BACK IN MY DAY (jk my day is ongoing 😜), many popular sites were called “e/n” sites. This was like before blogs, before Google, etc. Back then, the web wasn’t very feature-rich, but it was “loud.” Contrast that with now: there are more sites than ever and wayyyyyyy more users than in the late 90s, but the www is very quiet and isolated (or isolating? I’m not sure how to phrase it).
Anyway, I think about this a lot, and I came to Lemmy to escape the labyrinth of marketing funnels that we call the www, but the element I can’t quite figure out is like where’s the social element on the web? I see many forums for like whatever niche subject, but where is the e/n chatter? Where do people like…be people in a very general sense? I was looking at the …sublemmies I follow, and they’re all like niche stuff. I really don’t even know where to post this question (so please pardon me if I screwed up and feel free to redirect me).
In essence, where – if anywhere – do people interact with people online?
Funny thing is I have this kinda skip when it comes to the internet because I was on it in the non www days until 95 (kinda more the start of www but I did not use it and few knew about it) Then like I kinda started using www around 98 with yahoo and excite but I prefered excite. Slashdot was kinda the first www thing that harkened back to newsgroups for me but reddit came closer and this really scratches the itch.
Awww yeah! Slashdot.org!
Back then web search was terrible tho. I thought Google was such a major improvement in like 2000ish. I did not foresee it becoming a monopolist. Naive, I see now.
see I was late to slashdot to so if was like into the aughts before I was even on it. For that matter I did not even know about google until 2000 where it was mentioned at a conference by folks. you should try google.
Ohhhhh you just reminded me of Slashdot / “news for nerds.” I never got into that. I like/d Slashdot.org, which was excerpts of online chats (most of which clearly came from IRC).
It’s interesting cuz I’m for progress. I even think (so-called) AI has a lot of utility, but no matter how ya slice it, ya gotta get stuff back into your very non-digital brain
E/n?
I’ve never heard this term before.
Me neither, and I think I’m a similar vintage to op.
I’m old enough to remember 9600 kbps dial up modems on POTS line as a long distance call to the next major city who had a BBS. The internet was not yet common in the public and was still mostly universities. I was doing internet tech support when ISPs were rolling out publically. I have no idea what e/n is. A guess given the 90s was like an IRC channel named as such.
In essence, where – if anywhere – do people interact with people online?
This is it mate. We’re interacting right now
I had to do some digging to figure out what you were talking about, but it looks like you are talking about something like this
So, basically a blog without any real direction? Like, the og blogs which were basically just public online journals?
I mean, I’m sure there are still plenty out there… but no one (or few people) read them. Main reason being, there is far more interesting content to consume. I think the original appeal of these sorts of sites was that you had something in common with the writer - namely, that you were on the internet - exploring and creating a brave new world together. Now everyone is online, and being online is not a good signal that you might share a connection with someone.
So instead, you filter based on interests - hobbies or music or religion or politics or occupation or niche lifestyle. A blogger first needs to establish a connection with their potential readers, and then the readers are open to caring about them personally.
But once you clear that filter, there are still a ton of people doing this kind of content. Except they arent doing it on self hosted blogs. Instead, they are on substack, or instagram, or tiktok, or twitter, etc. I feel like the closest modern equivalent to what you are talking about is the Twitch streamer who talks about their day while playing video games.
Sites like reddit/lemmy, I feel, actively discourage these sorts of personal connections, since you follow subs or the “hot” algorithm, rather than certain people. With so much churn, it is difficult to remember people’s usernames, and therefore difficult to create a real picture of them as a complete human being. However, there are options here like AskLemmy or CasualConversation where you can talk about random shit if you want.
For the more traditional forum banal chatter, probably the best modern equivalent is small, niche discord servers. The ones with just a handful of members often have tightknit communities. But, by their nature, they are difficult to find and get invites to.
Sites like reddit/lemmy, I feel, actively discourage these sorts of personal connections, since you follow subs or the “hot” algorithm, rather than certain people. With so much churn, it is difficult to remember people’s usernames, and therefore difficult to create a real picture of them as a complete human being.
Worth noting, Mbin is a community-based fediverse project like Lemmy that also supports microblogging and thus following users.
