everything is fractured now, help
I would argue that if anything the problem is that things aren’t fractured enough. The internet needs to be more than 5 websites controlled by 3 companies.
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it used to be that everyone was kinda forced to coexist on the same places, but now the people who are cool/don’t want to bother/get baothered have all fled to hidden parts of the internet, while the only ones who remain are obnoxious / do not care about bothering / being bothered.
i’m not sure what you mean, are you talking about twitter? arguably it was only ever a mass social media platform for a relatively short period of time but communities organically split off with only a few overlaps.
i don’t know when people were coexisting in the same places, since the early days of the internet everything was largely split off.
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perhaps for me, it was the yoyogames forums, closely followed by the gamejolt forums. But then something happened that made everything child-friendly and people like me unwelcome. Now if I’m looking for gamedev stuff everyone just has their own space. Gamemaker specifically is owned by Opera now, and they have forums that are a horrible unmoderated space full of children where nothing of value happens. Also their official platform for hosting games sucks because there’s no option for comments. (gx.games) now there’s not one forum but a ton of forums I’m on and shareing the games I make feels like a huge hassle with tons of crossposting. I have my own discord server with people I interact with regularly but I’m missing the third space. Twitter was it for a while but we all know what it became. I feel like I’m not meeting anymore new people on the internet (definitely just a feeling, as I have actually met more peoople just on a more sparse basis)
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i feel you there, i do think its a byproduct of us getting older and younger people not really occupying the same spaces. we’re on forums, twitter, bluesky, they’re all on tiktok and instagram and various apps.
i don’t know how you bridge that gap in a healthy way.
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I don’t remember it being much different back in the day. I had countless forum registrations, many different IRC networks and channels stacked… now it sucks because these type of spaces are mostly gone and its all corpo social media trash for the vast majority, but the fracturing was always a thing. Of course there were places covering a multitude of topics with more diverse communities, but they didn’t replace more niche or different special interest places.
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This conversation is really interesting to me - I think it’s definitely true that there have always been specific niches on the internet for groups with shared specific interests, and it’s also true that corporations are trying to monopolize as much of the online space as they can. To me, these days the internet feels less wide, but maybe more deep (if that makes any sense).
But @adriendittrick I think I get what you’re saying about spaces like yoyogames and gamejolt, and they’re definitely not the only examples. Community migrations online are really interesting to me. I can’t think of a single example where an entire group has migrated platforms online (which might be obvious - of course 100%of a group is not going to stick together if their shared space is changed, but I’m talking more critical mass than actual completeness).
It seems to normally be caused by changes in the platform. Tumblr banned adult content in 2018 but its alienated userbase did not find a collective new home. Twitter turned into X 
and made it easy to be a fascist jerk. It didn’t cause a full migration of prolific posters, but rather a schism (and even then, only a portion of the group that left is now active on Bluesky).
I wonder if there’s any good research about this kind of phenomenon specifically online. Platforms build audiences, then those audiences shape the platform over time. But every now and then major shifts cause a disconnect between the platform and a significant portion of its users. Is the root cause the conflict between the platform-owners’ vision and the community’s influence? Is it corporate greed or “risky business strategies?” 