because Weird Al's drummer John "Bermuda" Schwartz was a regular in there. It was absolutely mind blowing for teenage me to be able to ask him a question about Weird Al, have him say something like "I don't know, but I'll ask Al next time I see him," and then actually get the follow up some time later. Was like my own private lifeline to my (at the time, heck maybe now even) favorite musician of all time.
I haven't touched IRC in a lifetime. For all I know that channel still exists and Bermuda is still idling in there waiting to answer fan questions.
The forum that I felt most at home was at the CDFreaks site. It was a support forum for people using optical media and optical drives. We were a close knit group from 2004 through 2018 or so, even...
The forum that I felt most at home was at the CDFreaks site. It was a support forum for people using optical media and optical drives. We were a close knit group from 2004 through 2018 or so, even after the site changed names and became MyCE. (Don't go to MyCE these days, it was taken over and became a trash site). Eventually the support forum was shut down by the new owners.
A few of us who became mods and admins at CDFreaks still get together at a private site run by one of our tech admins, so we keep in touch. Still miss a lot of the old members though.
Some random people online were in a 4chan related IRC channel back over 20 years ago when the site was brand new and no one had really heard about it. We were all getting abused by some op on a...
Some random people online were in a 4chan related IRC channel back over 20 years ago when the site was brand new and no one had really heard about it. We were all getting abused by some op on a power trip, so we made our own channel. 20 years later, I'm still in that channel (migrated to discord) with that same group of people.
We've stayed with each other, been through marriages, divorces, children, weird medical issues, mental breaks and a thousand other things. They're not my closest friends, but I still chat in that channel maybe once a week or so, and it's just kinda crazy it's been this long. Also, I don't think any of us have been on 4chan in probably 15 years.
In all seriousness, because Tildes doesn’t have (fucking) video ads, it means that we aren’t being monetized. The site is funded solely through donations. If you like it here, I recommend...
Hey Tildes FAM! This comic reminds me of a simpler time, and do you know what isn’t simple? Going to the grocery store and buying dozens of ingredients you only need for one single recipe! Luckily, with HELLO FRESH…
In all seriousness, because Tildes doesn’t have (fucking) video ads, it means that we aren’t being monetized. The site is funded solely through donations.
If you like it here, I recommend supporting it monetarily — not because I’m getting a 15% commission or anything it’s actually 30% but because I like it here too and would like to keep this place around as long as it can last.
I miss the "old" days (late 2000s) when RuneScape was extremely busy and I could hang out on the forums there. Much later, maybe 2014 or 2015, I was pretty active in a clan while I was in high...
I miss the "old" days (late 2000s) when RuneScape was extremely busy and I could hang out on the forums there. Much later, maybe 2014 or 2015, I was pretty active in a clan while I was in high school and talked to some great people there, but eventually drifted off playing RuneScape (until finding my way back like always). I was actually bummed when I found out RuneScape/Jagex closed their forums semi-recently and moved everything to their Discord server.
I also used to hang around in the /r/buildapc IRC channel circa 2012? maybe 2013? and enjoyed that little community a lot.
Slightly off topic because this was an intentional community and not an accidental one like in the comic, but you just reminded me of it: I always mostly avoided the official RS communities, but...
Slightly off topic because this was an intentional community and not an accidental one like in the comic, but you just reminded me of it:
I always mostly avoided the official RS communities, but back when we discovered the game, shortly after RS2 came out when we were teens, I spent a lot of time in a local RS phpBB forum. I'm from a non-english speaking country, so speaking english well enough to play RS, understand various helper sites and communicate with people when you're 13-14 years old was not an automatic thing, it served as a decent filter against stupid people and the community was pretty good for a while. Spent a lot of time there and while I lost contact with most of those people, I've been in a band with one of them for years now and last year I went to his wedding.
That said, we're both Runescape haters now. Genuinely think the game is crap and for many people unhealthy too.
