It is, but there's a subduction zone just off their northern coast following the curve of the Lesser Antilles so I could see how someone might mistakenly lump it into the pacific ring. It's not that far away from the northern Andes, in the grand scheme of things.
>Unfortunately it lost one of the most compelling features of the classic BBS culture: location bias.
I was thinking about trying to recapture this with a non-internet wifi or mesh networking setup in some way.
Maybe one could abuse the captive portal feature.
It would not have the broad regional aspect unless it was a federated mesh, but it would certainly have the local bias. I don’t think there are enough techy people in my immediate vicinity to pull something like that off and have the community sustain itself, though.
I have little sympathy for TFAuthor failing to spam their slop on Reddit, but I will say that Reddit pretty definitively replicated the key findings and observations of Usenet’s eternal September: online communities don’t scale.
I’d wager that there was a time when a supermajority of Anglosphere internet users were on Reddit. I could see why that’s enticing for the advertising douchebags that run Reddit, or perhaps for stroking Steve’s planet-sized ego.
But we’ve seen at least twice now that large online communities are not workable without becoming user-hostile. We need to reduce federation and centralization, and normalize smaller online communities again.
Would the following work (just spitballing here)? If there were a site like reddit but where communities were only allowed a maximum of lets say 10,000 users, after which a Community_2, Community_3 etc needed to be created where other users could join. And none of these communities were allowed to have overlapping mods.
Is there a specific number of users for when Usenet’s eternal September kicks in?
The hardest part about that is discovery. Where do you find these niche communities? eventually if you look hard enough, you’ll find them, but I think that friction is the reason people flock to a Reddit type ecosystem.
read the second sentence of my comment. if you'd like an example of a list that exists but is not on that page (in fact the one i mentioned not being able to remember), see https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback
The answer always seems to be “we don’t like these big companies putting additives in food but we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas”