Forums: My Introduction to The Internet

Yesterday I came across this blog post by @malpercio.dev about a new project, forums for atproto. This immediately peaked my interest because I absolutely agree, the world needs more forums.

What the World Needs Now is Forums Sweet Forums - Mal’s Musings

and other thoughts from a forums purveyorI was seven years old when I got my first video game console. It was Christmas, and I actually got two! A GameBoy Po...

Somewhere around the age of 11-13, I found myself on a forum called Jiggmin’s Village, run by the developer of a game series called Platform Racing. My older brother had actually introduced it to me, but I quickly found myself feeling like I belonged here. This place ended up being my home away from home for years until around the time I reached college age when due to declining interest from the owner/ dev, the site was one day suddenly shutdown and then just gone.

When I was reading Malpercio's blog post, this specific part really had me feeling nostalgic.

I had discovered the Nintendo NSider forums, and fell in love with it. I was spending all kinds of time chatting with other gamers. I started to learn GIMP so that I could make the cool footer banners showing off my favorite characters and games, and help others too. Who knows, maybe all of those images are still on a PhotoBucket server somewhere. -@malpercio.dev

Other than the forum itself, it feels like what Malpercio’s is describing my own experience. Making avatars and signatures in GIMP was one of the most memorable parts. I only wish I still had all of the image files saved somewhere. I may just have to do some serious web archive digging at some point.

As one would likely expect from a forum predominantly populated with 13-18 year olds, there was no shortage of drama from people making fake accounts claiming to be siblings, mods abusing power, and even at one point a collective action of requesting permabans from the admins in protest. It was all really quite dramatic, but it was so much fun.

At one point a friend of mine and I worked together to create our own forum. We had a vision of an almost democratically run community, but to no one’s surprise regarding the forum being run by 14yr olds, other than maybe ~30 miscellaneous folks from Jiggmin’s Village, it never quite took off.

I still occasionally talk with some of the friends I made back then, but there are countless others out there that I’ve completely lost touch with for well over a decade at this point. The only real thing still with me from this time is the name I still carry. My original username was Flybird and I had created a small blue spherical bird character (oddly similar to the twitter bird but in my defense, I was a child) as my avatar, which now lives on in my atproto handle @ajbird.net . The idea of an atproto forum, where never again would I need to worry of 100% losing all of the data and connections I’ve made over time, truly warms my heart and makes me incredibly excited for the future of the social internet.

If you find this idea as exciting as I do, I highly recommend checking out Malpercio’s blog post above as well as his first iteration of this idea below. I know I’ll be following along!

atBB Community Forum — atBB Forum

Also, how cool is it I can just embed the full site here? Common Leaflet W.