The days of June 1996 were honeyed with promise. In San Francisco's SoMa district, electronic music animated a loft dance floor as E. David Ellington and Malcolm CasSelle raised their glasses in celebration. Along with friends and colleagues, they had gathered to toast the success of their new platform, NetNoir Online, a hub of “Afrocentric culture.”

Though scrubbed from so much official history, black culture on the web thrived in the mid-'90s. NetNoir launched on the 130th anniversary of Juneteenth, a day that marks the end of slavery, and users flocked to its news articles, online classes, and discussion forums.

The platform soon found itself among a loose constellation of digital havens that together constituted “the soul of the internet”: Melanet, GoAfro, Universal Black Pages, and the Brooklyn-founded Cafe Los Negroes, whose advertising copy exclaimed “Representin' Bed-Stuy in Cyberspace” (years before the neighborhood assumed a ghostlier hue). Naturally, black users were not alone in jockeying for visibility. Sites like LatinoLink and CyberPowWow built communities of their own.

For a time, these sites operated as self-governed metropolises. Charlton D. McIlwain, author of the new book Black Software, notes that the black footprint on the early internet “was relatively enormous.” Of NetNoir, he writes: “They had accomplished something truly great and consequential for black America to think that blackness was at the center of the internet universe, something responsible for ushering the masses online.” You could read music reviews by Greg Tate, dine out on the latest sports commentary (“If O. J. is ever again mentioned here, we do not mean Kato's friend. We mean orange juice”), or gossip with friends—a pioneering model for community building when people were still figuring out the rhythms of being online.

It didn't last.

Functionally, the web is still very black. Our identities are embedded in Black Twitter-fueled memes and reaction GIFs, from Kermit sipping tea to Real Housewives star NeNe Leakes' virtuoso shade-serving. Black culture is likewise a major artery of platforms like TikTok and our beloved Vine (RIP). Even the very modes of exposure find root in blackness: Black death and its digital-era companion, the police brutality video, became a terrifyingly mundane 21st-century spectacle, recorded, uploaded, and shared with perverse frequency. “Blackness gave virality its teeth. Turned it into trauma,” the writer and academic Lauren Michele Jackson has said. In life and in death, black people are the bones and lungs of the web, its very body.

Yet as the web has scaled, with corporate gentrifiers like Google and Facebook moving in and taking over, the black-owned presence has shrunk. Today, there seem to be fewer websites, networks, apps, and cultural ports in which to find a kind of sanctuary for black people—perhaps when we need it most. “The provincial portals that once invested heavily in steering users to black content suddenly had little stake in doing so,” McIlwain writes, blaming Google's “traffic cop” algorithm in particular. “Those walled gardens came down. The web opened.”

What I'm proposing is not a firewalled splinternet; it has more to do with where I see us evolving as a society—into enclaves.

But what if it hadn't? What if the fortunes of NetNoir and Cafe Los Negroes had stayed strong? What if BlackPlanet—which predated even Friendster—had ballooned into a global diasporic nerve center? What if CyberPowWow became an identity-specific Twitter and Universal Black Pages our Google? What if alongside Reddit we had LatinoLink? To push the thought experiment a step further, let's imagine that these cultural sites not only endured but, as a result, created a more segmented, racially divided internet. What I suppose I'm asking is this: Would the internet work better if it were more segregated?

I admit it's an ugly question, one that betrays the values of inclusivity. It shouldn't sit well. It's not meant to go down easy. But if we begin from a place of discomfort, maybe we can get to a place of illumination. In fact, my premise is not without precedent.