after leaving behind so many platforms I’m a bit numbed to the FOMO effect
I was not really THAT active in the BBS. Yeah, 9 years there, but really only 4 active, and only the last one or two REALLY active. I’ve done much more activity here in two days than the last two weeks in the BBS (it helps that I know am “among friends” )
I do undestand that someone with much much more baggage can find this traumatic but… Look, I downloaded my facebook history of almost 20 years of posting daily, and the only thing I regularly check is the media folder. I realized there’s not much point of the content, I was there for the community - and much of the content was transient and with expiration date (ie: what does it matter that I organized movie viewings for two years? does it have any value all the comments on my summaries, the posters, etc… 7 years later?)
In the words of the inmortal Johny Cash (after Reznor): If I could start again A million miles away I would keep myself I would find a way
I’ve spot checked and some years don’t bring up anything though i’m sure if i tweaked the day and month i’d get archived results. But looking around i do see activity in the BBS so that might be useful to some folks here.
At some point – maybe when I became the site’s resident bridge dweller (but not that kind of bridge-dweller) – I realized that I had become more interested (and invested) in participating in BBS than reading BoingBoing articles themselves. I mostly only read articles on the BBS and only if they were generating lots of conversation.
After dipping my toe in the very sus SuS, and seeing that 1) this model of interaction was impossible, 2) posts were generating ZERO conversation, and 3) that the open thread approach on SubStack was fundamentally broken, I knew it was over.
I didn’t know about this place, so I’m glad @MerelyGifted called me over. Definitely feels more like home than SubStack chat.
I will miss having interesting, thoughtful, and (ideally) mostly wonderful stories shared in the systematic way the BBS managed it with BB stories, but I am sure there’s a way some sort of equivalent will happen here, if it hasn’t already.
(Amendment: I didn’t know about the sussness of SuS at the time; if I’d known I might not have bothered even checking out the scene over there. Le sigh.)
I guess a “news” category could be created (if it already doesn’t exist) and if we find a noteworthy one can open a thread for that. Otherwise I see conversations happening over tematically realted threads, you can post and comment news there, but in this format is more like a stream instead of focused.
Edit, I see you are proposing what I was suggesting here. A category I think would be ideal.
Not sure what to call it, but almost certainly not “boing”. Then people can post into that category whatever interesting story they found that they wanted to share with the community and it would have its own dedicated thread.
May I suggest visiting this thread? It started as a way for the newbs to aks how they can help organize themselves and not disrupt too much the café, and contains some insifght from the admin and veterans about how it was organized until now and how it could be organized in the future
That’d fall under the “tags” feature, I think. We’ve tended to under-use the tags feature here while the place was still small but the capability is there.
Here it seems to be done backwards (is that a good way to describe it?): news is posted more or less in the appropriate thread. Possibly Untrue Science News, Musk taking over Twitter, Elections 2023-2025, Felonious Ex-President, and so on.
Is this kind of thing adequate, or should we do it BB’s way? I look at the threads I’m interested and ignore those I’m not.
I do not at all believe Ellsworth Toohey is a real person (or a person distinct from the other authors). I am firmly in the belief it’s an alt account for Mark and/or an AI bot trained on Mark’s writing and fed other people’s content from Reddit and Twitter.
Rob definitely has an account here. I don’t think anybody else has an account here. I seem recall back in the day the site used happymutants.space as its domain and Mark was asked for permission since he owned a trademark on that (which he granted). It’s not a stretch to assume that other BB authors are aware of this site. (Whether or not they remember/care is another story entirely, though… Given BB’s general apathy/disregard for the BBS community I’m going to guess they couldn’t care less.)
Yup. I’m only looking at the Substack thread and not much else these days. Still pondering whether I want to get anonymized or hold out some sliver of hope that things will return to the way they were. (I’m sure they won’t…)
Oh, that too. And totally on brand for Mark with his libertarian bent.
I noticed Sekhmet posting anonymization notices in the General Mod thread, so if Ken’s backed up, maybe ask her? Or maybe tag @moderators in the DM so any community mod could step in?
Again, going on hazy recollections here, but uncertainty around this was part of why the domain became elsewhere.cafe. I’m sure @LockeCJ can keep me honest here if I missed anything. It’s been a while.
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