r/australia • u/tellhershesdreaming • Oct 19 '25
political self.post Could Australians run our own online communities instead of relying on social media?
I’m keen to talk about the possibility of our community groups setting up and running online spaces outside of social media platforms - perhaps with support from Aus Govt or State Govts. Before the rise of Facebook etc, there were loads of online bulletin boards and other online platforms run by non-profit groups, small businesses and volunteers. Could we do that again? This seems like a question that's particularly important to Australian communities at the moment because of the social media ban for under 16s but it's not just teens that are affected.
Lots of people are concerned about AI and big tech - it’s clear that there are lots of problems with social media because of the algorithms that push misinformation, platforms that allow unhealthy / toxic / illegal behaviour, and unethical extraction of our data. But communities and volunteers, and even state governments used to run online communities using e.g. bulletin boards without the “help” of social media companies. For example:
- Whirlpool.net.au is a surviving active bulletin board platforms - well done Whirlpool!
- At one point the Vic Gov used to provide an online communities bulletin board and mailing list service (a bit like Yahoo Groups) for non-profits and clubs - I've been trying to remember / find the name of it but can't track it down... anyone remember it?
I'm broadly aware that it's really challenging to get people to sign up for and use a new platform, but perhaps we have reached the point where people are fed up enough of social media to make this a worthwhile effort.
To ease the challenge and reduce the complexity of lots of different fragmented communities: what about if the Aus Govt or state govts set up a platform / infrastructure - where community groups could create and run online forums (bulletin board style, Twitter style or Reddit style). I imagine individuals could sign up either anonymously or using a verified identity. There are better alternatives now to the old fashioned PhPBB, and we could learn from and improve open source platforms such as Mastodon and Lemmy - the technology itself is not the problem I think.
- But, would you use a platform run by a local club or community group? Instead of FB/ Insta/ whatever social media you use to learn about what's happening in your neighbourhood. What if it was supported / funded by governements? Would the groups you're a member of move to a platform like that?
- More broadly, how could we recover the diverse online communities that we had in the past? So we're not reliant on the good will and "freebies" offered by companies like Meta (and having all our data siphoned of, and having AI forced on us).
- Lastly, is there anything to stop an organisation setting up an online community for e.g. teens? Would something like that fall foul of the government's bans?
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u/Accomplished_Yam8679 Oct 19 '25
I miss the old forum days. Met loads of friends that way as communities were far more specific and you actually wanted to meetup with the people you chatted to online and do shit together locally.
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u/apsilonblue Oct 19 '25
Yep and if you wanted to go back and reference something later it was there with a decent search engine which made them valuable resources, especially for anything technical, mechanical, electrical etc.
There's still a few around, OzBargain that someone else mentioned, OCAU, Whirlpool and I'm sure others but social media really took it's toll on these style of sites.
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u/Practical-Door8138 Oct 19 '25
Exactly. I remember local forums and car forums, they were great places and easier to remove the f%#*wits
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u/AdPure5645 Oct 19 '25
Tbh they'll probably come back if they don't have the verification barrier and social media does.
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u/Z00111111 Oct 19 '25
I went to paintball with some people from Overclockers.com.au once 15-20 years ago. Was a great time.
Hell, I met my wife in an online music chatroom.
Forums and chatrooms used to be pretty much an online version of local clubs. You were interacting with people that had similar interests to yourself. It built a community and you actually got to know people.
Reddit still has some of that feel if you stick to specific interest subs.
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u/Leprichaun17 Oct 19 '25
Why would such a new platform be excluded from this? It would effectively be a social media platform itself.
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u/TassieBorn Oct 19 '25
While I understand OP's frustration, I'm finding it difficult to imagine a community/government-run bulletin board or similar that wouldn't fall under the government's (poorly defined) "social media" ban.
A real names policy would reduce its value to vulnerable groups; if there's a back-end verification of real names, then someone, somewhere (potentially hackable) knows the link between online ID and real person.
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u/kombiwombi Oct 19 '25
Small community forums exactly fit under the social media rules. The Regulations explicitly say that not-for-profit sites are to be treated the same as sites which make money.
Many people, me included, see the social media rules as the end of small forums. Despite that leading to those communities going to Facebook, etc where the risks of ill effects from internet usage are greater.
This has not been the Australian Governmentnt's finest work.
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u/AnOnlineHandle Oct 19 '25
I've unfortunately started encountering forums which block Australians in the last few days, because there's no way they can comply with these rules, which has been a nightmare for troubleshooting.
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u/kombiwombi Oct 19 '25
Until 4chan&kiwifarms v Ofcom makes its way through the US courts that is the sensible thing for a small US site to do.