This reminds me most of an IRC channel I have frequented for well over 10 years. Some of the people in it were teens when they first joined and are still there. I've only met a couple of the...
This reminds me most of an IRC channel I have frequented for well over 10 years. Some of the people in it were teens when they first joined and are still there. I've only met a couple of the people in person, but considering we're spread throughout the world, that's still feels a bit impressive. We're a technical bunch, so it isn't like we couldn't move our space elsewhere (and have for a time), but we always find our way back to the IRC.
This also makes me fondly remember the BBS friends I made and kept for years even after the internet made BBSes obsolete. I only still talk to two of those guys because we became IRL friends, but the whole concept feels starkly pleasant compared to the modern web in a lot of ways.
What’s really remarkable is that the XKCD forums (“fora”) themselves were this for a lot of people for a long time. I’m not even sure Randall knew what it meant to people while it was around, and...
What’s really remarkable is that the XKCD forums (“fora”) themselves were this for a lot of people for a long time. I’m not even sure Randall knew what it meant to people while it was around, and there were some meaningful spaces on it for folks off the beaten path. I think it got taken down due to a hack a number of years back, but I went back and checked it every once in a while for a number of years.
Edit: I just checked my email archives and the time it was really hopping with activity was literally 2006, 19 years ago. Man. Time flies.
I believe it was a relatively old and understandably neglected phpbb and it got breached, and after that it got shut down. I was years away from it at that point though.
I believe it was a relatively old and understandably neglected phpbb and it got breached, and after that it got shut down. I was years away from it at that point though.
I'm in a few small chats where its only a handful of people and we've been chatting forever. I wonder where this one was, though. We ran a jabber server in this old corporation I worked for. It...
I'm in a few small chats where its only a handful of people and we've been chatting forever. I wonder where this one was, though.
We ran a jabber server in this old corporation I worked for. It was all level 3+ support dudes and a few BAs (like me) -- it was a fun chat... and then one day it was taken down.
I remember Axl's! Was that the server that had a map to choose the next map? Back when I ran the FITH highlander team, we would scrim against Axl's quite a bit. Still have Axl on my steam friends...
I remember Axl's! Was that the server that had a map to choose the next map?
Back when I ran the FITH highlander team, we would scrim against Axl's quite a bit.
Still have Axl on my steam friends though we never really talk.
If you still need to scratch your itch for TF2 debauchery, we're keeping the flame alive at FITH. Hop on some time- server.fith.co:27015
The level selection stage was pretty short lived, haha. But it did exist! And we played almost purely custom maps, most famously Avanti. ... I feel terrible because I was on our highlander team...
The level selection stage was pretty short lived, haha. But it did exist! And we played almost purely custom maps, most famously Avanti.
... I feel terrible because I was on our highlander team around 2010-2012 or so and I can't remember KITH or your username 😬. Sorry!
Thanks for the invite! I will try to check it out sometime but I worry my ego will not be able to handle being terrible now lol
I could map a good chunk of my online history through long-gone forums. AOL had a gaming section and message boards as part of it. I ended up becoming a regular on the Zelda Ocarina of Time board...
I could map a good chunk of my online history through long-gone forums.
AOL had a gaming section and message boards as part of it. I ended up becoming a regular on the Zelda Ocarina of Time board (while "Zelda Gaiden" was the name of the board for the not-yet-named Majora's Mask) and met one of my closest friends through high school as part of it when it turns out both of us played the same niche online game.
I don't remember the exact details of the higher-level situation but the people running the gaming section on AOL had a newsletter. One of the staff accidentally sent a blank email to everyone on the list, but including everyone's emails as recipients rather than BCC so people started replying to it and spamming everyone else. A small friend group formed out of that from the people that didn't ask to be removed from the list, and eventually two of them met in person and later got married.
Meanwhile I had joined a clan in Unreal Tournament and we played in competitive ladders in UT2003 (Bombing Run) and UT2004 (Onslaught) before it fell apart some months later with people going off to college and the like. The forum for the group still somehow exists online, though the last post was made in 2014 by me, some years after the person before me.
