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forums as liminal spaces - gorzek - 02-07-2025
One of the things that fascinates me the most about the Internet, and has since I first started using it in the '90s, is the idea of spaces within it. They aren't physical spaces, of course, but our brains are designed to think in terms of those, so we conceptualize virtual/digital spaces as having a physicality that they really don't.
A good example of this is how, before everyone had the Internet on their phones, the Internet was something you "logged onto." It was a place. You would sit down at a computer, push a couple buttons, and you would be "on the Internet." If you stepped away, you weren't on the Internet anymore. Pop culture portrayed this distinction, particularly in cyberpunk media, through similar fictional technologies and concepts. You would "jack in," or "go in." Regardless of the specific story or medium, the idea was always that you had a clear delineation between the real world and the virtual world.
When you logged on, you would be going somewhere. Maybe it's to a site you check regularly, or maybe you're hitting up a search engine to find something new, or something you forgot to bookmark.
Before the Web, digital spaces were considerably different. Early on, I'm not sure people were thinking about them as spaces at all, because they had no moment-to-moment persistence. An example would be email: you would fire off an email, the recipient would get it. The feeling is more like getting a letter in the mail than going somewhere, per se. Newsgroups/Usenet used a public bulletin board metaphor, but since you experienced it by intentionally downloading your own copies of the messages you wanted to see, it was more like getting a newspaper or a newsletter or similar. But there are a few early technologies that felt more like real spaces, because you would go to them, in a manner of speaking, and you could definitely tell one from another fairly quickly. Which is to say, they all had a unique character.
- Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) - I admit I never got to spend much time on these, but from what I did see, they're like a small step past Usenet, but with the drawback that you had to dial straight into it, so it wasn't really "going on the Internet." Initially used to distribute documents and software (sometimes illegally, lol), they eventually developed more robust features like chatrooms and even rudimentary multiplayer games. Importantly, since the same group of people would often dial into the same BBS, you would get familiar with them over time. Notably, these were text-based, and anything that looked like graphics was just doing clever things with text characters. It's also worth noting most BBSes were run by regular people who just had a spare phone line and a computer hooked up to it.
- Online Services - Before the Web, you had walled gardens like AOL, Compuserve, GEnie, and Prodigy. These often had BBS-like features, but they would also provide services like email, Usenet browsing and posting, and even graphics-driven games. The openness of the Web ultimately killed these, but they were an important step on that road. These started out as text-based but moved into graphics over time, which gave them distinct visual identities.
- Internet Relay Chat (IRC) - A number of these still exist! As spaces, they were a little odd because you could use any client program you wanted to access them, so how it appeared you visually could vary a lot. But much like the other services above, the character of the space would be shaped largely by the people you encountered in it. If you don't know what IRC is, it's just a bunch of chat servers. Anybody could technically run one. At one time, there were a bunch of IRC networks, meaning if you connected to one server, you would be connected to all the other servers connected with it, which allowed a single IRC network to support large user bases (thousands of people, or even tens of thousands.) Early webcam integration allowed extremely low fidelity video chat. It was terrible.
- MUD/MUCK/MUSH/MOO - Terminal-based like BBS services, but with chat features similar to IRC, this is a type of space purpose-built for roleplaying and similar collaborative activities. If you aren't familiar with the terms: MUD is Multi-User Dungeon, MUCK is Multi-User Construction Kit, MUSH is Multi-User Shared Hallucination, and MOO is MUD, Object-Oriented. The names help highlight sometimes subtle differences between them. Like a BBS, anybody could run a MU* server. Where they got really interesting was that, because they focused on roleplaying, the need developed to have special code running on the server that would automate actions and enforce rules. Your basic MUD is pure roleplaying: everyone is expected to be on good behavior and there are no machine-enforced mechanical rules, per se. The other forms typically had potentially very complex programming layers which were explicitly for the construction of virtual spaces. Taking the idea of a chat room to its fullest, a MU* would be made up of rooms, which would often be connected to each other. Each room would serve as a chat room between the people in it, though methods existed to "shout" to the whole server, or "whisper" to a specific person privately. I've always been personally fascinated by MU* systems because of their limitless potential for interactive world-building. Since they're text-based, they don't have to be constrained the way MMOs are in terms of allowable player behavior, customization, and modifications they can make to the world.
OK, OK, so where do forums come in? Why am I ranting about all this stuff?
Every online communication medium is influenced by the ones that came before it, as well as its contemporaries. Forums, in particular, take a lot of inspiration from BBS services, Usenet groups, and even IRC and MU* servers. I would say they are the most like BBS services, except they present themselves as a space more akin to how a BBS or a MU* does.
