For the next decade of the internet (2026 edition)

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

It’s been more than 13 years since @codinghorror first announced Discourse, with this claim:

Today we announce the launch of Discourse, a next-generation, 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

If we assume that this is an evergreen statement, and we’re continuing to build a discussion platform for the next decade of the internet, what do you imagine that looking like?

Consider what the world looked like in 2013 and how much changed between then and 2023^[1]. Which of those changes were we really anticipating when starting this project in 2013 and which were complete surprises or came much earlier than expected?

Looking ahead 10 years, what kinds of things can we imagine being true that are not true today? How much should we “expect the unexpected”? How do you expect to be interacting with other people online 10 years from now?

What role to you hope a project like Discourse to be playing in the world of online communication 10 years from now? What are you most worried about happening to Discourse that we might be able to avoid if we work together to shape our own destiny?

---

1. Not sure what to reference here to help ground us all, but here’s one link maybe worth skimming through: Timeline of social media - Wikipedia ↩︎

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

I expect to be talking to people in 2036 the same way I was talking to people in 2013, which is the same way I was talking to people in 2003: typing words into boxes.

That’s the common lineage through Usenet, BBS, mailing lists, IRC, ICQ, AIM, vBulletin, LiveJournal, SMS, MySpace, blogging, Digg, comment sections, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discourse, Mastodon, Slack, Discord, Threads, Bluesky… even media-first platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, TikTok… below the video there are billions of people typing words into boxes.

Plenty of changes were already in motion in 2013, driven by social media, and Discourse picked up a lot of them (infinite scrolling, touch and mobile layouts, live updating). Most of these were things we were seeing in social media and apps that forums simply weren’t adapting because at the time it was hard to retrofit them onto an application that was assuming a single page render was all you needed.

JavaScript pushed the web in a direction where a lot more is possible, despite the early naysayers… client-side processing did catch up, and most people now carry enough power in their pocket to run things that couldn’t work earlier.

Beyond the technology, what was happening then is still happening now and likely getting worse; there’s an effort to consolidate and get as many people as possible into one place as long as possible. This way, between typing words into boxes, your attention can be sold to companies that want to pitch you products and services to buy.

The danger for Discourse and many smaller platforms that don’t keep up with the billions of dollars poured into companies that centralize and resell this attention, is that all the air is sucked out of the room and no one has the money or the time to keep maintaining them as alternatives.

As we’ve seen, there’s a new player that’s doing a very good job at it… AI chatbots seek to shortcut the web entirely. Not only are they capturing attention and consolidating information, they’re also trying to replace much of the reason people were showing up to social media to begin with by seeming human enough to satisfy the need for connection. Who wants to visit a feed where people constantly argue with each other when instead you can talk to something human-enough that is incentivized to constantly tell you that “you’re absolutely right.”

So what’s anyone to do in this environment? The hardest thing is going to be giving people reasons to show up and type their words at all. Without that it doesn’t matter if you sell attention, ad space, information, ask for donations… worse than not having the ability to keep the lights on, there’s no one left to keep them on for.

What I hope Discourse can continue to provide is a safe harbor where you’re not subject to the massive unknowable algorithms that decide who you read and when. Your every action doesn’t have to be scrutinized to determine which brand you most identify with, what your next purchase is going to be. You’re not just sharing information for a chatbot to parrot back to someone you’ll never meet. You can run your own site where people type words into boxes and make it do as much or as little as you’d like… where the people who show up value the exchange enough to help each other keep the lights on.

[Ed_S]

One way to look at those trends is that human-to-human connection is getting harder, because there are forces trying to monetise and control it.

So the challenge for Discourse is to maintain and promote that human-to-human connection.

Discourse as a way to answer questions, probably not so much.

Another trend is polarisation, and ever more intrusive bad news from the world around us.

I think there’s a role for providing safe spaces where people can enjoy the things they enjoy, without harrassment, without argumentation, without being reminded of horrible scary things. That’s something I want to see.

There’s another view, which is that Discourse could have a role in bringing people together across lines of division, could facilitate peacemaking and de-escalation, could facilitate healthy developments in the real world, like improvements in organising and in governance.

I think those two roles are separate and might even pull in different directions. But moderators of different communities need the tools to shape things as they want them.

Oh, there’s another trend, which is increasing legal constraints or regulations, which make running independent communication platforms more difficult. (I’m personally most affected by the UK’s Online Safety Act, but the trends are the same elsewhere, I think.)

[satonotdead]

This post is great; I appreciate that you’re opening up this kind of dialogue and enriching it with such insightful responses.

I discovered the internet in the ’90s, and although I’m young (!), I consider myself something of a veteran of the web. I was familiar with its original philosophy, and as much as it pains me, I see its current decline — which aligns with the named points raised in this discussion.

Given how things have unfolded in recent years and with some understanding of the underlying issues surrounding centralization and control over data and information, I can envision two possible scenarios:

A) Discourse with much more integrated multimedia features, a hub format with interconnected communities that go beyond Discourse ID — which I think is an excellent initiative, if it weren’t for the problems one faces into when trying to link to other platforms (SSO, OpenID, SAML, or whatever) authentication systems.

I envision Discourse retaining the purpose and status it has today, as a tool used by both individuals and large corporations that would continue to value spaces for exchange in discussion forums.

B) Discourse that is exclusively part of the hard resistance, cypherpunk by obligation and maintained directly by the community, more decentralized, and featuring peer-to-peer (P2P) connections that ensure its continuity.

As is the case with private chats and forums that evade search algorithms, web crawlers, and the exploitation of human-generated data and content for the benefit of the handful of institutions that receive investments from debt-financed funds, a cycle that seems never-ending.

This may sound sad at first, but it’s actually quite the opposite. Books with purpose and meaning endure for thousands of years. Just like the TCP/IP protocol, P2P file sharing, and the need for human dialogue Both scenarios maintain Discourse as a space of resistance, except that one is transparent/public relatively consistent with its current state, and the other is hidden/private, hardened.