Mine was originally a burner, but became useful for other sites, which is why I didn’t want to keep the name on such a prominent site that was frozen in amber.
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Well, since I was raised on a sort of “who knows what it might be good for” mindset, I also saw the withering of the BBS as an opportunity to maybe spend a little less time online and maybe getting a little more stuff done offline (and there is a lot to be done, to be honest)…
But here I am.
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I was freaking out until I heard from you.
Then I was all
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…and “threw a shoe” is quite a nice horsey turn of phrase, altho not one which one, nor one’s horse, enjoys experiencing IRL.
…and @orenwolf
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I get the feeling that BB users who were very engaged with the BBS [1] were more likely to find the change unsettling and off-putting. But I suspect that group is a minority of the readership [2], and a whole lot of BB readers prefer the new format.
I’d imagine that there are plenty of fans of the BB front page who don’t comment on the BBS, and this probably suits them better than the cheesy ads.
[1] That is, us.
[2] I mean, it should be a minority - I think there were only a few hundred people who engaged with the BBS at least once a month.
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I had no idea that your moderation work was unpaid.
Thanks to your (and community moderators) work Boing Boing BBS was a safe space and pretty much the only place online I knew of where talking about serious political topics wouldn’t be overwhelmingly stressful. I want to thank you for this, you did seriously amazing job.
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Same for me. I thought the bbs going dormant would help me spend more time offline. I’ve lurked some here since the very start, but didn’t make an account until last year, and then I didn’t really participate beyond the DMs. And here I am now, spending hours reading through all the new comments 
My sister, for one. She and her wife are long-time fans of Cory and of BB. Once, when I mentioned the vibrant online community that I participated in, and explained that it was actually the comment section of BB and that I always wondered if she might recognize me from a family story or two that I’d told there, she said “I’ve never even looked. I never read the comments on the posts.”
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Guys, the BBBBS has been on the radar of all the worst Palantir-style fuckery for twenty years now. They Have Your Number. You just have to accept it and become the Rorshach you never wanted to be—make the billionaires understand that they are locked in with us, not the other way around. I know it’s scummy, but they’ve tainted the whole world with their scammy authoritarian hell. It’s up to everyone to pressure-wash their lazy tags off the sidewalks.
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Yeah, i have been saying this for years. And situations differ, obviously, but for me, at least, i am far too well known locally for being trans supporting, liberal, feministic, etc etc to worry about my BB posts. I did anonymize out of an abundance of caution, but truly, if it comes to that, my local activities will have me on more lists than my online stuff.
I’m the only one i have seen around here wearing this…
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One of the casualties of that time was the Boing Boing book that chronicled all this good stuff! *slaps the manuscript* will finish this one day.
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hmm. Having trouble finding the equivalent of the bb forums on substack. Where is everybody?
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Pretty much here… lots of us are just not going to participate at SuS…
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It’s the chat and chat is shit.
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tcg550 left an open invite to a private Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/displacedmutants/
I haven’t signed up yet, so I don’t know who all is there.
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True…
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and just in the last half day or so, there’s no permitted commenting on the recent postings. hmm… really don’t get the ‘goal’ over there.
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Popping in briefly to share this piece from Cory. Reading it, and considering the timing, I don’t think this is entirely about Bluesky…
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/
I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will
[…]
But here’s the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they’d never sell out. I know those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.
They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.
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That’s too on the nose to be a coincidence.
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