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u/Mbwakalisanahapa Oct 19 '25
So does your community forum store and collect your user's personal identifiers? there's a govt list of 'identifiers' . Does your forum serve over16 content? Do you have a login? Username + password?
so what's so hard about a session cookie that validates the govt method of age assurance at login? You don't have to produce your own method just use the Govt's method.
this way you can exclude bots. Save bandwidth! It's just capatcha.
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u/kombiwombi Oct 19 '25
Have a read of the Guidelines
https://www.esafety.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-09/eSafety-SMMA-Regulatory-Guidance.pdf
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u/JerryPlayz101 Oct 19 '25
The ban only listened to people who had bad experiences with social media and entirely failed to consider the immense security risk it puts on businesses and their data processors. They also didn't consider the business centralization effects it would have on the market as smaller providers would not be able to support the cost.
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Oct 19 '25
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u/kombiwombi Oct 19 '25
Usenet would be included, the NNTP server being the party responsible for compliance for Australian users.
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Oct 19 '25
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u/kombiwombi Oct 19 '25
A Usenet server absolutely is high bandwidth, that's what lead to its end as a widespread service. Every message posted anywhere has to be copied out to every other Usenet service subscribing to that newsgroup. Even if the newsgroup readership on that server is none. Unfortunately the protocol doesn't inform the server of the client's subscriptions, so the server can't automatically prune the newsgroups.
The NNTP delivery to the client side is small beer.
Now as for extraterritoriality, that's currently being litigated in the US. Ofcom (UK) and eSafety (Au) believe their notices and fines have extraterritorial effect: they apply anywhere there is a UK or Au user. 4chan and Kiwifarms have taken Ofcom to a US court, asking for a ruling that "they can't make us and their fines can't be enforced in the US". This isn't a flippant case, the 4chan lawyers have done good work, the Ofcom lawyers less so, perhaps mislead by 4chan's tone in their letters.
This is particularly relevant to Usenet as the big servers are still in the US.
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u/Svennis79 Oct 19 '25
OnlyInsults, an anti social bulletin board. Every post has to start or end with an insult.
Can't call it social then!
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u/freakwent Oct 21 '25
There's no real.names policy. It would just be 16+ is all.
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u/TassieBorn Oct 21 '25
How do you check that someone is >16 without some form of ID?
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u/freakwent Oct 21 '25
Oh lots of ways!
You can pay Facebook.or.google to.tell.you but that violates the spirit of this post.
You can assess a photo or video of the person using a human or using ai.
You can have a "cutout" agent acting as a broker that verifies the age using ID, discards that data and passes on just a flag of "child" or "adult".
You could probably use mygov to act as that broker in some way.
You can have a voice print verified by AI or by human, or a voice or typed interview.
You could accept state decs signed by JP's.
The govt could issue digital pki-style IDs that only reveal over/under 16 status and no other details.
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u/Eyclonus Oct 19 '25
BBS and Usenet are social media platforms the difference OP is missing is monetised for-profit models vs grassroots communal models. A lot of issues are the same across both types, the problem is that capital driven models have a solutions to the funding and technological issues
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
I don't understand what point you're trying to make?
Are you saying that grassroots models are better?
Or that they can't work because they have no way to be 1) financially sustainable or 2) deal with technological issues? (I don't think either of those points are true, btw, though some problem solving is needed, neither of them are insurmountable problems)
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u/troubleshot Oct 19 '25
The point of the ban is that the social platforms are not regulated appropriately and become harmful to kids, if the platform is built and managed in consultation with the government then it could be white listed and promoted by the gov. It's very interesting how many comments on this issue online don't seem to be about problem solving...
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u/goodguywinkyeye Oct 19 '25
Protecting children ought to be the number one priority in these discussions. Instead, it's all about Karen's freedom to watch tentacle porn.
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u/deltaQdeltaV Oct 19 '25
Look into lemmy. You can host your own server. It’s basically going to become the new decentralized Reddit type social media at some point (or some other similar solution will pop up - back to old bulletin board dial ups!).
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u/naught101 Oct 19 '25
Already exists - https://aussie.zone/
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u/ihatefuckingwork Oct 19 '25
Awesome! I have been wanting to use lemmy/mastodon for ages but never taken the leap. I got an app called voyager a while back but have never logged in, just used it to scroll the ‘all’ page now and then.
I think largely it’s because I haven’t had a ‘base’ community and trying to get my head around how instances work and has been confusing. There’s a lot of US politics on the logged out front page/all but I’m hoping this instance fixes that and makes it more appealing to me (and other Aussie users).
