Finding Lebanese communities online: a journey/struggle/Friday night ramble

Y'all ever heard about LebGeeks?

It was something like 2010, and I googled some obscure DSL problem. I thought I'd include my ISP's name as well. Lo and behold, a site emerges from the darkness. It's called LebGeeks, a forum for Lebanese techies. Seemed cool, I was a bit of a forum enjoyer myself. I pop on over to create an account so that I too can enjoy complaining about this trash ISP.

The signup process involved a simple programming exercise, which was unusual. The gatekeeping was pretty silly, but it did serve the purpose of keeping non-techies out. Which was the point, but it was 2010 in Lebanon - these were the only people who would join that forum.

Anyway, I did not make friends on that forum. Bashing ISPs and the telecom ministry's inaction with the slow internet can only give you so much gratification.

A few years later I discover this other tech forum. This one is called Reddit, and it's pretty dope: there's a community for all kinds of stuff. Building PCs, gaming, Windows OS mods, go nuts.

Eventually found myself on /r/Lebanon. Being the early 2010s on Reddit, the majority of users were programmers, network engineers, IT guys, what have you. There were meetups, but I never went because I was too young (or at least I felt too young - back then I swear everyone online seemed 30 to me).

The sub was good overall, I believe it was a force for good for a long time. The mods were (and still are) decent folks, and they did a good job of letting people with shitty social or political opinions speak their peace and get downvoted and taunted, which was great IMO. Let those fucks understand we don't like them or their za3im.

The subreddit's demographics did change over time, along with the rest of the site. That's fine, it was a good platform and it was expanding pretty aggressively. By that point, there were a lot of Lebanese spaces online, as the internet was much less niche than it was even ten years prior. Nobody really needed a general-purpose Lebanon forum, since you can now go to Twitstagriktokbook and do all the Lebaneseing you want, in a space where AUB and LAU students don't make up 85% of the userbase.

What about Lemmy? I'm not interested in moderating a large community at all, but I don't expect Lemmy to be popular at all in Lebanon for a while. I will try to grow the community, but I will probably hand it off to people who are better at this, if this ever grows. That's what the original mods did for /r/Lebanon anyway. I expect this to stay casual for some time until things become clearer.

Apologies for the cheap ass banner image, but I don't want to pick a nice photo from one area just yet. I found some nice ones over on Unsplash that I really liked, of Beirut, of the hills, of villages, but I didn't want it to seem like this was a space that's dominated by city folk, or by people who have never stepped in the city (you know what I'm talking about).

I think FMHY is a good instance for this - it's a general purpose instance with (so far) very few defederations (fingers crossed). Also seems to be run pretty competently. Which is more than I can say about the old site.

Feel free to help me grow this space. News, discussions, memes (as long as they're good), all welcome.

Also, what happened to LebGeeks? Well, the site is still around, but user activity has slowed to a crawl. Pretty sure the thing that killed it was the subreddit. The trade forum was still pretty active though, last time I checked a few years ago. So maybe a gatekept signup for tech dudes helps with cutting spam down and keeping a close community of people who sell computer parts to each other. Idk