One of my side projects is maintaining a really cool resource: Fishes of Georgia. It’s a directory of all of the known fish species that are in Georgia waters, both fresh and salt. The work was compiled at the University of Georgia by Dr. Bud Freeman, who for the longest time was the chair of Ichthyology there. Go check the site out. It’s a wonderful resource.

Now - we’re working on updating some of the data, as it’s a bit out of date. The site lost funding and was offline for a while, but it’s now being hosted by the North American Native Fishes Association - NANFA. I’ve been a NANFA member for nearly 30 years, and appreciate the community of scientists, aquarists, outdoor enthusiasts, and people who just like fish. Mostly they like the small, colorful fish that are way more common in the southeastern US than most people realize.

What I treasure most, however, is that it’s an entirely different community and culture than my usual haunts. I’m a digital native - I’ve lived on the internet since before the web. Newsgroups, IRC, and MUSH games were my first fascination when I found that I could dial into a shell account as a teenager, and it was so much more interesting than BBS’s.

(BBS stands for Bulletin Board System - basically the original forum site before people had universal access to the internet. You’d plug in a modem to your computer and make a phone call to another computer that hosted the BBS. If that computer didn’t have multiple modems attached, you’d get a busy signal. It was a different time back then! There are still some BBS’s around if you look, but most are now telnet servers.)

The core of NANFA culture at the time I joined was a lively and active web forum. I met some local friends there and a quarter of a century later we still go on scouting expeditions to fill someone’s fish tank or see if we can find the type locality of where a local fish was first caught and described in the literature. Good times.

But the forums started to change - the original group were pre-Internet. To them, trolling is a thing you do with a slow boat and a fishing line, not ragebait. As a matter of fact, this is where the online verb to troll came from. But, as a younger group was discovering NANFA, they were joining the forum and the culture started to shift. It wasn’t as purposeful - the general forums stopped being trip reports and talking about conservation legislation and was just…. online chatter.

To be sure, the trip reports and conservation talk still happened in their dedicated sub-forums, but this level of informality was legitimately disturbing for a lot of the original NANFAns. These were wildlife biologists, outdoor enthusiasts, fisheries science nerds, not keyboard warriors.

Me…. I’m a little of both. I’m also a card-carrying NANFAn and I love standing in a creek looking at tiny fish, but I came of age online, and when there was a discussion in the members-only forum about the change that was happening, I was able to tell a story that really helped the NANFA old guard understand. I explained about Eternal September.

And now I’m going through a similar realization with NANFA - the forums aren’t just changing culture…. the forums are almost silent. It’s now an archive. NANFA’s now on Facebook, and has a Discord server, and everything’s ephemeral - the conversations disappear quickly now. I can’t go back and see what happened last month. And I’m really feeling the loss - especially now that I’m actually helping on the ops side of keeping the resources online.

I’m not sure what to feel about it, but I definitely have some feels.