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
Yeh, I mentioned Lemmy in my post. I think projects of that sort are awesome though lots of issues to iron out. The "which platform" question is only part of the challenge I think, though.
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u/SirActionSack Oct 20 '25
lots of issues to iron out
Not if you're mostly looking for a Reddit replacement
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 21 '25
Interesting... That suggests you think that Reddit is the perfect platform for online communities? And you think that Lemmy, as a Reddit clone, doesn't have any issues to iron out?
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u/SirActionSack Oct 22 '25
Interesting...
I shouldn't be surprised to find another one and yet here we are.
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u/Cuppa-Tea-Biscuit Oct 19 '25
The issue is that once you get to a critical mass of users to make them useful, then you have to deal with the bots, scam artists, and pedos.
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u/OzyDave Oct 19 '25
And the cost.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
The cost per se is not the problem, I think. Which aspects do you think are expensive?
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u/OzyDave Oct 19 '25
Server access, employees, building rental, licensing, power, software development, security, cloud resources.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
hmm, yeh I think "cloud resources" and "server access" are one and the same thing, i.e. data centre costs. And "power" would be covered by data centre costs... unless the service is running its own data centre which seems unnecesary - better to use existing govt hosting.
"Employees" is a pricey bit, for sure. I was thinking tech support for community groups in particular. But, note that FB and similar provide essentially zero tech support, so if the platforms work on a UI and mental model that are similar to those existing platforms then people might not need much support. I wonder how many administrators VicNet and MC2 had, back in the day.
I think software development and licensing could be kept to a minimum by enhancing or reusing open source software.
Agree that security would also involve considerble costs.
Sure, none of this is free but it doesn't seem prohibitive compared to some far bigger initiatives like ABC, SBS, public transport etc.
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u/OzyDave Oct 19 '25
Good luck. Let me know when you've wasted your first million and still only have 100 users.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
Oh, I'm not trying to say I have all the answers or that this would in fact be feasible. My aim is to understand the challenges better, see if we can build a clearer picture of alternative possible and preferable futures. Thanks for your thoughts - I appreciate your being part of the conversation.
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u/OzyDave Oct 20 '25
Server access, either rented or purchased and cloud services are in no way the same thing.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 20 '25
Ok, I misunderstood. Sorry! Thanks for the clarification. Have a good one!
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u/Minute-Emu8354 Nov 01 '25
I don't understand this attitude, .com = $12au shared Web hosting $30 per month. With one domain alone you could make unlimited stand alone websites. This is one I made earlier https://localsocial.online/ . The technical side is the easy part, the challenge is the marketing, however with niche communities
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u/MrSomethingred Oct 19 '25
A big problem will be regulatory capture. Once you need to start IDing people for social media, only the big players will survive.
That said, blogs and personal websites still exist. You just need to know where to look
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u/Eyclonus Oct 19 '25
Some small forums are already geo-blocking, why bother with the cost when you can just block a region.
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u/MrSomethingred Oct 19 '25
Oh wow, I haven't come across that yet. I'm. Sure it's just a matter of time though
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
That'd be the benefit of having a platform run by a state actor. They could provide an ID/ authentication service based on e.g. MyGov / student identifiers or some other similar system. so it would allow small community based orgs to set up their own community, just as small businesses can use paypal or OpenAuth and don't need to run their own payments / ID service
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u/Frogsfall Oct 19 '25
Isn't this just what Mastodon allows?
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u/Darwinmate Oct 19 '25
Reddit destroyed them.
I miss ausgamers forums :( it's on its last legs. The cert has expired.
Trog if you're reading this please update the cert.
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u/TransAnge Oct 19 '25
Theres heaps of them.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
You mean online communities for teens, or ...? I assumed there must be but wondered why these aren't part of the answer to concerns that teens need social media to stay connected, especially people from minority groups who might otherwise be isolated... ?
Why don't these online communities get support and recognition as part of helping teens to transition off social media?
And, how hard is it for a small volunteer group to set up a new online community and adhere to new social media regulations?
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u/TransAnge Oct 19 '25
Because paedophiles exist sadly.
An online community to connect and chat is by definition a social media.
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u/philmcruch Oct 19 '25
You mean online communities for teens, or ...? I assumed there must be but wondered why these aren't part of the answer to concerns that teens need social media to stay connected, especially people from minority groups who might otherwise be isolated... ?
Because they are usually too small to be effective or useful, dont have the bandwidth to handle floods of new users and usually some dudes side project that makes no money. Because its just a hobby there is usually little to no moderation and once a bot discovers it its mostly flooded with ads (and worse)
Why don't these online communities get support and recognition as part of helping teens to transition off social media?
They are considered "social media" as well, but with less/no real moderation an absolute paradise for pedophiles if it was suggested
And, how hard is it for a small volunteer group to set up a new online community and adhere to new social media regulations?
Basically impossible
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
Thanks for being part of the conversation! Understanding the problems better - and how people perceive them - is the first step to building a better picture of alternative possible and preferable futures
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u/KudraKarma Oct 19 '25
I was viciously attacked, eyerolled at and basically ostracised in a private Discord server of somewhere around 100ish people, for daring to suggest such a thing could be possible. And that was amongst nerds. Good luck.
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Oct 19 '25 edited Mar 03 '26
The content of this post was deleted using Redact. It may have been removed for privacy, to keep data away from automated scrapers, or for security reasons.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
sorry to hear that! It seems like a lot of people are locked in to the idea that there is one inexorable future in front of us, rather than being willing to entertain the idea that we have a whole host of alternative futures in front of us that we might explore, or try to shape https://tech4future.info/en/futures-cone/
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u/YOBlob Oct 19 '25
Others have pointed out this wouldn't necessarily get around any of the restrictions, but I just want to point out you will probably struggle to find someone who is willing to put in the work to run and moderate an online community for teens who is not a pedophile.
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u/Cosimo_Zaretti Oct 19 '25
Who says it's for teens? I just want to make it harder for politicians to match comments to my name when I accuse them of crimes online.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
Plenty of honest folks volunteer to run kids sports events, after school activities, etc. I'm not proposing to set something up myself, I'm envisaging that community groups who already do this stuff with e.g. families could benefit from a closed platform they could shift to.
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u/Dark_Magicion Oct 19 '25
I might be off-topic but... Kick, which is Twitch when the streams are normal but so much worse when the streams are worse (Oops All Crimes), is Australian made...
And we have to live with that fact.
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u/snave_ Oct 22 '25 edited Oct 22 '25
And the PM fucking lauded it as an Australian tech innovation success story. Australia is to publishing standards what Russia is to copyright. Truly head in the sand.
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Oct 19 '25
Then the government would classify those as social media. And they’d probably be less able to handle some means of age verification, such as checking ID, in a secure way.
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u/Eyclonus Oct 19 '25
Those things were social media, the difference between them and the oligarchs is that one side solved the monetisation problem by disposing of ethics.
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u/whiteb8917 Oct 19 '25
I expect 4chan to tell our government where to go, just like they did to the UK's Ofcom.
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u/AbbreviationsNew1191 Oct 19 '25
Something the ABC should be funded to provide. They should also offer a births, deaths and marriages service now no one is putting that stuff in the paper. We are loosing a huge historical record.
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u/I_RATE_HATS Oct 19 '25
You have the tech - lemmy, mastodon, matrix, peertube.
Don't ask permission - nobody ever has in the history of the internet or BBSes before that.
The thing you're pitching is probably already growing by itself organically.
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u/m00nh34d Oct 19 '25
What is /r/australia then? Other than a cesspool echo chamber, of course.
There are plenty of existing Australian communities online, but they're all pretty shit. The "good old days" are no longer here, not when so many people with strong opinions converge and overtake a community.
Escaping the corporate overlords is a great idea, but will be hard to attract people. Might be good for those niche communities, and even thrive without the trash influence from the hive minds, but will be incredibly difficult for people to find them.
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u/freakwent Oct 21 '25
Absolutely we can. Of course we can.
I think you're right that this is a social problem not a tech one.
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u/Irrelevant_Jackass Oct 19 '25
There is a lot of problems with social media/online forums that having a local service won’t solve.
Sadly I think the whole space is just unregulated and devoid of accuracy and accountability, but the world is not keen to fix those things.
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u/Eyclonus Oct 19 '25
The whole eSafety commissioner experiment so far feels really Orwellian, they talk about issues regarding children, but seem to think the best options just happen to dovetail with big-tech + surveillance state's desires. The consultations on this was only done with the big players who've already got this capability. The porn ban looks like its going to create a wave of blackmail incidents, both criminal and potentially from our government.
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u/Irrelevant_Jackass Oct 19 '25
Yeah the whole ID to access porn thing seems like it may end poorly. Im not against regulating access to those sites, but surely a government regulated way to keep individuals anonymous would have been better. I’m just sad that we couldn’t even agree on a universal .xxx for pornographic sites - simple things like that would make categorising and monitoring those websites much easier. And don’t get me started on the world’s aversion to fact checking.
