Esoteric Chat
Esoteric Chat (formerly known as esoTalk, esoForum, geteso, geteso.org, gete.so) is a discussion board created using the esoBB forum software without any central topic or theme.
Esoteric Chat was created in 2018 by John Mosley in order to hold conversations with friends from high school with the name esoTalk. The first users to join the forum were either real-life acquaintances of Mosley or found the website through Total Freedom. As such, early conversations on the forum were somewhat topical. The subject matter of these conversations came to be understood by a select group of users, thus leading to the term "esoteric" being used in reference to the forum. (The "eso" in esoTalk developed a second meaning.) Over time, more users began to join the forum either from neighboring discussion boards on which the forum was mentioned, such as MessengerGeek, or through search engines. Alas, the majority of early users were part of a centipede operated by the webmaster.
History
The creator of the forum, John Mosley, first discovered the esoTalk forum software in 2011 and created an account on the esoTalk support forum early in that year. He created his own private forum using the software a few weeks after joining the support forum. After January 2012, a complete rewrite of the software undergone by Toby Zerner and Thirtysixway led to the appearance and functionality of the forum software being drastically changed. Mosley continued to operate his private forum using the esoTalk beta 2 release of the software until it was deleted two years later.
On February 22 2018, Mosley created another forum by the name of "esoTalk" using the beta 2 software and with the free domain esotalk.ga. Shortly thereafter, the name of the forum was changed to esoForum at the request of Toby Zerner, who also relinquished copyright of the old esoTalk logo to Mosley and gave permission for the beta 2 codebase to be further developed into a fork of the software that later became known as esoBB. Mosley purchased the domain esotalk.net and began hosting the forum outside of his own residence. The second account created on the forum was used to test e-mail verification, however this account was later deleted entirely. The first real user to sign up was Pramire, an acquaintance of Mosley who went on to co-develop the UnraveledMC Minecraft server. Not long after, about a dozen members of the Total Freedom community joined the forum.
2018-2020: Prophetfags
Users that signed up from February 2018 until the end of 2020 are referred to as prophetfags. The conversations started by these users tend to revolve around subjects only understood by the community to which those users belonged. Billiam Kush, Dominic and amougies are all examples of notable users from this era who started conversations that lasted until the Great Reset or have maintained relevancy to this day.
The majority of prophetfags either originated from Total Freedom or were otherwise introduced to the forum by fellow high school students of Edison Preparatory School.
2021: Oldfags
By 2021, the forum had already established a relatively large number of posts thus giving the appearance of a website consisting of substantial content. Adolf Hitler joined the forum on January 21 2021 after being linked to the site by John Mosley on the Total Freedom server. Akefu Brewer joined the forum shortly thereafter after learning about it from Hitler.
During this period, multiple centipedes were created, which substantially altered the frequency of new posts and conversations on the forum. The subject matter of conversations also changed substantially, going from consisting of harmless inside jokes to more esoteric subjects. The forum's rules were altered in order to further encompass the freedom of speech and dissuade the excessive moderation of posts. This change was probably made in reaction to the authoritarian shift that had occurred on Total Freedom not long before.
