tbh semi-open registrations and invites are really how fedi should work in general. We should not be actively trying to grow. Normies are cancer and ruin everything.
@RustyCrab there was a time for growth. this is no longer the time for it.
@GrungeQueef my thing is that a lot of people want to grow fedi in order to break people away from big tech and big media. The reality is that if you import the third world you become the third world. Just like we're seeing with Mastodon, the normies came in and the corporations followed the normies. Now it's just a hellscape comparable to twitter. We're only protected by the rainbow curtain.

You will not impose freedom on normies. They will put the shackles on you instead to share their misery.

@RustyCrab@clubcyberia.co

You will not impose freedom on normies. They will put the shackles on you instead to share their misery.

Harsh, but I see what you mean.
@GrungeQueef@poa.st

@gabriel @GrungeQueef @RustyCrab Except if you give it a bad enough reputation, you will see people trying their best to kill it (maybe not completely) like what so many people tried to do with imageboards after the 8chan linked mass shootings. Now, imageboards are considered dead or dying at this point because nobody wants to risk hosting them anymore.

@xianc78 @gabriel @GrungeQueef @RustyCrab It's also imageboards just aren't culturally in vogue anymore, like BBSes and IRC were after a while.

Aside from imageboards being extremely vulnerable to a AHS style "posting CP to own the chuds" attack or the even easier "fedposting to own the chuds" attack, imageboard culture has been diluted hardcore thanks to everything from the infamous 4chan jannies to the fact that people don't give a shit that much to sacrifice everything to run a site like that.

But most importantly IMO, I think the #1 thing killing imageboards is simply people online use different communities now in 2023, be it Discord/TG/Matrix groups or social media in some form. When you're trying to find friends and communities online, why post on a dying imageboard when you can go to Discord. Like it or not, you're dragged kicking and screaming because that's where the people are at and you're not. Before the 8chan thing, it was already in terminal decline.
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@PurpCat @RustyCrab @gabriel @GrungeQueef
>But most importantly IMO, I think the #1 thing killing imageboards is simply people online use different communities now in 2023, be it Discord/TG/Matrix groups or social media in some form. When you're trying to find friends and communities online, why post on a dying imageboard when you can go to Discord. Like it or not, you're dragged kicking and screaming because that's where the people are at and you're not.

I really hate this as a gamedev. I really don't want to use shit like Twitter or Discord, but I'm afraid I have to if I want a decently sized audience, especially given that the hobbyist gamedev community is now full of zoomers who have probably never heard of an Internet forum. Even the anons at /agdg/ realize that using sites like Twitter and Discord are necessary if you want a player-base.

Literally, my only other option is to pay someone to do my social media for me.

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@xianc78 @RustyCrab @gabriel @GrungeQueef I don't like how Discord is full of alphabet people at every corner and I'm sure they will throw me under the bus if something happens, I don't need that shit IMO.

@PurpCat @RustyCrab @gabriel @GrungeQueef Just seeing what they tried to do to the Ion Fury devs a few years back makes me feel uneasy. But I'm afraid that the alphabet people is an Internet wide phenomenon at this point. Even if you decide to cater to the freetards and host your community on IRC, you still have to deal with the "programming sock" types who are sometimes even worse.

This two way interaction between viewers and "content-creators" (I hate this term but I can't think of a better one) and the toxicity that it brings really makes me wish that RSS took of instead of social media, where these cancel-culture types are instead on some remote blogs on obscure corners of the Internet. Seriously, interacting with fans outside of fan-letters and fan-emails has brought only the worst in people.

@xianc78 @gabriel @xianc78 @PurpCat @RustyCrab @gabriel @GrungeQueef The one I've always figured is to have a public facing twitter for strictly business, but to primarily advertise alternative outlets.

There's no reason to have a discord, you're just babysitting the most mentally ill retards on the planet. Even big "content creators" like Sseth have realized it's 100% not worth the effort. Just have a public forum or instance or whatever for troubleshooting, you want that to be public and not behind the great retard app.
> There's no reason to have a discord

Discords are good for appealing to your active participants. If your business depends on active participation (i.e. you're a streamer, content creator, multiplayer game developer), Discord is one of the best way to indirectly keep that activity high.

It does have the side effect of being more hostile to more passive consumers of your content because unlike a proper forum or such, it locks content behind active participation in a community that is not searchable by common web search engines.
@Ash @Dozu @PurpCat @xianc78 @gabriel @GrungeQueef it would be great if admins could make their discords publicly indexable so that information could be found but then you'd have your technical documentation mixed with furry porn
I honestly think that Discord is the biggest memory hole problem we are currently facing online. Chats get deleted (owners clean up stuff, re-organize etc), servers get deleted, accounts and servers fall inactive then get deleted. There is no "Internet Archive" for Discord.

I've seen valuable information lost and have no way to retrieve it because it was posted on Discord some time ago.
@Ash @Dozu @RustyCrab @xianc78 @gabriel @GrungeQueef That's also the biggest problem with the PC-98 community I've noticed too. Everything is stored in one Discord server, including stuff with old computers, and even then people who "know it all" won't post it unless I prod them for questions at times. If the server goes down and there was a risk of that when the last admin went apeshit, it's toast.

Unfortunately some things take a massive priority over me writing up or scanning in documents for old computers (webm related).
@Ash @Dozu @GrungeQueef @RustyCrab @gabriel @xianc78 I should add, Reddit is a major memory hole problem only slightly easier to archive. From bots that wipe all your posts to Reddit's moderation team, the website is not the same as it used to be but every midwit still uses it. In fact it's taken the role of forums, to the point people will use Reddit as a search term.

Of course now Reddit and it banning anything that offends corporations is no better than forums run by boomers who say "DON'T POST THIS SOFTWARE FOR PROGRAMMING A 25 YEAR OLD RADIO" at this point.
@PurpCat @Ash @Dozu @xianc78 @gabriel @GrungeQueef literally the only use for reddit at this point is checking if a service is down and why (see: Aurora store)
I was recently bickering similarly about Discord guilds centering around software projects to offer tech support. I was poking around with Stable Diffusion on AMD, and experimenting with different models, but the problem was that nearly everything is completely unsearchable, and yet every project page being "JOIN OUR DISCORD. JOIN OUR DISCORD."

If some of it was more accessible, then you wouldn't need people to hop onto a Discord guild to ask the same question over and over again, and be at the mercy of how bad the search on Discord is.

Meanwhile for continuity: I've kept an older forum alive for over 18 years now that has some archival merit, despite some admins going rogue or trying to kill it by pulling the plug on the hosting/domain, yet I've 'kept the lights on'. Meanwhile you're not going to see such continuity with a Discord guild, since you can't just export/import, or deploy your own installation on commodity software elsewhere. If it's posted on Discord, it's most likely going to die with Discord too.
@gabriel @xianc78 @arcanicanis @Ash @PurpCat @RustyCrab @xianc78 @gabriel @GrungeQueef I remember going to forums where the mods would, rightfully, yell at you for asking the same question that's been answered 100x before. With discord, there's practically a guarantee that will happen because it's not at all set up to easily search for past information.
Oh, the feds are archiving it forever to be used against you. All your stupid ERPs. All your uses of words that are now slurs that weren't just a year or two ago.

And you deserve it for being a furry shithead collaborator
@Ash @Dozu @RustyCrab @xianc78 @gabriel @GrungeQueef Unfortunately you can end up in the situation where SSeth was in in which he actually shut his Discord down because it got out of hand. Or shit like that one Fallout mod fiasco. Or like the one Discord server I'm in which had a flamewar. Or when the owner decides to close the server or throw a tantrum first.
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