Here’s the thing: We had this before. This is nothing new. This is not a crisis or even worthy of note. This might reflect the cycle repeating again at best, but ultimately it’s a tempest in a teapot.

BBSes were, for the most part, isolated but sometimes federated communities. They had their own moderation policies, their own rules of conduct, and their own local communities. Sometimes, if they were part of a BBS network those communities were in contact with each other. Those BBS networks had their own policies, moderators, and so forth. It was usual for users of a given BBS to also be users of other BBSes; those users fit into the community of each other system pretty normally.

Usenet was distributed across hundreds, if not thousands of servers across the Net; still is, if you read it. Each newsgroup had its own community, rules of conduct, FAQ (usually), and sometimes its own moderation team (the .moderated variants were well known). Rules were enforced, communities were unique to the newsgroup, and norms were followed. Again, it was not unusual for a given user to participate in multiple newsgroups and the communities thereof.

E-mail lists were not that different.