>>27
>>26
Smartphone normies are not the problem IMO, since they confine themselves to a handful websites anyway.
One nice way to build a community today would be to have an anonymous text board as a front, with a bridge between individual users that preserves anonymity in some way. Maybe something like PGP, though I don't know how it works so I might be wrong. Say, your posts have a hidden ID with a public key attached, and people can decide to encrypt their reply using that public key.

So the posts would look like
>>26
hello
##27
[garbled]

But the poster of >>27 would see the message.

Sometimes I want to send a private message to the person who wrote a post, but there's no way to do that except taking the conversation away from the board by leaving a contact for another platform. This was a nice thing in forums because you could send a PM seamlessly to other people in a confined space for a topic. You could do this on Reddit with multiple accounts I guess, but you'd have to be on Reddit.

I think the changes happened because the demographic of "nerds" who use the internet to escape normie life has changed, and even the people who used to be the original nerds with niche interests have aged and changed. And most people who want to chat privately for the sake of chatting these days are riddled with mental issues.
It's such a subtle feeling but I remember that posting publicly on the internet felt more like being in a room with a bunch of friends. Now it feels like you're stepping up with a microphone and talking to an audience and there might be cameras rolling. It's weird as hell.