When the Internet was Good

I remember when the internet was good. I started using it in graduate school in 1991. The interface was mostly text in those days, which meant that the focus was on content, not visuals. I think we used the Mosaic web browser in those days, and I used to telnet into MUDS (Multi-user dungeons) to play games with friends.

This was the age of list-servers. I used to be the Hammer of Heretics in a Catholic list, in those days of yore. Halcyon days!

As the 90s progressed, web-hosting became easier to do, browsers could display graphics and even video, Myspace came along, and it was the glory days of internet forums. The forum was an evolution of the Bulletin Board or BBS, where you would dial in to someone’s computer, make posts and respond to others, and then dial in the next day to see how the conversation was going. In the 80s, we used to play Dungeons and Dragons via a dial-up BBS. But in the 90s, forums were the thing.

If you were interested in strength training, interactive fiction, or something more obscure, you could find a forum devoted to your hobby. The forums at bodybuilding.com were great. Forum posts were searchable via the nascent search engines. You could find Anon401’s brilliant take on the conflicts inherent in conciliarism vs ultramontanism from 1997 if you wanted. I still have a post on a strength training forum that comes up in Google.

Nowadays, nobody can find anything with a search engine.

I loved internet forums. But they have mostly gone away. Our interactions on the internet are ephemeral, on Discord or Slack or Twitter, where your latest post scrolls up the page in someone’s “feed”. What’s the motive to be thoughtful? It’s like flatulence in a hurricane; no one will ever notice!

All of this is prelude: I have created a forum for Soulsteading.life, using the open source forum software Discourse. Podia, where I host my website, has forums built in, but I find it clunky and hidden from the search engines. This should be better. Go to discourse.soulsteading.life and join us! Intellectual pursuits, in our case the “homesteading of the soul,” are easier to do with friends. Let’s get together on our virtual porch. Pull up a chair, throw a log on the fire, and tell us what you’re thinking.