Given that the capitalists in power are hellbent on making it clear that they own the internet we have been using by virtue of locking it down, plenty of people out there (me included) have come to the conclusion that eschewing the current order of centralized social media by returning to older, more independent forms of communicating over the internet. This sense of rebelling against the concept of a world where everything is proprietary is most literally exemplified in communicating through the use of universal standards such as sending out emails to a mailing list or hosting a channel on an IRC server. I extended my sentiments of support for these means by subscribing to the mailing list of an irl friend and hopping on KVIrc to get a hang of the system in case I would be tasked with hosting matchmaking on it in the future.[1]
The most appealing of these systems to "revive" from a functionality standpoint is the internet forum. First off, the standard powering the colorful forums of yesteryear is still around, fulfilling the requirement of not being proprietary. The bulk of the advantages of making forums the preferred way to communicate over the internet are embedded within the posting system. Topics being their own pages that get bumped to the top whenever a new reply is made make these threads more visible and permanent than the infinite scroll of modern social media.
Now that the existing talk of forums resurging has laid out the benefit/cost ratio of the project to restore the message board to its previous place in the internet ecosystem, the discussion can now shift to how to execute the plan to get that cultural capital back. Through much of the early part of this year, I have been invited to hop on a few forums: two fully new, one a revival of a classic forum from years past. Regardless of age or original intended purpose of the sites, distinct posting cultures will arise. Forums, moreso than anywhere else that people "post", instill the importance of adhering to this posting culture.[2]
The first message board I made an account and posted on in 2026 was that of foopy.net. Foopy had created this website initially as a place to organize and archive game jams, and the forums were added to be on the ground floor of a new forum boom. As the early adopters of foopy.net's forums were also posters of the the famed #lfg-na channel in the original Melty Blood discord, the posting culture was lifted from there as well.[3] Leaning into the idea that people wouldn't make the site the primary place they interact on the internet, Foopy had commented that the wheat was separated from the chaff.
Later on, the organizer of the Dustbowl netplay tournament series for Xrd entered the fray with xrd.lol, an April Fool's gag that would later exist in perpetuity. Befitting that this site's existence started as a bit, I saw varying levels of commitment to playing along with it from the userbase. This created an interesting dymanic where you could see who was RPing[4] an earlier time in internet history and who was actually living it. I made some bits about the premise of my own, but they were still in the matter of fact writing style I use to build this very website.
My favorite of the three forum posting experiences I had as of late, and the blueprint for how the message board posting system as a whole can regain its cultural capital, is the revived Dustloop forums. The act of going through and Remembering Some Posters is a universal experience; plain fun to see who and/or what is still relevant today. You can also sell new users as continuing the legacy of those who blazed the trails before them.
There is one extra-special consideration with this path in particular: thread necromancy. After a long enough timeframe (which is exactly what we are working with), it goes from a faux pas to brilliancy. For my first post on Dustloop, I stuck the landing on the most carthartic necro of all time:
