@PurpCat People could have said the same thing about Yahoo Answers or many of the communities on StackExchange.

@xianc78 Did you know StackExchange was literally founded because another website was paywalling answers?

@PurpCat I wasn't aware of that. It's a lot better than Quora which forces you to login or create an account after visiting a certain number of pages.

@xianc78

So once upon a time there was a website called Experts Exchange which was like 90s/early 00s StackOverflow, namely asking questions about "how to do XYZ on Novell Netware or UNIX". And then they paywalled it to make money and this pissed off everyone online. It was so universally hated that Stack Overflow was made in response to it.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/

@beardalaxy
I've always been more of an imageboard type of person. The fact that they are completely anonymous means that there is no "elitist culture" you see on Reddit or most forums. Posts are judge solely by content and not by the users. You may get insulted, but you don't have to worry about building up a negative reputation for yourself.

>Perhaps it would be better if it were actually decentralized.

There was (technically still is) actually something similar to that called Usenet. It's a decentralized network of discussion groups and posts and threads were copied from server to server. Topics were organized into Newsgroups which were basically it's equivalent to subreddits. It was popular back in the 90s and even early 2000s. Two major things that killed it were the "Eternal September" back in 1993 where a bunch of Universities offered Internet access which lead to an influx of college students joining without learning the culture first, and then the popularity of the World Wide Web and later Web forums finally put the nail in the coffin for it.

It's still around today, but from what I can tell, it's mostly used for piracy because files are automatically copied to federated servers and media publishers don't bother searching some obsolete network.

If you want a modern example, Lemmy is supposed to be a decentralized Reddit. It even uses the same protocol that the Fediverse uses, ActivityPub. However, the developers behind that project are probably more pozzed than the Mastodon developers because they've included a hardcoded slur filter, but I heard that it can be disabled now.

>I can talk about zelda stuff with people without needing to put up with that one zelda forum's bullshit pop-ups for LGBT shit

Let me guess, it was Zelda Dungeon. They made some retarded article about Link possibly being gay.

I never had any account on any Zelda forum. I sometimes like to lurk the Zelda Universe forums because they do make interesting theories. I can clearly tell that all the Zelda forums are pozzed, but that's something to expect from an extremely popular franchise.

I really hate how forums in general have become even bigger cesspools than Reddit. They are only still active because Reddit isn't enough of a hugbox for them so you end up with the same culture you find on most Mastodon instances.

Even before Reddit, you had forums that would ban you for merely dropping an uncensored F-bomb. Seriously, forums had some of the worst moderation policies around. People were expected to act like they are participating in a school discussion board. It's part of the reason why sites like Reddit got popular because they didn't have this restriction.

@xianc78 yup, pretty much. So that's why I still use reddit despite it being shit.l xD it's not as shitty as other shit. I'd rather use reddit over discord or gay forums.

I'm pretty sure it was zelda dungeon, yeah. Most of the popular forums out there are garbage, and the ones that aren't popular don't have enough users. GBATemp is awesome when it comes to hacking stuff, and as far as I've seen they don't do a lot of the typical stupid forum shit there. A lot of the users there are shit lords though, they act like little kids and try to incite drama or make accounts just to ask about things already in the FAQ which leads to modders quitting.

@beardalaxy I miss AssemblerGames. They had a lot of cool threads on rare consoles and prototypes. I never had an account on there though because I don't collect that kind of stuff (from what I can tell you are best off living near a video game company HQ).

The CaveStory Fansite Forums was also a site I liked to frequently lurk. They're still around but don't seem as active, but that is to be expected because the popularity of that game has waned over the years thanks to games like Undertale eclipsing it's popularity. It is pretty relaxed compared to other forums, but being about CaveStory, there is naturally a plethora of furries on there.

One forum that I don't use but I've heard is pretty good is RPG Codex Forums. They're pretty active, have very lax rules compared to other forums, and the community seems to be anti-woke/SJW. They mostly talk about video game RPGs, other video game genres, along with table-top RPGs.

Now that I think about it, it is probably a great place to show of your game. They even have a subforum for user-created RPGs.

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/forums/codex-workshop.37/

>A lot of the users there are shit lords though, they act like little kids and try to incite drama or make accounts just to ask about things already in the FAQ which leads to modders quitting.

That is increasingly a problem everywhere, especially in open-source projects. The most recent example is that PS2 emulatior where idiots and trolls were asking why can't they run it on literal ObamaPhones from the early 2010s. It got to the point where the lead developer quit the project entirely.

@xianc78 interesting, i'll have to check out rpgcodex, thanks for the recommendation!

@xianc78 lmao yeah this place seems pretty cool

@beardalaxy Is that from the Codex? I can't find that linked anywhere.

@xianc78 yeah hahaha I can't remember where I found it though, maybe the screenshot thread

@beardalaxy Oh I thought that one of the users was actually an LGBT streamer or endorsing them. I did see someone with a Ukrainian flag and had "GLORY TO UKRAINE" as a subtitle (though I didn't pay attention to any context), but otherwise, the culture of the site reminds me of old-school /v/ except as a traditional forum and more CRPG focused. I know that a lot of former 8chan /v/ users went there when the original 8chan shutdown.

New users have their posts moderator approved for about a week, but they claim it's because they had a bunch of Pieville types who join the forum and do nothing but talk about DA JOOZ all day and never actually talk about video games. It's also why you have to wait an entire year just to be able to post on their politics board. Though, I'm pretty sure they will be immediately welcoming if you show off your game.

The only reason why I'm not on there is because I have no plans on making an RPG anytime soon. My dream game is more of an action-adventure. And while, I do have my fun with RPGs, I don't consider myself a die-hard fan of them. I'm more of a fan of games with RPG elements like action-adventures.

@xianc78 I'm honestly not a crazy mega rpg fan either, but it seems like they have pretty healthy discourse on other games too.

Yeah that post was pointing out the "everyone is welcome in hell" lmao