I was showing the new cunt the Wayback Machine version of my site from the early 2000s, and holy hell, I miss thread maps.

The thing is, I recognize they’re not practical at the scale of something like Tumblr… the HTML/JS for a thread map with thousands of posts might not be performant in a browser on a Chromebook, and a 6″ phone screen isn’t the place for elegant visualizations of conversational flow. I’m guessing all the progress on non-SQL datastores over the last two decades would get around the backend bottlenecks, but I can still understand why we don’t have thread maps today.

With that said, there’s nothing like being able to see a tree-based overview of a large, multi-person conversation…it’s lovely, having a clear idea of who’s dominating the discussion, who’s tangled up in a back-and-forth, and quickly recognizing which branches are full of useful content and which are overrun with idiots. It’s also awesome for moderation, but of course, that’s a topic no one wants to touch in 2021.

Anyway… it makes me —slightly, noncommittally— inspired to go back to working on federated communities… or at least semi-permeable bubble communities within a silo. Tumblr’s ad hoc thing is great for a free-for-all, and I admire what Karp created here, but a lot of value has been left on the table. Reddit, meanwhile, has the right idea with micro-communities and local moderation, but the actual content is presented in a way meant to drive engagement and highlight the biggest dumbasses, not foster extensive interpersonal exchanges. (Twitter, Facebook, and so on aren’t even on the right planet, unfortunately.)

Or I could just sigh, shrug, and urge people to return to Usenet, which would probably be amazing right now if dicks like me hadn’t left for the web to begin with.