By roundabout I mean neither forums, emails, nor comment sections, but other indirect and atypical ways of community forming online.
The irc warez scene was an odd community. People showed up for the hacked software and stayed for the friendly banter.
I used to spend hours on Suprnova’s IRC and they eventually made me a mod.
Yeah I hosted some apps because my “@home” service wasn’t capped at 128k, so I was getting 5mb up/down. Would spend a lot of idle time shooting the shit with people, lots of regulars.
MMORPGs are an easy example, where people form recognizable identities and communities in game. An extension of this would be Second Life, and somewhat more recently, VRChat.
Late 90s PC gaming. Even the simple in-game chat systems back in the days in games such as Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and many others helped people meet, socialize, and form communities.
Met a lot of folk through Diablo II chat :-) it was nice and chill leveling with new friends
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There’s a program called Hypothesis, it’s a toolbar that uses its status as a non-site entity to add a comment section to any page from any URL you could possibly think of. It’s hard to explain.
Man, the world sure has changed if people think forums are an atypical online community.
Fwiw those I mention in the OP are a few I personally consider typical but thought others might consider atypical these days, so wanted to head them off.
Edit:
was replying from notifications, so missed where someone else pointed this out, sorry for the extra notification! 😅
Discord servers?
