On Octber 18th, 2025, after a few weeks fiddling and some tough lessons on how to run a virtual private server, I started inviting people to the forum. That means this date is henceforth The Underscore’s official birthday. And now here we are exactly a month later, and wow, the response has been beyond my wildest imagination. Many of you know me from my YouTubery, Twitch streams, Discord, contributions to Electric Zine Maker, silly Bluesky posts, or wherever. Many of you didn’t know of me until you heard about this little forum that promised a reinvigoration of the values of the old web. Some of you possibly don’t even care to know me at all, and you know what, that’s fine! The whole point of this thing is to foster a community that is greater than myself, and there are many conversations happening here that I’m happy to take a backseat on.
Now here we are a month later, and I thought it would a great opportunity to look at the numbers so far.
The forum now sits at 221 members, which is about 200 more than I expected to get in the first year, let alone the first month.
In this time you have all created 122 threads, 2,313 posts, have liked posts 4,867 times, and the forum has accumulated an astonishing 70,846 pageviews. The graph looks something like this:
Obviously you can see the big spike of activity when I first opened the forum up and all you folks from Bluesky came to check it out, a very exciting time that did not do good things to my sleep hygiene. This has since settled to a nice and steady 1,000 - 1,500 pageviews a day. The little goblin sitting at the accounting desk of my brain is very satisfied that there hasn’t been a day below 1,000 so far.
As for what’s next, well who even knows? The to-do list for technical things grows ever larger but less and less urgent, and I feel like I have a handle on managing the server and managing Discourse and all the tricky things, so now it’s all about managing the community itself. Yesterday I was able to complete the FAQ/Rules rewrite, which I’m happy will carry us forward into the foreseeable future. Today the first bimonthly jam starts, which I’m particularly excited about. Join if you can, it should be a very good time. I see people already building little sub-communities around their personal interests, which is wonderful. At some point I might add some subcategories to help keep everything ordered, but I’m happy to keep things on autopilot for the time being.
This forum started as an experiment, a mere attempt at restoring something which I thought the internet had lost. But I think we can conclusively say we’ve succeeded at the attempt and have passed the experiment phase. This is now a community, and I hope I can continue to make it welcoming enough to see you still hanging out here in another month, and a month after that, and after that, and so on. Thank you, and I think we can all agree that today is the day.
. No technical issues, everything running smooth!