OverClocked ReMix once had an "unmoderated" forum that was my online home for a while, that particular one is gone but I still have my account on there dating back to 2002. Meanwhile the forum for xkcd itself is no longer around but that was where I ended up in the mid-aughts, as well as a forum for a site dedicated to the anime series Crest of the Stars. I kind of miss those niche fan sites.
Like many other people in early 2014 I got swept up in Twitch Plays Pokémon (and I'm still following the channel and see there's a dedicated community for it to this day) but also took a diversion to a side channel where the inputs from that channel's chat were sent to another game instead, resulting in "Twitch Plays Pokémon" Plays Tetris. There was a small IRC community for that group which I hung out in for a while, even making my own IRC bot there for fun.
One fun part to me is that journey's been going for more than 25 years and I've had the same username for every single one of those communities, through Digg and Reddit and now here.
insight@world.std.com An email list from the 90s for people into Buddhist insight meditation. A few old GNU Mailman lists for vegans, local veg*ns, and some tech Usenet groups....but they were...
This post definitely has me feeling nostalgic for my older internet interactions. I think some of my earliest interactions were on Skype actually. Those chat groups are definitely long gone and...
This post definitely has me feeling nostalgic for my older internet interactions. I think some of my earliest interactions were on Skype actually. Those chat groups are definitely long gone and I've lost touch with basically everyone from that platform. I did actually reach out to one of my friends from Skype a few years ago but our conversation was brief and we haven't talked since.
I do also have quite a lot of Discord servers that died years ago. Some of these servers were just between me and my school friends who I still talk to, but a decent number of those servers were just filled with random people. I actually maintain a folder of these dead servers on Discord because i just like scrolling through the ruins. It's wild scrolling through those servers sometimes because people used to talk on those servers daily, talking about random crap. It was inevitable that these servers would eventually die out I guess. We were all in high school and college when they were started and we're all now just busy with being full-time workers.
This post also has me thinking about just old friendships in general. I've essentially lost touch with my friends from elementary and middle school since I didn't really join online groups and chat apps until I was almost in high school. I've also changed my phone number since then, as I'm sure many of them have as well. I always wonder how those people are doing.
Arbornet/M-Net is still around (sort of, they can't be bothered to renew their SSL cert), but I married my favorite conversation partner and haven't bothered to log in in decades. I do miss the...
Arbornet/M-Net is still around (sort of, they can't be bothered to renew their SSL cert), but I married my favorite conversation partner and haven't bothered to log in in decades.
I do miss the IRC #bookz community and my G+ peeps. For all that #bookz was built on sailing the high seas, it was genuinely global. I had amazing conversations with the people there, until it started attracting a weird, paranoiac right-wing crowd.
G+, more conversations with amazing, thoughtful people until the service started getting overwhelmed with spam leading up to the shutdown.
Back in the earlier days of the internet, maybe around 2000, I had joined diedonline.com (no longer what it was, don't bother visiting). Ostensibly, it was a service that would email a message of...
Back in the earlier days of the internet, maybe around 2000, I had joined diedonline.com (no longer what it was, don't bother visiting). Ostensibly, it was a service that would email a message of your choosing to anyone you added to your list if you didn't log in at least once every X days (because that meant you were dead). It was silly, but there was a forum attached, and I was one of about 6 people that took over the forum for ourselves. We'd be having multiple different conversations over several different threads, and it was a really nice little community we made for ourselves for a short time. I think I might even still have the image I made for my personal icon kicking around somewhere, I'll see if I can't find it later.
Sadly diedonline died and is no longer online, but I remember the feeling of chatting with my small crew, wondering who and where they really were.
Tildes aligns better with how I like to use the internet but Special Fish is another interesting site. Very different style from here--but I think some cross-pollination can often be good.
Tildes aligns better with how I like to use the internet but Special Fish is another interesting site. Very different style from here--but I think some cross-pollination can often be good.
