I think this is inevitable when your community is basically a splinter group from some incumbent which ends up being an identity-level trait of that splinter group.
It contributes to a culture of NOT being like the incumbent instead of a culture of existing alongside the incumbent. Another example would be Reddit clones like Voat and, sometimes, even HN.
When I was a pre-teen, I was banned from NeoGAF, the massive gaming forum, and joined a forum that was basically a bunch of NeoGAF rejects. While I enjoyed it at the time, it could never be its own stand-alone gaming community and, a decade later, still wasn't. Sometimes you had to know about NeoGAF and its current events if you wanted to fit in and understand content on the splinter forum, yet the splinter forum also would want you to believe they weren't in fact chomping at the bit for more NeoGAF/evilore drama.
Mastodon reminds me of that, especially after Musk's purchase of Twitter where Mastodon became even more toxic and gleefully adolescent in its anti-birdsite-isms.
On the other hand 4Chan was basically formed when Somethingawful kicked a bunch of weebs off of their forums. They somehow managed to find their own identity.
Yeah, there are exceptions where the splinter outgrows the incumbent.
I know nothing about 4chan much less its early days, but maybe 4chan didn't have the "at least we're not Something Awful" culture, or maybe it was unique enough to attract enough new blood that had no clue what Something Awful was.
It contributes to a culture of NOT being like the incumbent instead of a culture of existing alongside the incumbent. Another example would be Reddit clones like Voat and, sometimes, even HN.
When I was a pre-teen, I was banned from NeoGAF, the massive gaming forum, and joined a forum that was basically a bunch of NeoGAF rejects. While I enjoyed it at the time, it could never be its own stand-alone gaming community and, a decade later, still wasn't. Sometimes you had to know about NeoGAF and its current events if you wanted to fit in and understand content on the splinter forum, yet the splinter forum also would want you to believe they weren't in fact chomping at the bit for more NeoGAF/evilore drama.
Mastodon reminds me of that, especially after Musk's purchase of Twitter where Mastodon became even more toxic and gleefully adolescent in its anti-birdsite-isms.