I'm thankful for old forums and newer one's as well, they were my gateway into a more interactive internet consumption lifestyle in 2021. Before then, I never conversed anywhere online. I think the rather simplistic fashion of the phpBB forum I chose to join, got me more acquainted with a paragraph per paragraph writing style and the same forum still helps me grow in many ways.
Forum's have always been places for knowledge and sometimes they can become real hubs of quite fervent (and quick) activity. I just know that whenever Boards of Canada releases anything at all, the twoism.org boards will be lit up with over 100 signed in names at one time, and that won't stop for at least a couple of days.
The Tomorrow's Harvest release was a testament and a great example of the peak of the site. The album's ARG had many puzzles to solve with numbers stations, code decryptions, radio and public broadcasts, and six 12' inch vinyl records for Record Store Day, which when discovered with their nearly blank sleeves and 40 second robotic announcements, would finally leave you with the order page for the new album itself. Pretty gruelling puzzle-solving work and basically all the hardcore discussion was to be found on old electronic messsageboards and forums like twoism. You can still read the threads today, and see how concentrated it really was.
Since then twoism has died down a lot and the speculation over new music has taken a rather bleak turn for a lot of members (though the moderators are still chipper with their rock-solid evidence that it's a-coming). A thread on the forum that I have actually come to really disdain, closed a few weeks ago, because the forum was running out of internal space and it was actually the biggest thread EVER on twoism!!!
After 1180 pages of the last one were finally ground to a halt, the new 3 pages in, "General New Release Speculation Topic Part. II" was now continuing the roundabout of passive-aggression, distraught tinged despair over lack of new BoC music, arguments, "just give it another year", and mind numbing and time-passing, always wrong numerology.
It's best avoided if you don't want to see the No. 2 most toxic place for Boards of Canada fans!
Luckily I hung out more in the other less BoC related sub-forums, dedicated to music and random chatter ("This Random Sound" and "The Playground" respectively), they were always the more chiller places and quite lighthearted, you had more time to THINK about your responses, it's a big shame those obsessive BoC fans never saw the subjective paradise right on the very same forum, they kept going around in insanity loops for the band.
So that's my history with twoism.org, I left out a couple of friends I made, but our interactions together are still alive and kicking, like for example; every Christmas we send each other presents through the post. In 2023 I received prints of one of my friends very own artwork! Each of the prints are album covers for a fictional industrial rock band and I was glad of having something of theirs to frame after many years of seeing the same paintings in twoism threads. It felt rather cathartic.
So much of social media now is not deliberate or considered enough for me, the fast nature of online spaces like twitter and discord pushed me away for a long time until I decided to use them within moderation, with forums there's a kind of easy atmosphere to reply to someone within your own time, and you can write up big paragraphs like these without getting an "omg bruh touch grass duhhhh".
If you can document periods in your life however you wish, forums are always how you'll find out the most about me, and I'm pleased open house is here with people whom I'm very glad I observed and was part of their discord server, you bring a bigger sense of community and friendship in an online space than I've felt for years. So thank you all.
Old Internet, New Age
Beginning this thread to discuss the websites, dilemmas, people, and movements that concern the way we progress as an Internet. What purpose does an online forum have in the age of social media? What is Web3? Web scraping for AI chatbots? Tumblr revivalists, Twitter refugees, Soulseekers, Neocities residents, the whole thing. 
converse with the technologists about the latest and greatest gadgets and gizmos
