>>97
When it came to the CWCki, the most natural way for them to keep the community alive was to discuss other "lolcows". I'd even say it was pretty easy for them.
Now /m/, just as you mentioned, had to generalize more, since there's not a lot of /m/-tier content coming up these days.

The board itself changes URLs and is found so often because it is designed to be linked to.

Partially. They only seem to kill off the domains when /pol/-tier people flood in using them. Other than that I believe I've seen a direct link to it once (on this textboard nonetheless) and you can get in from r/a/dio if you know it exists and are lucky enough.
Dunno about it being linked on 4chan, because I don't go there much.

It also essentially just a discord server that occasionally talks about 4chan meta

Nah, not only. They have a pretty good community with groupwatches and events, discuss a fair share of their own board culture (also related to r/a/dio)... the topics vary from history to coding, and it's all on /a/.

Most of the old guard has already fucked off to discord

I recall someone saying the spin-off Discords that some namefags made in anger were mostly dead. Besides, is the old guard better? Their community right now isn't the worst.

There is (was?) a webring when 8chan first died. The problem with federating sites like imageboards is that the administration/userbases of such sites get ornery about each-other because of the different philosophies they have.

There still is, but some 8chan splinters (e.g. /late/) aren't hosted on anon.cafe nor julay.world, and as such sometimes don't end up being part of the Cross-Chan Alliance/Imageboard Federation.

Not a message board but http://www.baka-updates.com/ is a good example of this happening to a lot of the 2000s imageboard-wapanese crowd.

They literally stated that fansubs becoming obsolete was one of the reasons to shut the whole thing down.
I think Hongfire might be a better example. But in general, sure.

>>98

but if this is pushed as an artificial barrier it only increases the chance that those elitist start growing

And half of the discussion will be about how to get the damned system to work.