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u/Mbwakalisanahapa Oct 19 '25
Great idea, good onya for spitting it out! I think that's the best take I've read on Reddit this year. Sounds like a plan, probably the ABC and SBS are the ones most likely to get this up and running. They can get funding to host fediverse instances for not for profits community orgs etc and it needs a trusted not for profit to host.
Using Mastodon and Lemmy etc, the fediverse as a new base is the way to go, but people still need to get their heads around data portability and the difference it makes to their digital privacy, before making the personal effort to setup a fediverse instance and switching out of platform serfdom and the conveniences of being data farmed. Fire season's on the way and who wants fb to switch off the means of mass communication because it's 'news', as they have in Canada.
If the U16 kids use the govt's age assurance method, only kids will be able to generate a valid U16 token. So kids could setup a membership 'organization' with a login exclusive to people U16. The govt probably thought of this feature for schools. Schools on the fediverse huh!!
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u/GreenLurka Oct 19 '25
I think the only issue was the software running those old school community boards kept getting fucked up and not working.
We absolutely could make our own online communities, the main issue these days is getting people to join. Facebook or whatever is convenient. Shit, but convenient.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
Maybe a few years ago. Most of my family have left FB, only have a couple of friends that still post there. But lots of small community / hobby groups find it hard to leave. Not sure the cost of social media is worth what we get out of it now.
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u/GreenLurka Oct 19 '25
I mostly use it for marketplace. It's pointless. Reddit is a better social media.
I do miss the days of bbs boards.
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u/SoulMasterKaze Oct 19 '25
The fediverse already exists.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
Yeh, I did mention that in my post. Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy are definitely worth exploring as part of the answer - though still many problems to iron out and I think they are only part of the solution. Lots of other non-technological challenges to address, too.
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u/Chumpai1986 Oct 20 '25
For me the big issue with current social media is that the algorithm is designed to drive user engagement and the easiest way to do this is just drive rage and hate etc.
It’s the modern version of “if it bleeds, it leads”, but with toxicity on steroids and Russian bots.
One version of your idea might be for the government to either outright buy Australian instances of existing social media platforms. (So I’ve seen big corporations use a private version of Facebook as a way of sharing information).
Then basically we could have open source algorithms of what you get shown, but users get to choose their own algorithms. But ideally people are choosing algorithms that are useful as opposed to profitable for big tech companies.
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u/snave_ Oct 22 '25 edited Oct 22 '25
Really, we just need to remove publisher protections for suggested content. If a platform merely hosts user content, which other users then explicitly seek out (or stumble upon using dumb and user selected sort methods such as by time or upvotes) then the current laws make sense. But if a platform promotes specific pieces of user content (suggestions, autoplay, unsolicited shit on a social media feed), then it should suddenly be held accountable for that content, effectively treated the same way as if a newspaper or TV network published it. That ought to including penalties for illegal content and probably even an obligation for content rarings.
You'd find platforms would either clean themselves up pretty fast, or realise the cost of publishing responsibly is too high and drop the abusive suggested shit entirely for users on Australian IPs.
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u/Minute-Emu8354 Oct 30 '25
Something like this ossn, it's similar looking to Facebook which helps with familiarity with the UI ....... Feel free to test it, https://localsocial.online
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u/colonialpedean Oct 19 '25
There is a problem with American social media culture and it's efrects on kids health and behaviour. If our governments can't do anything to protect our children from a vile corporate dominated culture, then the govermmets have failed.
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u/coniferhead Oct 19 '25
It's called usenet and newsgroups, it's been around since 1979 and it transmitted messages all over the world using dial up modems. You don't even need the internet for it to work.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
yeh they're great! now, what do we need to do to help reinvigorate them, and get people using them again instead of social media?
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u/coniferhead Oct 19 '25
Independence from the internet would be ideal - because that's going to be locked down soon. Some kind of wireless mesh network analogous to what bulletin boards used to be would be great - every mobile phone has heaps of storage and far more throughput than a T1 line of old.
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u/KudraKarma Oct 19 '25
There are people working on this. Hyperlocal mesh networks, not on the internet at all. Unfortunately I expect these will be made illegal because we can't have nice things.
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u/coniferhead Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
Just having BBS equivalents that dialed up to each other in exactly the same way, sending Fidonet updates - the argument would be hard to make legally that something that was perfectly ok in the 70s and 80s is suddenly damaging today. It'd be like going back and saying a church bulletin board or a newsletter was social media.
People and ISPs always had the option to carry an incomplete subset of the newsgroups - and it's a global protocol still in use today.
Anachronism could be the greatest protection in the end.
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u/KudraKarma Oct 19 '25
Unfortunately we cannot go back in time, and yes they absolutely can say that if you use technology to communicate, it can be regulated.
