I'm not sure it can be replicated. The future of the Internet seems to me to be small private "hidden" communities and mega platforms filled with garbage. No room for a middle
Maybe a paid platform?
What, how? HN is one of the most squeaky clean - corpo - heavily moderated sites with a extreme bubble centered around SV tech.
Its basically the exact opposite of the old internet.
Oh sweet summer child.
GP post is technically incorrect, though, in that during this time, the web didn't exist yet. The tech folks were on Usenet and IRC, not on "websites." (In fact, the creation of the web and "Eternal September" basically coincided: the web was the killer app that got regular people to sign up for Internet service. Despite HTML being designed for scientific-research use-cases, the web that actually formed in practice was "for normals" from the very beginning.)
USENET was not only every bit as bad as the worst of 4chan -- it was worse, because there was no effective moderation.
That said, there was also a large "signal" component in the "old internet" that is now lacking in most of the New Internet. Places like HN remain as lonely outposts of that lost world, where people wrote in entire paragraphs, to convey complex and meaningful ideas for mutual discussion -- rather than just firing punchy little 140 character epithets and 10 second insta-videos off into the void and then forgetting about them, moving on to the next flash in the goldfish attention span pan.
That level of sustained, complex actually seems like it was more common on the "old Internet," even recognizing fully that the "old Internet" was also overflowing with dross and garbage.
What you're describing are two attractor-points in community design space, for communities that don't put any effort into fixing their position elsewhere in the design space.
• Managed-membership communities don't grow by default, because by default they don't advertise / recruit members. So they have strong cultures, but they're "hidden."
• Unmanaged-membership communities start off small and nice, sort of like closed-membership communities; but then they grow "by adsorption" — diluting the original spirit of the community with greater and greater numbers of people who are less and less committed to the premise of the community. Until the community is a generalized nothing, a random sampling of all of humanity.
A managed-membership community that advertises / actively recruits could be nice, but it would have to first also avoid the third natural attractor-pole in community design: becoming a cult-of-personality-driven money-making scheme.
If the thing that makes HN enjoyable is the community, maybe we should see it more as a commons and worry about how it is/can/should be governed. Taking Wikipedia as an example, if the worst that comes out of the money problem is an occasional desperate plea from Jimmy Wales begging for a small donation, I'm perfectly happy.
Would it be possible to foster a similar community using a platform like Mastodon? If, yes — it might already exist... Anyone have a pointer?
I guess it depends on exactly how picky you are about pattern matching to "the old Internet," but a lot of that stuff feels like a throwback to the early Internet or even BBS era... none of it is mega platforms and most of it isn't really hidden... all of it is pretty cool... HN fills a great niche to be sure
Hold your nose and throw in a few of the better run subreddits until Lemmy takes off...
And WordPress is now paying a guy to work full-time on ActivityPub integration, hold on to your hats ...!