@berkberkman @RatPoster @coolboymew Even before THQ Nordic, there were a bunch of indie game devs that openly posted on imageboards and even held AMAs on them. Hell, Running With Scissors had an official board on 8chan. I'm not even joking.

@coolboymew @berkberkman @RatPoster Notch frequently posted on 4chan, during the early days of Minecraft.

@coolboymew @berkberkman @RatPoster
>I'd argue that 4chan back then was even "worse" in what was often happening there back then than it is now

Are you talking about the site itself or how the community actually affected things in the real world?

4chan is worse than it has ever been. Nothing but Pepe and Wojak template threads. I had to mute that greentextbot on here because every time I saw a 4chan screenshot, I'm reminded how soulless that website is now. It's probably a bunch of markov-chain bots making those threads.

@PurpCat @RatPoster @coolboymew I really hate how the places that many of those users went to afterward are fundamentally worse, fedi included.

@PurpCat @RatPoster @coolboymew My main issue is that I don't understand why people think that Fedi should be a replacement for imageboards. Social media/microblogging is literally the exact opposite of imageboards. On imageboards, everyone is completely anonymous, all posts are judged by content and not by the poster, and things like "blogposts" are discouraged unless it's for something like an /agdg/ thread. Here, everyone has a reputation whether their accounts are linked to their real ID or not, people try to only post things that won't make them lose followers and will get them enough likes and reblogs, and people will ignore your posts if you have a bad enough reputation. People love to claim that imageboards are hiveminds, but I would argue that the fedi (post-2021) is worse.

There is also the fact that on imageboards and regular forums, threads are grouped into subforums or boards so if you want to take a break from politics and just talk about tech or video games, you can do so. Granted, some political shit might bleed in, but even then you can check each thread. Here, there is no escape. It's guaranteed that the posts talking about $CURRENT_EVENT will be the ones cluttering your timeline.

@PurpCat @RatPoster @coolboymew That issue is way overblown. As far as I know, 8moe never had any problem with that. Granted, it's /pol/ board is nowhere near the most active boards, but still. The webring had those problems, but that was mostly due to admin incompetence and laziness, and CP spam on those sites happened during the COVID lockdowns when more people had free-time on their hands and decided to go after the bunkers of the most controversial website in recent memory.

There isn't that much of an effort to take down these sites like there was back in 2019 and early 2020. Most of the 8chan bunkers don't even have an active /pol/ board and most of the activity happens on the vidya and tech boards instead. People only hate these sites because of /pol/. It makes little sense to fedpost on a /v/, /tech/, or /co/ board. The secret is not to have a /pol/ board. Just have a news board instead if you want to talk about current events.

And if you think that imageboards are truly dead and are not worth the risk anymore, there are other places to discuss current events and niche topics. Forums still exist and there are a lot of niche and laidback forums out there like RPGCodex. I know that a lot of former 8/v/ users are on there. Even VarisHangout has a forum now. Sure, they do have usernames instead of complete anonymity (unless they enable guest posting), but forums are meant for discussion and not to make yourself look like a micro-eceleb, which I think is the fundamental problem with the microblogging format.