The alt-text comment for folks whose phones don't play nice with that
Changing the
wwwto anm(as inm.xkcd.com) gives you a nice mobile-friendly version. Tapping the (alt-text) superscript to the right of the title reveals the alt-text.Nice, I was able to get it on my phone, but every time xkcd gets cross posted somewhere I just think adding the alt text is nice. It's how some folks find out about it!
It's always nice for people to be part of the lucky ten thousand after all.
Undocumented xkcd feature.
That's definitely how I thought of the tildes minecraft server this season, especially considering how the iteration I joined took place alongside a pretty turbulent time of my life where I legitimately needed such a little community. It's also genuinely pretty cool that, for me, it more or less helped foster several new friendships which eventually made it "out" of tildes and into other places - and I'm honestly really happy about that. It might not have happened for every person I really enjoyed talking to or admired, but it happened for a handful of folks and that's great too :)
It’s just a really inefficient single channel IRC server.
That's a... genuinely good description and it's honestly 100% true. You get a gold star for this comment
I really want to thank you for taking the time and effort to host it every time. I appreciate it a lot even though I never got to join the previous version. I think it really brings a lot to this place as a community.
I hope to find other services I can provide to the community. Other games I like are DayZ and Geoguessr.
I think it got brought up as a (very) rough idea a while ago but I like Project Zomboid and I know multiplayer servers exist for that game.
I feel like I shouldn't really get a vote considering how hard I fell off the Minecraft server but I'd be down for that
Build 42 should get a stable release "soon". That would be a great time to spin up a server
I'd be interested! It's such an amazing game.
Oh, a Tildes DayZ Server could be fun. Unfortunately I hadn't had the time for the Minecraft Server, but a relaxed DayZ community could be fun.
What kind of flavour of DayZ do you enjoy?
I like to play on DayOne. I’m a big Smoke fan.
I already find myself missing it. It's nice to have some place where I can just log in and shoot the breeze with someone. Even though I didn't play very consistently at times.
Yup, it was great being able to join and just talk to folks online. Like @hamstergeddon I already find myself missing it just for that.
There's an old game from 2000 called Noctis, which IIRC was almost entirely written by one guy. Noctis was pretty much a pure exploration game, in which you'd fly a spaceship around a procedurally generated universe and land on planets, explore, take pictures, and write notes that other explorers could read (by way of manually emailing the dev your notes and downloading packages of compiled notes later on).
The game had limited visibility, but became a cult hit (for very small values of cult), and the dev had/has his own quirky hand-coded web forum where people could talk about the game and other topics, including the devs other interesting projects.
That forum became one of the first "internet homes" young me found, where I could share fanart I'd made in Blender, ask dumb questions, learn a bit about programming, play a MUD, and get to know some people I still recognize when I hop back on.
Unfortunately in the last few years it seems to have gone offline, but there's still a discord with a handful of oldtimers hanging around. It's not the same, but I'll always have the memories.
The Dwarf Fortress forums played a similar role, but that was a much more notable game and thus a much larger forum experience as the game got more popular.
ohhhhhhh
fuckkkkkinnng
AAAAAAAAAA
I played Noctis a little bit ages ago and could never remember what it was called or figure out how to find it again. You just solved a mini mystery I've been having for so long, thank you.
I remember that thing, it was PHP held together with frames and I think furries, and everyone was lucky it wasn't coded in 386 assembly or whatever the actual game was.
That game blew my mind, you could type on a computer in the game and do stuff. I still remember
casting things. Somehow despite Rodina actually coming out, and many other space sims, nothing was ever as good.There's a forum that I'm still a part of that is an reboot of a reboot of a reboot of an offshoot of a larger forum going back to the mid-to-late 00s (when all of us were teenagers). There are only a few of us that check in from time to time and it's mostly just little "hey here's what's going on in my life" stuff or complaining about politics and Star Wars. We're in our 30s/40s now, so obviously life happens and people drift apart and all that.
