The sad part to me is that there's not many online communities left that focus on helping sharing their knowledge with newcomers. I'm excluding discord doxxing generation communities here, because they are really unhelpful for newbies and the opposite of a safe learning environment for kids.
When I built my first website, xhtmlforum and selfhtml forum was amazing as it was a wiki combined with a community around it. The same for pentesting and learning how to solve CTFs. The same for electronics and how to build, etch, and debug motherboards for 6502/i386/etc. I could go on and on forever, but I loved the web for what it was: It always had an answer for anything that I could ever imagine, with other people wanting to build the same cool things, together, as a community.
And that spirit is kind of gone now. Now the statistical majority(?) wants to get famous and rich and be instagram and tiktok idols, without building something to get there. The quick buck has the priority now, and there's maybe some dozens of youtubers left that want to make knowledge on a beginner level accessible, which I have huge respect for. But video content is temporary, especially on platforms with shitty discovery methods like Youtube.
But the wikis and communities? Haha, good luck finding posts from pre 2010 with google. They've all been wiped out.
Just last week I wanted to explain to some junior dev what XHTML1.1 strict and the idea of separation of concerns was about when we still cared about accessibility. Google gave me 2 useful blog posts post-2017, 2 youtube videos of someone raging about it and favoring web components. And that was it. I was flabbergasted how much knowledge is lost.
There is no point in learning new ideas and concepts if you forgot how we got there, because we'll end up in an endless loop of repeating ourself. And I think the worst nightmare of 1984 has come true already. Google already controls the present, and the web archive might be nice but is absolutely useless as a search engine.
I wanted to start a pentest/CTF community because that's what I care most about nowadays. But turns out there's not many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age. Now I'm writing my own markdown based forum software, with a webasm frontend for it and the idea to make all posts storable/shareable as markdown threads.
I don't want knowledge to get lost again in databases.
>> many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age
I am a part of a community that is run on a slightly modded FluxBB. It has more comments per hour than hacker news. Maybe even 10 times more. And new threads are started almost daily. I think this particular forum is almost ten years old?
We did change platforms, but this was more then 7 years ago for sure.
And the code base isn't maintained, since moderators aren't very tech savvy.
That's to say: php forums are pretty robust, don't discount them! You can always migrate, if something better will come up. Older versions are just as good, as the enshittified ones.
It's highly specific to the country (and also to the social media where the community was once established), so I doubt it is relevant to you.
But think fandom non-english space with historical empathizes on female and lgbt members under antilgbt government.
Any social media on this particular language that wants to grow large will swiftly remove half of the discussions we can have there. Keeping separate from opinionated socially-aligned people is also a plus
When I built my first website, xhtmlforum and selfhtml forum was amazing as it was a wiki combined with a community around it. The same for pentesting and learning how to solve CTFs. The same for electronics and how to build, etch, and debug motherboards for 6502/i386/etc. I could go on and on forever, but I loved the web for what it was: It always had an answer for anything that I could ever imagine, with other people wanting to build the same cool things, together, as a community.
And that spirit is kind of gone now. Now the statistical majority(?) wants to get famous and rich and be instagram and tiktok idols, without building something to get there. The quick buck has the priority now, and there's maybe some dozens of youtubers left that want to make knowledge on a beginner level accessible, which I have huge respect for. But video content is temporary, especially on platforms with shitty discovery methods like Youtube.
But the wikis and communities? Haha, good luck finding posts from pre 2010 with google. They've all been wiped out.
Just last week I wanted to explain to some junior dev what XHTML1.1 strict and the idea of separation of concerns was about when we still cared about accessibility. Google gave me 2 useful blog posts post-2017, 2 youtube videos of someone raging about it and favoring web components. And that was it. I was flabbergasted how much knowledge is lost.
There is no point in learning new ideas and concepts if you forgot how we got there, because we'll end up in an endless loop of repeating ourself. And I think the worst nightmare of 1984 has come true already. Google already controls the present, and the web archive might be nice but is absolutely useless as a search engine.
I wanted to start a pentest/CTF community because that's what I care most about nowadays. But turns out there's not many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age. Now I'm writing my own markdown based forum software, with a webasm frontend for it and the idea to make all posts storable/shareable as markdown threads.
I don't want knowledge to get lost again in databases.