Interesting – thank you for your thoughtful response. I think a lot of the “Dunbar number.” This guy Dunbar hypothesized a number of around 180 that was basically the max number of social connections primates had (or something). Circa late-90s, I had fewer friends online than IRL. However, as that behavior has become normalized, the prospect of having “online friends” has been normalized, thus removing pressure to like “go out and do something.” Moreover, back to Dunbar’s number, it has been completely normalized to have many isolated interactions, leading to a general disincentive to form new connections, as it seems like additional effort without clear upside.
@jtzl@lemmy.zip @asklemmy@lemmy.world
I don’t recall the specific “e/n websites”, but I do remember a time where the Web was a more connective place. I used to participate in Orkut communities, MSN groups (wasn’t a native feature, instead it was a third-party plug-in I can’t recall the name), Yahoo Messenger, IRC (not ICQ) channels on Freenode, etc.
Even though some of these things still exist (Escargot IM reviving MSN services; IRC is still a thing), the past Web is long gone. Now it’s Cloudflare and captchas and Anubis challenges, ads, clickbaits, paywalls, subscriptions, AI everywhere…
Yeah, there’s Fediverse and other decentralized places. Except that those places, including the Fediverse, depends on an infrastructure (Internet) which is increasingly closing on itself like a pangolin (or an Ouroboros, eating itself)… Once Internet closes itself due to the synergy of forces acting against it, there’ll be nowhere else to flee from enshittification. Maybe Meshtastic, but I don’t know how much it’d manage to become a haven for us, how much it’d be able to resist those forces.
(This text may sound a little vague because it is, I was going to be more specific and detailed, I even composed a larger text, but then I realized it was going into complicated realms (e.g. current geopolitics, lots of personal anecdotes making my whole comment sound as if I were narcissistic) so I refrained from going into further detail)
May the record show I would have gladly read your comment. Nevertheless, I have never heard of Meshtastic – will have to look that one up.
As for the web becoming a husk connected by ads, I think about this a lot. Tbh it seems like an awful lot of work to degrade civilization – I write about this in my blog often, obviously.😜
In essence, where – if anywhere – do people interact with people online?
That 90s Web is long gone, as a trend. It is still there, mind you, but it’s mostly through blogs who have themselves evolved from being a trendy space, everybody wanted to have a blog starting in the early 00-05s, to a very niche phenomenon that is barely visible anymore. But that still exists.
Many people like myself, who used to hand code websites in the 90s, are still blogging to this day. The one real change is in readership: very few people can be bothered with visiting blogs (I seldom spontaneously share a link to my blog, but regularly mention it but I’ve only been asked once its address ;).
It’s even more obvious with the younger generations who have not grown used at all to search through the World Wide Web (that is much more akin to a World Narrow Web, for them) for whatever content they might be interested in. And for those that may still read blogs, how many will not be using RSS, or even be aware it exists, making it uselessly harder for them to read said blogs.
They’re not to blame. They need/want said content to be served to them from a few limited sources they all gather around because it’s what they grew with. Hence, most of them only using social media platforms, be they centralized/corporate-owned ones like X, Facebook, TikTok, or even Substack, and so on. Or decentralized ones, like Mastodon, Piefed,… the entire Fediverse.
As far as I’m concerned, even email has almost completely vanished as a meaningful tool of communication. Email! It used to be my main means of communicating with correspondents all over the world since the early 90s and has remained so until around 2010, or maybe 2015 when it has started to dried out, and quickly so. As far as I’m concerned, email is barely a trickle nowadays. Here again people will use ‘messaging apps’, centralized or not it doesn’t change much! they have moved from a fully indendant/personal means of communicating to a non-personal one.
I’m not sure that, collectively, we have gained anything by not using emails anymore: a lot of my pasts interactions lasted much longer (oftentimes it was measured in months if not years worth of back and forth exchanges) whereas I seldom have any long lasting (or even that stimulating) exchanges on those social media platforms, even the non-corporate owned ones. But maybe that’s just me being incompetent and unable to engage in a meaningful way using those tools.
It’s a silly comparison, but I often make a parallel with eating habits.
They are a generation that will happily gather at meal time around some trendy (cheap) places, fast food, snacks or whatever they fancy, without having to worry about preparing their meal. While my own generation learned how to cook and often will prefer cooking (or at least, go to a traditional restaurant, a place where they actually prepare food, not a fast food) because one gets to pick what they eat (fresh products, nothing industrially processed) and can oftentimes eat for a similar price (it’s even cheaper to cook one’s own food) than the industrial junk food that are sold everywhere.