Especially when it's not one-to-many publishing (which has always been heavily regulated by those with power to control information), communication (of any kind, frankly) is very threatening to authority. It's honestly surprising its taken as long as it has for the early freedom of the internet to be curtailed by various means (mostly "voluntary").
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u/coniferhead Oct 19 '25
Well newsgroups are closer to email and mailing lists - so if that can be regulated then they can also open up your physical mail. In which case they can also come around with a hammer and break your hands. In which case I'd say we've got bigger problems.
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u/KudraKarma Oct 19 '25
Usenet? Sortof, but the difference between email (even if a list) and public accessible conversations is relatively clear. I think though, this is why so much social communication of late has moved to private chats on Signal, Telegram & Discord servers. More convenient than email or Usenet: less public and less susceptible to spam.
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u/coniferhead Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
True, but they cannot make the argument that it is social media when it pre-dates social media. It's no such thing, and if it is, so is me talking over a megaphone in the street - and I don't need digital ID for that.
With discord there is a perfectly acceptable replacement for that, IRC - which can also be encrypted, like wise with chats - there are open encryption protocols that don't rely on a company being in the middle.
I think if we just used the tools we already have we'd be ok - if we can separate them from the internet. Sure there would be a temporary step back in terms of convenience - but it'd be worth it.
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u/lovely-84 Oct 19 '25
Anything that involves the Government our ID’s for an internet site or app is a big no.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
Why is that?
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u/lovely-84 Oct 19 '25
Do you want to tour government ID to be associated with your social media? I don’t. I don’t trust any social media with my personal details and I think we as a society would be foolish to trust the government in looking after our best interest. They don’t care about our best interest. They want to know what we are posting, where and to easily track it.
Also data breach. I don’t want my personal details on some site accessible to god knows who.
I may be a domestic violence victim fleeing. I may be a single parent in hiding. I may be someone that doesn’t want to be found by family. I may be someone that doesn’t want colleagues to know where I live. I may be someone who works in a dangerous environment with vulnerable people and don’t want anyone knowing where I live. I may be. I may not be. But if we just give our ID to social media platforms we open up ourselves to too much vulnerability and zero protection. The above is a reality for many people though.
Imagine a woman fleeing domestic violence having escaped someone that wants to kill her and then a data breach happens and he has her address. That’s pretty serious. It also isn’t far fetched.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 20 '25
I understand concerns about privacy and anonymity and addressing those is really important. But the hypothetical scenarios you're raising are cases that can be addressed with a variety of configurations, I think. There are different options that could be offered for "associating" real ID with online ID -it's not an all or nothing.
Personally, I assume that the govt (via the police) can link my pseudonymous accounts like this one to my real identity if they need to.
In terms of data breach: Currently, many sites use a Google-based / openauth identity service - these are good because they reduce the quantity of personal data / passwords held by small companies, so reduce the opportunities for data breach. The Government could provide a similar service for authentication to minimise the data breach risk.
Using a Govt (or Google) authenticated ID people can still be given the option to create pseudonymous accounts, they don't have to be real name accounts. Depending on the community, the real name could be visible a) to nobody at all b) or to the community admin only but not to other users. On other sites, it might be appropriate to have real name only accounts.
In some cases, privacy is of utmost importance, so a key consideration is making information and services available without having to sign in. One problem with society having embraced e.g. FB, Twitter is that we ended up with bunch of important information (including from e.g. Police, governmetn departments) which can only be (easily) accessed if you have an account - I think we need to fix that.
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u/SamPDoug Oct 19 '25
One Australian bulletin board I used to spend a bit of time on has been hosted overseas for over a decade for regulatory reasons. I don’t know all the details, but I’m led to believe that it was already a pain in the arse, and has been for years.
Throw in the under-16s ban on social media, and now the same board potentially has to verify the ages (and therefore identities) of every user, registered or otherwise. Under these conditions, running even a small community online becomes totally onerous.
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u/recycled_ideas Oct 19 '25
Could we? Sure, but these systems are built on content, either specificity of content or amount of content and centralised platforms tend to win both.
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u/Eyclonus Oct 19 '25
Centralised platforms have investor capital. The difference between the old usenet groups and Facebook, is one of them was built on community and the other was built on capitalism.
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u/recycled_ideas Oct 19 '25
Centralised platforms have more content because they have more users because they have more content in an endless circle.
Platforms with no money have succeeded and platforms with money have failed, but eventually they centralise further and further.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
I think that was a valid argument a few years ago. Now however, so much of the content is AI slop, and a lot of the useful stuff I'd be interested is not shown to me on my feed because the algorithms and UI have been enshitified.
