That sounds so cool! Wondering how many pages that got up to? Also what were some of the more common topics?

Thankfully we offloaded all those members onto more boring nerd music sites.

Well, when you’re not really into, let’s say, golf,
then it seems like the perfect forum to join, eh?

It’s been a really long time since I was there, but it had already
been around for years and had thousands of members. It wasn’t
too much different than here, but it never pretended that it was
a single-issue community like this one does. If someone came in
and dropped a new subject in the thread, it could be ignored or
steered in that direction. Again, not for people who come to
expect mostly a single subject (like music). It was fun, but
the party would take away from your real life easily.

Yeah golf fans who just want to talk about golf and think golf is the only thing worth talking about seem pretty boring.

yeah, to those who find golf boring.

Very interesting to read the experiences of you guys on social media, esp. as MB is the only place I go, never having been motivated to work out what tik-tok or facebook can do to improve my life.

For a while I was a member of a world music forum, but traffic was v light and (*checks page*) it seems to have closed down 3 years ago.

I really like MB, even with its now-reduced membership, and hope it keeps going as long as we all do. If google ever decides to close it, I wonder if we have any back-up plan? Can we copy and paste it? Can we beg to join the alternative site that I think tore actually opened once?

I'd say Facebook, but who knows what devious plans Zuckerberg may have. Maybe Google will have some other sort of social platform we could just do our thing in.

Hopefully, nothing will happen with MB though.

Faceplant and Dickrot are large wanky turdariums,
but there’s lots of smaller forums that can meet your needs.
If this place ever folds, it’s not that difficult to start your own,
but it does involve some bucks. On one music forum I’m on,
the guy is upfront about the costs to him and even has a
running total on donations. It costs about $225/month.
Latest topic: Mingus’s secret eggnog recipe. :D

On another forum, we lost a relatively young, very frequent
poster (from Denmark) of avant/experimental music back
around October, so we’re devoting a year-long thread to him
next week talking about his influence on our musical lives.
Latest topic: mostly just talking about year-end lists of ours
and others. (Both of those forums have respected music
journalists who’ve written for major publications and
Bandcamp, so there’s a healthy dose of year-end stuff).

I’ve been watching another music site that I may end up
on in March, but they’re really into music lists all-year
round which is kind of a time-consuming black hole
that I’m still debating if I want to be involved in.

… and that’s just some music ones …

There are some other good ones out there,
but, again, if anyone wants to start a site like this one
(if Psychoblather gets flushed down the googling turd hole),
you can do so with donation help if you don’t have the regular funds.

When an instrument related forum got 86'ed a while back someone created a temp one through proboards:

https://www.proboards.com/

It helped to bring everyone back together until the issues were solved with the original site. It also helped that someone had a bunch of email addresses from a lot of the members.

Anyone remember BBS's? How about Chat Rooms?