Early Web forums used nested threading. One of the earliest and most popular was wwwboard. Here's a picture.
If the nesting looks hard to follow, yes. Yes, it was. This is where links you've visited showing up as a different color was really important, because otherwise you'd never remember which posts you'd looked at.
I cut my teeth on an X-Men themed board in the mid '90s. It was split into a few subforums:
- General - People would talk about anything and everything. It was a general hangout.
- Teams - Roleplaying among "teams" would happen here. There were teams you could join which had friendly rivalries with each other. There weren't any real rules, people just improved. There were no stats or anything of that nature. It was like LARPing, but fully in text.
- Comics - Where people talked about (mostly X-Men) comics, of course.
- Fanfic/Stories - This one was interesting because most of what people wrote was dramatizations of the roleplaying from the Teams forum, but sometimes it included elements of people's real lives (or whatever they had shared/made up), as well as events involving people who showed up to troll the board, or who were regular members for some time but ran off the deep end of whatever reason (many such cases, somehow.) It was like a way of recording the mythology of the place, and that's one of the ways you know it was a place: it had mythology!
Forums moved to a very different format within a few years, however, adopting the Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB) style which pretty much everything that isn't Slashdot, Reddit, or Hackernews uses today:
Super telling on myself with this: I'm the "jimmy" in that screenshot.
Notably, calling them "forums" wasn't entirely the standard at the time. People called them "boards" or "forums" pretty interchangeably.
But you can probably tell just from this example that Web forums had a feel about them. Each one had its own identity, made up by its visual appearance (themes or templates), its structure (categories and subforums), and its population (you know, people.) As a result, no two forums felt alike. By virtue of being people-driven, they also weren't static. A Web page, as such, wouldn't necessarily evolve much over time. But forums were fluid. People would come and go, relationships would be forged and broken, even the people running the place might change. Some forums might have very light (or no) moderation, others might be run in a very heavy-handed manner.
What's interesting to me is that, like any physical space, online spaces like these will feel different to each person based on their experience of it. Sometimes, a forum just feels like an unhealthy or hostile place, and you leave, or at least take a break.
There was one forum I was on last decade (what a phrase!) that accidentally became a very beautiful place due to another forum's mismanagement. It also imploded because the guy running it made a particularly bad call on behalf of a friend rather than looking out for the community as a whole. When that happened... I left. The specifics aren't important, but I think it's a good illustration of the lifecycle a forum might have. Right now, we're in an early growth phase. It's hard to say what this place might look or feel like with 100 users, or 500. I honestly don't know how it would handle 500 people, and I don't mean at a technical level (that would be fine.) It's just hard for me to conceive of what the sort of user base would do the character of a forum like this. It wouldn't stay the same, that's for sure!
I would love to end this with some kind of insightful point, but I don't have one. Forums are cool and I love them and that's why I started one again.
We can make this a beautiful space together.
RE: forums as liminal spaces - FrodoSwaggins - 02-08-2025
Great points! My liminal spaces, and that's what they are it's true, were things like IRC, AIM, forums to be sure, even some work forums that were a terribly ill fated combination of personal drama and professional... something. And let us not for LiveJournal and its communities back before it too turned to Nazism.
RE: forums as liminal spaces - gorzek - 02-11-2025
I was on ICQ, though I mostly used it to talk to people I knew from the X-Men forum. I also used IRC, but honestly so much of that was a cesspool of predators and creeps it's a wonder nothing bad happened to me. But this was also before "everyone" was on the Internet.
RE: forums as liminal spaces - ScottyMcGee - 02-11-2025
I honestly can't remember the first forum I really joined. I jumped around a lot. But some early ones were TeenWriters (which later branched off into Young Writers Online), VGF (the aptly named Video Game Forums), and Surreal Twilight, which was a roleplay forum. I always loved how each one had their own vibe and aesthetic. Throughout its entire history, VGF has had a cool blend of dark blue hues. It was very calming but also cool and slick. VGF is the only forum I used to be on that is still around. There was some drama where it was going to shut down and we all migrated to Discord, but then at the last minute the admin decided to keep it up due to some deluded belief that people were going to flock to the site again (it was just an influx of people saying goodbye after hearing VGF was leaving lol). But also - plot twist - the admin is a Jan 6 supporter, and he never did anything about certain individuals in the forum with a history of stirring things. So, I kid you not, the site is still up and it's the same 3 terrible people, admin included, talking to each other. Random dashes of other people logging in.