A few months ago I was reflecting on my need for a digital community:

I find myself once again yearning for a digital community. I believe the future of social media (for me) is some kind of invite-only group chat where the conversation flows like a river. It might live in Discord, Slack or even IRC, I don’t care. Physical community is important but as a millennial I need text-based friendships too.

Maybe I should have said hypertext instead of text-based. Hypertext is more than just text. Hypertext is images, links, pages… It’s the internet in its labyrinthine ways. This was also my thought process when I decided to start blogging on this domain, hypersubject.net. I was looking for a space where I can express myself, my subjectivity, via hypertext. Hence I merged the two: hypersubject.

Since creating hypersubject.net, I have been on a constant lookout for communities that I could participate in. I found a few in the wild.

I believe one should not make legible what depends on illegibility for its mere survival. The communities I list below, to the best of my knowledge, don’t depend on illegibility. They don’t really operate in public; all are either gatekept or have their own initiation processes to allow new members. However, if you think this post is exposing a community, let me know and I’ll take care of it.

dealgorithmed

Dealgorithmed was the name of a newsletter Manuel started in 2026. Actually it didn’t continue after the first edition, but it gave its name to a small community that was announced on Manuel’s blog. It consists of a small bunch of people from three continents, and so far it’s the only community I feel comfortable participating in.

nightcity.chat

nightcity.chat is a community operating on Matrix servers. I don’t know what it’s really about, but I got interested in it because of its cyberpunk aesthetics. For me the conversation moved too fast, so I couldn’t really participate.

tilde.town

tilde.town is an old community operating on a single Linux server. The server is the town, hence the name. I found this community very welcoming and nice to participate in. The town has its own IRC server, mailing lists, twitter-like status updates (called binks) and its own bulletin board on the side.

omg.lol

omg.lol is a nice little community that provides a toolbox for participating in discourse on the small web. It allows you to have a webpage, email address, blog, status updates, a Fediverse account, pastebin instance, git forge and more for $20/year. I recently joined omg.lol, and so far this community too seems very welcoming.

Dark Forest OS

DFOS is not a single community but a platform to host your own communities.

The internet is not a public square. The most meaningful creative and social coordination happens in private groups, closed communities, invite-only spaces. This is where real work gets done, real relationships form, real culture develops. The topology is private-first.

DFOS is a platform that implements the DFOS protocol. The protocol allows members to prove their identity and ownership of the content without revealing the content itself. Hence the name Dark Forest: it’s designed for creative activities that happen in private spaces.

Although it’s still under development, there seem to be a lot of spaces already where things are happening. I joined one or two that piqued my interest, but this platform seems very promising for collaborating with others on real projects in cyberspace.