Staying on the theme of nostalgia, I’d like to talk about small web communities. This post is a part of IndieWeb blog carnival - an alternative form of independent, personally curated content aggregation on a specific topic. I think that’s a pretty neat idea, a throwback in itself to how I used to discover cool stuff. This month’s carnival is hosted by Chris Shaw.

The fact that “small web communities” is a nostalgic topic for me should speak volumes about how I engage with the web today – or perhaps, how I don’t in the same way. But let me start at the beginning.

My relationship with web communities kicked off in the mid-2000s. I was probably in middle school, and while I’d had a computer for a while, the internet wasn’t yet a fixture in our home. That wasn’t a huge deal; my digital world mostly revolved around video games anyway.

Then came the cell phone era. Suddenly, every kid at school had one, and my mom, bless her, got me one too – and a smartphone at that! I think it was the Sony Ericsson K750. Man, that thing felt like a marvel of technology. It played music, snapped pictures with its (then impressive) 2-megapixel camera, and – get this – it had a web browser! I could actually browse the web using (very expensive, very slow) mobile data.

A render of Sony Ericsson K750.

It was on that tiny 176x220 pixel display that I stumbled into my first real online community. A schoolmate showed me this internet forum specifically built for phones. It was a godsend: low data requirements, images disabled by default (a blessing for my GPRS connection!), and topics covering a vast array of subjects – including, crucially, video games and tabletop gaming!

I became a frequent poster. I dived into countless threads, argued passionately about silly things (like Diablo II not really being a role-playing game - “you don’t play a role”), and even played through forum-based role-playing games. Quite frankly, I’m impressed I didn’t graduate school with carpal tunnel from all that WAP browsing (that’s Wireless Apllication Protocol if you’re not familiar). The other posters were mostly teenagers too, and over time, a small tabletop gaming community formed around that forum. There were maybe 20 of us, tops. We lived in different cities, went to different schools, but we were connected by our shared love of tabletop gaming, forum-based RPGs, and the low bandwidth afforded by our phones.

There was genuine camaraderie, a lot of laughter (typed out, of course), and the occasional burst of teenage drama (I vividly remember employing some social engineering to obtain my “rival’s” password and writing profanities on their profile page). It felt real.

Closer to the end of the 2000s, things escalated. I finally got dial-up at home. I lived in a small town, and dial-up was still pretty common there (a good reminder that I didn’t grow up in the US, so the pace of internet adoption was a bit different).

I was also neck-deep in my rebellious teenager phase – blasting heavy metal, rocking a black jacket and steel-toed boots (an outfit my ever-supportive mother actually bought for me to encourage my “rebellion”). MySpace was the place to be around that time, and I’d diligently seek out other alternative-looking teenagers from my town, add them as friends, and then the real conversations would happen over ICQ.

Screenshot of ICQ interface, version marked 2001b.

For those not in the know, ICQ was huge. It was kind of AOL Messenger’s cooler, more international predecessor. AOL didn’t really take off in Russia, but ICQ went on strong for ages – until being acquired by VK in 2010 and finally shutting down in 2024, ceasing its operation after a whopping 28 years. Long live the king, indeed.

As an aside, thinking about ICQ makes me a bit wistful for the era of interoperable protocols. Remember Jabber/XMPP? Google Talk ran on it, and you could use various clients to connect to different services, including ICQ gateways. There was this sense that you weren’t locked into one company’s ecosystem. You could pick your client, connect to your network, and chat with people regardless of what specific app they were using, as long as it used the same protocol. It felt like the web was more open, more… connected in a federated way. We’ve lost a lot of that. Now, everything is a walled garden, and I can’t help but feel that this shift has made it harder for those little, cross-platform communities to organically form and thrive. Everyone retreated into their own digital fortresses.

I spent countless afternoons after school, evenings, and late nights glued to that computer screen, chatting about the events of the day, school gossip, music, and, naturally, gaming - both tabletop and video games. Some of my ICQ friends were from out of town, people I’d never met in person, but they still felt like real people, tangible individuals on the other side of the screen.

This brings me to VK (VKontakte), which really started to take off around that time in Russia, much like Facebook did elsewhere. These massive platforms were amazing in their own right – connecting everyone – but they also marked a shift. Suddenly, communication became centralized. Instead of seeking out niche forums or specific Jabber groups for your interests, you could just join a massive VK group with thousands, or even millions, of members.

If you look closely, you'll might see a resemblance to Facebook. This isn't me, by the way. Screenshot from the Wayback Machine.

It was convenient, sure. But something was lost. The intimacy of those smaller spaces started to fade. The signal-to-noise ratio went through the roof. While you could find more people, it became harder to find your people, or at least, to have the same kind of focused, tight-knit interactions. The algorithms started to decide what you saw, rather than the curated flow of a smaller, human-moderated community. It felt like the digital equivalent of a bustling, anonymous city replacing a cozy village. As I started using VK, I became connected with a lot more people, spent more time scrolling through algorithmic content, and the smaller forums I engaged in just sort of… faded out?

Despite this changing landscape, my journey into distinct online communities wasn’t completely over. Through someone I knew (no doubt from an ICQ chat), I discovered Space Station 13 – a game that really clicked with me. I dived headfirst into a close-knit Russian-speaking community for the game. I ended up becoming the custodian for the in-game wiki and eventually found myself heading up the server as a de-facto community leader. This was a noticeably larger community than my old forum haunts, with hundreds of active members, but the core crew of maybe 20-30 moderators and regulars maintained a very distinct (albeit, in retrospect, sometimes toxic) culture.

And again, the key thing was that each participant had their own personality – a distinct, real person on the other side of the screen. Some people were absolute good Samaritans, contributing to the wiki, the forum, or the server code. Others… well, others were notorious griefers who reveled in chaos. But they all felt like real people, because they were real people. Passionate, excited, sometimes infuriating, but undeniably real. There was drama around fudged moderator elections, complaints of hacking, tensions between role-players and munchkins… Yeah, real.

At some point, life happened. I moved to the US, my professional career started demanding more and more of my attention, and I gradually disengaged from the Space Station 13 community. I think this was around 2011-2013. I spent a number of years here focused on my career and professional growth, and frankly, I didn’t really engage with any specific internet communities for a while. My free digital time was mostly soaked up by solo experiences – video games and shows. Many, many hours were lost to the landscapes of Skyrim and the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica.

I did try to recapture some of that old magic. I remember joining a few local or interest-based IRC channels, hoping to find that spark. But the audience was always much, much older than I was at the time, or the vibe just wasn’t right, and I had a hard time connecting with people. I didn’t stick around for long in any of them.

Eventually, like so many others, I started using Reddit and YouTube more and more. I began relying on upvotes from massive, amorphous communities and the ever-present algorithms to introduce me to content. And for a long time, I didn’t really feel the need to engage with people as intimately online as I once had.

Real-world friendships, connections, and experiences had also, thankfully, taken center stage.

And then, relatively recently, as I was writing about my nostalgia for the old web, I discovered the IndieWeb. And something about it – its philosophy, its community, its focus on owning your own content and connecting on a more personal level – reignited that old desire to be part of a concrete, intentional online community. I’m excited about the idea of your personal website being a part of the larger network, heavily encouraging communicating with and actively hyperlinking to other sites.

I’m engaging in IndieWeb chat, I added my blog to the IndieWeb Webring, and, as of this submission, I’m participating in an IndieWeb blog carnival.

It feels like coming full circle, in a way.