I do miss the golden age of the forum, but I'm glad I've still got the memories and old posts to check out :) Plus I believe there's at least one person from it that posts here (I shared an invite a while ago). So hi, it's Anti if any of this sound familiar.
I will steadfastly maintain to the end that Reddit Was Never Good™, but I still do miss the Reddit of a decade ago. You could have genuine conversations with real people with actual knowledge about interesting topics. (Or you could get sexist and/or racist screeds. Reddit Was Never Good™.) By the time I nuked my account a year or two ago, there was very little of that left, and based on admin's actions and explicitly stated goals, I'm sure the situation is even worse now.
The ESO guild I was in, Wings of Kynareth, was run by a very pleasant and helpful Argonian player. I played more of that MMO than any other, completing the main quest of all three factions and exploring every single province except for the very centre (which was reserved for PVP). Thanks to his Histy tutelage, I managed to get a good build and buffs sorted out that made a lot of the game much easier.
I'm currently head of a medium-sized community dedicated to a survival game, The Long Dark. It's a generally decent community, but it sometimes feels like it's been taken over by a younger crowd than when I started there.
I've also been a part of another community that's been ongoing for the last two decades. It began as a forum in 2002, which still exists and is running, though most folks have moved on to discord now. It's been amazing meeting some of those folks IRL, and seeing the courses our lives took from when we were young teens all the way through to our adulthood and middle age.
There was this matrix themed mod for half life called Existence. It wasn't super popular but I liked it. Their forum was the first online community I ever joined and I stayed a part of it long after I stopped playing the game. It was small and friendly.
Unfortunately the site went down sometime in the early 2000s and I only really engaged through the forum itself. So I instantly lost touch with the whole community.
Space4k, an old German browser game had a forum I used to frequent with others. In the spam section. Was really fun until a new admin came and policed the spam section too
Back in the 90s I hung out on IRC a lot, including a
#weird-alchannel (on EFNet, I think?). It was notable because Weird Al's drummer John "Bermuda" Schwartz was a regular in there. It was absolutely mind blowing for teenage me to be able to ask him a question about Weird Al, have him say something like "I don't know, but I'll ask Al next time I see him," and then actually get the follow up some time later. Was like my own private lifeline to my (at the time, heck maybe now even) favorite musician of all time.I haven't touched IRC in a lifetime. For all I know that channel still exists and Bermuda is still idling in there waiting to answer fan questions.
The forum that I felt most at home was at the CDFreaks site. It was a support forum for people using optical media and optical drives. We were a close knit group from 2004 through 2018 or so, even after the site changed names and became MyCE. (Don't go to MyCE these days, it was taken over and became a trash site). Eventually the support forum was shut down by the new owners.
A few of us who became mods and admins at CDFreaks still get together at a private site run by one of our tech admins, so we keep in touch. Still miss a lot of the old members though.
Some random people online were in a 4chan related IRC channel back over 20 years ago when the site was brand new and no one had really heard about it. We were all getting abused by some op on a power trip, so we made our own channel. 20 years later, I'm still in that channel (migrated to discord) with that same group of people.
We've stayed with each other, been through marriages, divorces, children, weird medical issues, mental breaks and a thousand other things. They're not my closest friends, but I still chat in that channel maybe once a week or so, and it's just kinda crazy it's been this long. Also, I don't think any of us have been on 4chan in probably 15 years.
Hey Tildes FAM! This comic reminds me of a simpler time, and do you know what isn’t simple? Going to the grocery store and buying dozens of ingredients you only need for one single recipe! Luckily, with HELLO FRESH…In all seriousness, because Tildes doesn’t have (fucking) video ads, it means that we aren’t being monetized. The site is funded solely through donations.
If you like it here, I recommend supporting it monetarily — not because I’m getting a 15% commission or anything
it’s actually 30%but because I like it here too and would like to keep this place around as long as it can last.If you use the excellent (and also ad-free) Three Cheers for Tildes app, you can donate to its developer, u/talklittle, from within the app.
