Ben Werdmuller comments on a post by Aphyr, an administrator of a niche Mastodon server, who laments:
I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community. I do not know how to determine whether someone’s post about their new bicycle is genuine enthusiasm or automated astroturf. I don’t know how to foster trust and genuine interaction in a world of widespread text and image synthesis
I’m not sure how ANY large, open social media platform can deal with LLM signups, or content—at least in real time. The fact that soooo many people have come to rely on these platforms, which are effectively the worst possible way to design effective distribution of trusted knowledge, might be humanity’s biggest self-own ever.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of online social communities. But cramming everyone into a single social media platform isn’t necessary. And I think we’ve come to discover that it’s not exactly a good idea, either. It’s hard to look past the misinformation, the radicalization, the attention-seeking, the user addiction. Especially when the mega-companies that run these are thoroughly enmeshed in enshittification cycles. After all, you are the product they’re selling.
Besides, we already had a global social network; it’s called the World Wide Web. It worked great! And it still does. (You should have a website; go on, go grab one right now.) It accomplishes everything you need for a social existence online. The interoperability so many folks are looking for is already present on the web; it’s always been there. But I digress…
Back to the quote above. Aphyr is worried that LLMs are better able to avoid the usual traps set by moderators in preventing spam accounts. I can sympathize; nearly all small communities are under resourced and most moderators are volunteers.
But I’m still very bullish on these exact kind of communities. I think small, niche-based social communities will continue to be the very best kind of online communities. In spite of our brief diversions into mega-platforms, they have always been the best, and I don’t see how that will change.
That’s because they’re the most focused on actual communities of interest—that’s literally why people join them. They’re human-scale. They foster relationships. They generate shared history, inside jokes, and treasured traditions. They build trust among members. They’re designed around the needs of the members, not those of a corporate superpower. And they’re not tied to a particular tech platform; if their current environment erodes, they have enough social cohesion to escape lock-in and move elsewhere, together.
There are plenty of ways to avoid spam signups in small communities like these.
The easiest, and perhaps the best, is to charge some sort of fee to join, or for posting privileges. The added benefit, of course, is that members help support the group they care about. Previous generations called these types of arrangements “clubs.” 😆 Yeah, nothing earth-shattering in this model, in spite of how many people naturally recoil after decades of “free” (read: very, very far from free) apps.
Another option is to only allow new signups from people who are referred by other members. I used this method for the first version of OnePhoto.Club (which worked great as a small closed community, but failed when I moved it to the more open and interoperable “social web”). The obvious downside here is that it adds a barrier to for anyone who randomly stumbles on a community they want to join. But in practice, I don’t think this has much negative impact. Most people discover these communities from someone else, whom they can simply ask for access. Or, as I did, you can offer an alternative process to join that an interested party can request. This added step seemed to keep out the spammers.
Since scalable growth is not the end goal of these communities, you don’t need to make joining 100% frictionless. Indeed, sometimes having a bit of friction to joining is a feature, not a bug. These communities are about quality, not quantity, after all. In fact, there’s often a sweet spot for community size; getting “too big” is definitely a possibility. But that size allows you to engage in whatever “hard to scale” activities you might think up—including entirely offline ones. To that point, a much-experienced lesson of small communities is that running the latest tech isn’t a factor in success; it’s all about the people who engage in the community, not the tech they use to engage.
So, no. The future of forums most certainly does not have to be lies.
And in spite of Ben’s concern that “for individual, niche communities maintained by enthusiasts and hobbyists, that may be the beginning of the end,” I don’t buy it. Not one bit.
Small, niche communities maintained by enthusiasts and hobbyists will continue to prosper. Why? Because they remain the best communities. They may not be on Mastodon, or a corporate platform like Facebook, but they can thrive and prosper as they always have in their own little corner of the web.
This post is part of #JulyReply2025.