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.