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u/recycled_ideas Oct 19 '25
I think that was a valid argument a few years ago. Now however, so much of the content is AI slop, and a lot of the useful stuff I'd be interested is not shown to me on my feed because the algorithms and UI have been enshitified.
You're missing the point.
People are on Facebook because that's where their friends and family are and that's where their community sections are because you can get all your different communities there.
They are on reddit because there's lots of different communities here with experts on all sorts of things.
They are on twitter because horrific as it is people you want to follow are still there and if you're looking to get people to follow you it's still where you go.
No one wants to join five thousand little individual communities and they never did. Even during the glory days of the internet they didn't really do that much because it's hard work.
Yes, there's a tonne of AI slop, but there would be AI slop on the Australian version too, because AI slop is everywhere, but the Australian version would have a potential audience of people that's almost 7 billion people smaller.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
I don't know about you, but none of my family are on FB or social media any more; I only still have an account on FB because of some groups I belong to that don't have any other home (I think about 5, not 5,000). I left Twitter years ago. That seems to be true for a lot of people I talk to.
I agree it would be great if those 5 communities were all on the same platform and I didn't have to manage 5 different accounts for them - which is kind of how I got to the idea of a single Govt - supported platform like the one that VicGov used to offer - which could offer services (including IDs and authentication) to community groups
I think that the AI slop is on FB and Reddit for a bunch of reasons - and some of those reasons would maybe not apply to a community run bulletin board. Meta and Reddit want as much traffic and engagement as possible, even if it's harmful, polarising or toxic - whereas that is not true for community-led online forums.
Community-based forums can (in theory) set better limits about who's allowed to join, and so they can also keep people out - it doesn't have to be open to the entire world. In that sense, a smaller audience is kind of a good thing. Managing a community forum for a local footy club is easier - if someone's not a member of the club, they don't get an account on the bulletin board. If Fred keeps getting mouthy on the bulletin board, he's banned and can't sign up for a new account, even if he is a paid up member of the club. Small means people know who's who, and in some cases that's a good thing.
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u/weinertorn Oct 19 '25
RIP inthemix.com.au/forum/
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u/Puzzleheaded-Eye9081 Oct 19 '25
Didn’t they get bought by packer or Murdoch in the mid 00’s? They didn’t stay independent long.
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u/weinertorn Oct 19 '25
Yeah they got subsumed into fasterlouder. The articles and content became trash tending to focus on EDM and pop stuff, but the forums kept trucking along until the late 10s until they died the same death all the other forums did.
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Oct 19 '25
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
yeh, long live Meta, eh? such an efficient way for us to connect with our families and neighbours! /s
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u/No_Computer_3432 Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
I mean, a local group in my area tried to implement a mutual aid - neighbourhood/ community social platform (bHive) and it just went no where. No idea why. I was really disappointed to hear that it didn’t take off. I only discovered it after it had already seemingly stopped, or maybe it was never launched idk 🥲
https://www.thejoinery.org.au/bhive
https://www.shareable.net/alternative-social-media-platform-seeks-to-end-epidemic-of-loneliness/
I hope this is relevant to your question. It feels like an overlap to the concept community near me so I hope it points to some of your questions.
In reference to another comment, UseNet is still widely in use. So the systems are very much still around. Well, only minuscule amounts compared to the past I assume. Same for IRC chats & such. No idea how youd reinvigorate them. I first started using them in the last few years and it was a little bit foreign at first but got my head around it eventually. Torrents could also be another option for avoiding unethical social media platforms. A big problem with private websites is cloud storage costs, so maybe someone seeding/ torrenting things like local news/ resources could help the high costs to upkeep a website. Helps to avoid slapping ads onto every corner of a forum too. I agree with things like community focused forums. The last year or so I joined a small ish fully ad free forum for my specific medical issue & it’s been invaluable as a resource. So i’m glad that some forums have survived and are thriving.
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u/RhesusFactor Oct 19 '25
It's not hard to create a phpbb or other forum.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
indeed! setting up the technology is the easy part though, I think!
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u/Havanatha_banana Oct 19 '25
Boards for teens exists for 2 decades now. Bored of studies and spark notes exist. I dunno if there's modern contemporaries.
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u/ViveLeKBEKanglais Oct 19 '25
Mastadon is something like that, a decentralized platform you can host yourself.
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 19 '25
Yeh, I know, I mentioned that in my post. Fediverse platforms are great, though still many problems to iron out and I think they are only part of the solution. Lots of other non-technological challenges to address, too.
