For a while now I’ve been coming across people complaining that there are no more places like the old internet forums from the good old days of the internet. The ones made with phpBB, old weird topics and people talking about whatever they find interesting. I had the same nostalgia for years. And I decided to turn that nostalgia into something real.
I started the internet forum.
Yesterday I bought a domain, I was in a mood and the domain is called myfriendsmisfits.com. Today I read a bit, bought the hosting and opened the forum.
It’s a historic moment for me. I have never done anything like this before and had no experience. It can be a bit rough around the edges, but that was the Internet twenty years ago.
Why such a name? I want this place to be a home, a safe place for all of us who don’t belong anywhere else. Who are misfits, weirdos, outsiders. And I wanted everyone there to be friends. It has to be a friendly place or it doesn’t make sense.
It is not finished and I hope it never will be. Like any home it has to live, it has to change and adapt as the family grows. I hope it grows, I hope people find this place interesting. Calm and quiet, slow and steady, but at the same time – full of new ideas, great discussions and wonderful people.
I used the technology that has now twenty years. It is the good old phpBB and it still works. There are no ads, no trackers, nothing. Anyone can check it. There are no analytics or data mining technologies. There are people and our conversations and nothing else.
The hosting is provided by OVH and we’re using a data center in France, in the European Union. I’m telling this because maybe someone will find it interesting and important. I do.
I don’t know how it will develop, what life will bring us. I don’t know if we will have a community of dozens or hundreds. But it doesn’t matter to me. What matters is real conversation with real people about real things. That’s what matters.
There are some rules, every good old forum had a set of rules. All those rules can be summed up in one sentence: be a good, curious, warm and open person and you’re good to go. Come to us, join us, get to know us, build something with us. I assume, always have and always will, that people are good and want to do good. I ask you to do the same. It can change a lot if we assume good will. Let’s build on trust and respect
Let trust and respect be our foundation.
Let’s build something together. Big, small, who cares? Together. Ours. For us.
I started it, but I’m not the most important person. You are, we are. I’m building a place, but I’m not building a culture. That’s our job.
Join us and be part of something beautiful. Something old and something new at the same time. Let’s start again, let’s take what has been taken from us.
We’re people, and we need other people. We need connections. It’s getting harder and harder to connect, to find people who have the same values that we do. The big social media platforms have made a lot of promises about connecting us, and they have divided us. They can’t change that.
But we can. And we will.
This is only an Internet forum, but for me it is an idea. And ideas are infinite. Ideas cannot be killed, cannot be destroyed.
For you it might look like something small. For me it’s important.
For me it is really emotional moment.