A Vermont librarian now owns MetaFilter, a social network that was started in 1999. It’s one of those sites that I have occasionally encountered over the decades although I’ve never been part of it.
“There’s some people who have been a part of this particular online community for over 20 years. Right. And so you get to know people. You have people who have been married and they have kids and then their kids get accounts on MetaFilter …”
The new ownership is a complicated story. I learned about it from this interview on PublicInfrastructure.org, which has to be one of the most deliberately unsexy URLs around. It’s from the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.