I miss the "old" days (late 2000s) when RuneScape was extremely busy and I could hang out on the forums there. Much later, maybe 2014 or 2015, I was pretty active in a clan while I was in high school and talked to some great people there, but eventually drifted off playing RuneScape (until finding my way back like always). I was actually bummed when I found out RuneScape/Jagex closed their forums semi-recently and moved everything to their Discord server.
I also used to hang around in the /r/buildapc IRC channel circa 2012? maybe 2013? and enjoyed that little community a lot.
Slightly off topic because this was an intentional community and not an accidental one like in the comic, but you just reminded me of it:
I always mostly avoided the official RS communities, but back when we discovered the game, shortly after RS2 came out when we were teens, I spent a lot of time in a local RS phpBB forum. I'm from a non-english speaking country, so speaking english well enough to play RS, understand various helper sites and communicate with people when you're 13-14 years old was not an automatic thing, it served as a decent filter against stupid people and the community was pretty good for a while. Spent a lot of time there and while I lost contact with most of those people, I've been in a band with one of them for years now and last year I went to his wedding.
That said, we're both Runescape haters now. Genuinely think the game is crap and for many people unhealthy too.
This reminds me most of an IRC channel I have frequented for well over 10 years. Some of the people in it were teens when they first joined and are still there. I've only met a couple of the people in person, but considering we're spread throughout the world, that's still feels a bit impressive. We're a technical bunch, so it isn't like we couldn't move our space elsewhere (and have for a time), but we always find our way back to the IRC.
This also makes me fondly remember the BBS friends I made and kept for years even after the internet made BBSes obsolete. I only still talk to two of those guys because we became IRL friends, but the whole concept feels starkly pleasant compared to the modern web in a lot of ways.
What’s really remarkable is that the XKCD forums (“fora”) themselves were this for a lot of people for a long time. I’m not even sure Randall knew what it meant to people while it was around, and there were some meaningful spaces on it for folks off the beaten path. I think it got taken down due to a hack a number of years back, but I went back and checked it every once in a while for a number of years.
Edit: I just checked my email archives and the time it was really hopping with activity was literally 2006, 19 years ago. Man. Time flies.
What happened to them, did Randall decide to stop hosting them?
Im sure it was hacked and then a nightmare to fix/restore.
I believe it was a relatively old and understandably neglected phpbb and it got breached, and after that it got shut down. I was years away from it at that point though.
I'm in a few small chats where its only a handful of people and we've been chatting forever. I wonder where this one was, though.
We ran a jabber server in this old corporation I worked for. It was all level 3+ support dudes and a few BAs (like me) -- it was a fun chat... and then one day it was taken down.
The point of the comic was unexpected. But it's true!
Shoutout to Axl's TF2! My favourite online community ever. Shame we had to grow up and move on 🥲
I remember Axl's! Was that the server that had a map to choose the next map?
Back when I ran the FITH highlander team, we would scrim against Axl's quite a bit.
Still have Axl on my steam friends though we never really talk.
If you still need to scratch your itch for TF2 debauchery, we're keeping the flame alive at FITH. Hop on some time- server.fith.co:27015
The level selection stage was pretty short lived, haha. But it did exist! And we played almost purely custom maps, most famously Avanti.
... I feel terrible because I was on our highlander team around 2010-2012 or so and I can't remember KITH or your username 😬. Sorry!
Thanks for the invite! I will try to check it out sometime but I worry my ego will not be able to handle being terrible now lol
I could map a good chunk of my online history through long-gone forums.
AOL had a gaming section and message boards as part of it. I ended up becoming a regular on the Zelda Ocarina of Time board (while "Zelda Gaiden" was the name of the board for the not-yet-named Majora's Mask) and met one of my closest friends through high school as part of it when it turns out both of us played the same niche online game.
