There was for a brief period what I like to call the &quot;wild west&quot; of the web. All just shitty phpBB and whatnot boards for every topic. There was no concept of social media. I genuinely got to know the people, mods, smods, gmods, admins, superadmins (the list of &quot;positions&quot; was always comically long and induced great drama on most communities). I visited many of those people I formed connections with online, in person. I feel like social media has swallowed the people from these communities and created large &quot;highways&quot; instead of communities.<p>Facebook groups just aren&#x27;t the same. There&#x27;s something comforting knowing it was &quot;just some fucking guy&quot; hosting the website for fun.