Edit: like I said personal websites, blogs, still exist almost everywhere one makes the effort to search for them. They’re just not searched for, so we get to decide they don’t exist anymore which is not the reality. People expect to get their content served to them in those few limited centralized places called social media… a bit like they expect to meet their partner(s) through dating apps only… Something old-me will never be able to fathom, to be honest.
Interesting. May I please have the link to your blog? If there are specific must-read posts, please point me that direction.
If there are specific must-read posts, please point me that direction.
Not really, it’s a tiny little blog (without ads and without tracking) written either in English or in French, depending my mood and the topic. It’s personal in the strictest sense. My only suggestion would be to trust your guts while browsing through some post titles, and by all means don’t feel bad if you feel like reading none: there will be no hard feelings on my part ;)
D’acc. Je vais lire. Et maintenant j’éxpecte que vous êtes Canadien.
Mais à ce propos: Puis-je devenir Canadien, siouplé? Can I become a Canadian, pliiiz?, … impossible de ne pas partager ce lien (et mon admiration) ;)
Not really: French ;)
I just gleaned that from your blog. Sadly, there was no comments section, so I’ll comment here.
I just read the post about “good” vs “evil,” and I agree. I’m also reminded of a book I once read by Nietzsche.
Those sorts of labels are eagerly assigned by politicians but usually misstate and distort reality. I would much prefer to see more people thinking more critically and, perhaps as a consequence, showing more doubt.
I just gleaned that from your blog. Sadly, there was no comments section, so I’ll comment here.
I suggest people use email instead of comments.
Matrix groups are a good location
Pretty much here. I just comment on things I find interesting and try to participate with other comments.
Discord
I loved IRC so I have looked at Discord, but it seems like yet another company trying to own the commons.
Do you like it for specific features, or is it like “go there cuz ppl are there?”
I don’t like it for the same reason you don’t. But it’s undeniable that there are a crap ton of people there using it like IRC. They have something like 200 million monthly users.
I would say that the Web in 2026 is much less isolated in terms of person-person interaction than it was in the late '90s, as a lot of websites in the late 1990s were static or mostly-static and the major rise of social media hadn’t yet happened. Much social interaction happened on non-Web platforms like IRC, Usenet, or mailing lists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
The term “Web 2.0” was coined by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant, in her January 1999 article “Fragmented Future”:[3][20]
“The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will […] appear on your computer screen, […] on your TV set […] your car dashboard […] your cell phone […] hand-held game machines […] maybe even your microwave oven.”
Instead of merely reading a Web 2.0 site, a user is invited to contribute to the site’s content by commenting on published articles, or creating a user account] or profile on the site, which may enable increased participation. By increasing emphasis on these already-extant capabilities, they encourage users to rely more on their browser for user interface, application software (“apps”) and file storage facilities. This has been called “network as platform” computing.[5] Major features of Web 2.0 include social networking websites, self-publishing platforms (e.g., WordPress’ easy-to-use blog and website creation tools), “tagging” (which enables users to label websites, videos or photos in some fashion), “like” buttons (which enable a user to indicate that they are pleased by online content), and social bookmarking.
Users can provide the data and exercise some control over what they share on a Web 2.0 site.[5][28] These sites may have an “architecture of participation” that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it.[4][5] Users can add value in many ways, such as uploading their own content on blogs, consumer-evaluation platforms (e.g. Amazon and eBay), news websites (e.g. responding in the comment section), social networking services, media-sharing websites (e.g. YouTube and Instagram) and collaborative-writing projects.[29] Some scholars argue that cloud computing is an example of Web 2.0 because it is simply an implication of computing on the Internet.[30]
I don’t know exactly when the first Web forum software packages started spreading off-the-cuff, but they took a while to spread; were much less common early on, and at first were custom implementions on a per-site basis.
PhpBB’s been around for a while, was popular in the “standalone Web forum” era.
goes to look when it started out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhpBB
phpBB was founded by James Atkinson as a simple UBB-like forum for his own website on June 17, 2000.
It looks like UBB is a commercial package that dates to 1997, though it certainly didn’t meet with phpBB level of use, and I don’t know if I’ve ever used a UBB-based forum.