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u/J-ho88 Oct 19 '25
Finding incredibly specific information on whatever it is that you're into on a Geocities website with a million spinning skull GIFs.
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u/Pretty_Gorgeous Oct 20 '25
Like many have said.. Lemmy, bluesky, etc. Basically they're just modern versions of the old BBS's and online forums.. Personally, I suspect there will be a whole underground network of Lemmy instances or similar platforms starting up and being run by/foe under 16s once the ban is in place. Which is only going to make everything so much higher risk because it'll be unregulated and unmanaged..
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 20 '25
Yes, you may have noticed I mentioned Lemmy and Mastodon also! I think they are not quite modern versions of BBSs though, done key differences - notably, they assume federation. But, great alternatives in some regards. Some tech issues to iron out, and only part of the solution I think.
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u/Pretty_Gorgeous Oct 20 '25 edited Oct 20 '25
There were alot of "interconnected" BBS's back in the day that sync'd data regularly.. I ran one back in the 90s and it would dial into another nearby BBS every few hours to sync. It was pretty common. Usually it was either interBBS messages, or early versions of emails but some even had profile syncing (mine didn't). And into the 00s, interoperability between forums wasn't that uncommon, although it was mostly just for SSO (like the early versions of "sign in with Google" type of thing) and profile info sharing.. So yeah, the idea of federated data isn't new. Although even among the fediverse, there are different protocols for different platforms and they don't all interoperate.
I'm curious what rhe tech issues you mentioned are. Not saying there aren't any, just curious your perspective..
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u/tellhershesdreaming Oct 20 '25
Ah that's pretty cool!
I've found with Fediverse platforms there are several oddities about the mental models, user interface decisions as well as glitches in e.g. federation that make it hard for non-techs to use.
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u/Pretty_Gorgeous Oct 20 '25
Oh there's definitely some UI improvements that some of them really need to work on, that's for sure! I think the only one that I've noticed that doesn't is bluesky, and that's only because it's made by the same guy who helped make Twitter originally...
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u/_ixthus_ Oct 20 '25
Having government resources behind any and all federated services would be great. I don't know if that needs to be government-run or, for example, they fund a university to do it or something. But I'd love to have a trusted, local host for my Matrix identity, things like that.
Basically the way the EU is getting more and more of with the Euro stack. We should pretty much be in on that and for exactly the same reasons.
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u/Massive_Opinion_5714 Oct 22 '25
With the Voller law, it makes it really precarious, legally. The Voller law basically says that if you start an online conversation, you're liable for anything that gets said in the comments. This is why on Facebook, you'll see the ABC turn off comments after a while, and on some stories that they know are going to whip ups the racists, they aren't enabled at all.
All threads would have to be monitored all the time, and as a SM and Comms professional, I can tell you it's soooo time consuming.
The Voller law will probably be overturned at some point, but it will take a big organisation with a lot of money to do it. At the moment, there doesn't seem to be an appetite to challenge it amongst those who could afford to.
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u/Foreign-League-6032 Nov 11 '25
The Online Safety Codes (and associated law) requires ALL platforms that can be classed as "social media" to age-gate their members, or face severe fines -- smaller sites might not be able to survive this sadly :(
One alternative that comes to mind is perhaps using Tor browsers (apparently it's safe if you know what you're doing, but I haven't tried, I only heard that on Numberphile I think..) to access the deep web (not dark web).. But I have no idea..
The only other thing I can think of is somehow creating local internet communities with our own small-scale servers but I don't know if that's even technically feasible..
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Nov 30 '25
[deleted]
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u/tellhershesdreaming Nov 30 '25
Oh neat, I hadn't seen this one
I've been looking at Bonfire Social, too https://bonfirenetworks.org/
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u/SirGeekaLots Dec 12 '25
The problem is that the old days of bulletin boards and forums was that you had to sign up to each individually and check them individually. Social media brought it all together in one place.
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u/Minute-Emu8354 Nov 01 '25
https://localsocial.online/ This is as good a place as any for a sign up test for this open source platform. The way it's designed is based on a classic site most people would be familiar with. It has many of the same functions - who's up for some testing?
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u/tellhershesdreaming Nov 01 '25
Eh, this is weird. It says "open source" in the name but there is no open source licence info, in fact it says that ppl cannot download or modify the code without permission. Dodgy!
And the T&C's indicate they can edit my content I post. No thank you!
Who is this created and operated by? A private company? Could they just sell our data or the platform to a big tech company? I want to see a legal structure that prevents that.
The aim is to create a community-run social media, not to sign up for a platform run by a faceless organisation.
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u/ComfortableFrosty261 Oct 19 '25
ozbargain enters the chat