I don't remember the exact details of the higher-level situation but the people running the gaming section on AOL had a newsletter. One of the staff accidentally sent a blank email to everyone on the list, but including everyone's emails as recipients rather than BCC so people started replying to it and spamming everyone else. A small friend group formed out of that from the people that didn't ask to be removed from the list, and eventually two of them met in person and later got married.
Meanwhile I had joined a clan in Unreal Tournament and we played in competitive ladders in UT2003 (Bombing Run) and UT2004 (Onslaught) before it fell apart some months later with people going off to college and the like. The forum for the group still somehow exists online, though the last post was made in 2014 by me, some years after the person before me.
OverClocked ReMix once had an "unmoderated" forum that was my online home for a while, that particular one is gone but I still have my account on there dating back to 2002. Meanwhile the forum for xkcd itself is no longer around but that was where I ended up in the mid-aughts, as well as a forum for a site dedicated to the anime series Crest of the Stars. I kind of miss those niche fan sites.
Like many other people in early 2014 I got swept up in Twitch Plays Pokémon (and I'm still following the channel and see there's a dedicated community for it to this day) but also took a diversion to a side channel where the inputs from that channel's chat were sent to another game instead, resulting in "Twitch Plays Pokémon" Plays Tetris. There was a small IRC community for that group which I hung out in for a while, even making my own IRC bot there for fun.
One fun part to me is that journey's been going for more than 25 years and I've had the same username for every single one of those communities, through Digg and Reddit and now here.
insight@world.std.com
An email list from the 90s for people into Buddhist insight meditation.
A few old GNU Mailman lists for vegans, local veg*ns, and some tech Usenet groups....but they were mostly filled with bickering.
This post definitely has me feeling nostalgic for my older internet interactions. I think some of my earliest interactions were on Skype actually. Those chat groups are definitely long gone and I've lost touch with basically everyone from that platform. I did actually reach out to one of my friends from Skype a few years ago but our conversation was brief and we haven't talked since.
I do also have quite a lot of Discord servers that died years ago. Some of these servers were just between me and my school friends who I still talk to, but a decent number of those servers were just filled with random people. I actually maintain a folder of these dead servers on Discord because i just like scrolling through the ruins. It's wild scrolling through those servers sometimes because people used to talk on those servers daily, talking about random crap. It was inevitable that these servers would eventually die out I guess. We were all in high school and college when they were started and we're all now just busy with being full-time workers.
This post also has me thinking about just old friendships in general. I've essentially lost touch with my friends from elementary and middle school since I didn't really join online groups and chat apps until I was almost in high school. I've also changed my phone number since then, as I'm sure many of them have as well. I always wonder how those people are doing.
Arbornet/M-Net is still around (sort of, they can't be bothered to renew their SSL cert), but I married my favorite conversation partner and haven't bothered to log in in decades.
I do miss the IRC #bookz community and my G+ peeps. For all that #bookz was built on sailing the high seas, it was genuinely global. I had amazing conversations with the people there, until it started attracting a weird, paranoiac right-wing crowd.
G+, more conversations with amazing, thoughtful people until the service started getting overwhelmed with spam leading up to the shutdown.
Back in the earlier days of the internet, maybe around 2000, I had joined diedonline.com (no longer what it was, don't bother visiting). Ostensibly, it was a service that would email a message of your choosing to anyone you added to your list if you didn't log in at least once every X days (because that meant you were dead). It was silly, but there was a forum attached, and I was one of about 6 people that took over the forum for ourselves. We'd be having multiple different conversations over several different threads, and it was a really nice little community we made for ourselves for a short time. I think I might even still have the image I made for my personal icon kicking around somewhere, I'll see if I can't find it later.
Sadly diedonline died and is no longer online, but I remember the feeling of chatting with my small crew, wondering who and where they really were.
Tildes aligns better with how I like to use the internet but Special Fish is another interesting site. Very different style from here--but I think some cross-pollination can often be good.