By roundabout I mean neither forums, emails, nor comment sections, but other indirect and atypical ways of community forming online.
The irc warez scene was an odd community. People showed up for the hacked software and stayed for the friendly banter.
Sounds like being buddies with your drug dealer
More like befriending the other customers in the drug dealer’s waiting room.
More like hanging out at a swap meet, but with more trout slaps
Yeah, but you get the hacks first. Unlike having to watch 3 episodes of always sunny before you can leave with your dime bag of seeds and stems. ;)
I used to spend hours on Suprnova’s IRC and they eventually made me a mod.
Yeah I hosted some apps because my “@home” service wasn’t capped at 128k, so I was getting 5mb up/down. Would spend a lot of idle time shooting the shit with people, lots of regulars.
MMORPGs are an easy example, where people form recognizable identities and communities in game. An extension of this would be Second Life, and somewhat more recently, VRChat.
Late 90s PC gaming. Even the simple in-game chat systems back in the days in games such as Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and many others helped people meet, socialize, and form communities.
Met a lot of folk through Diablo II chat :-) it was nice and chill leveling with new friends
Webrings were great. I met one of my best friends, a girl who literally changed the course of my life, because we were both writing poetry and publishing it on our personal webpages as teens.
There’s a program called Hypothesis, it’s a toolbar that uses its status as a non-site entity to add a comment section to any page from any URL you could possibly think of. It’s hard to explain.
I have read about the Circles app. Have not tried it. Anyone with any experience?
Discord servers?
Man, the world sure has changed if people think forums are an atypical online community.
They said not includong forums.
Gosh dang it! I really need to stay off the Internet until I’ve finished my first cup of coffee. I thought they said “I mean either” as in “possibly including these following things”.
Fwiw those I mention in the OP are a few I personally consider typical but thought others might consider atypical these days, so wanted to head them off.
Edit:
was replying from notifications, so missed where someone else pointed this out, sorry for the extra notification! 😅
Minecraft servers.