Oh god yes
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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I love “old school forums” as much as anyone else drawn to the fediverse, but there is no denying that discord in particular has a very specific flow and community structure that does not exist on forums. Just like you can’t get the full forum experience on discord. It’s not about emojis, it’s that all these services have their own sauce when it comes to how the users interact. Clearly “traditional” forums are not great for everything, otherwise we would not be on the fediverse!
It’s impossible to have a real time conversation, for starters. Also I have one server in particular where we use voice a ton. The ability to see Miss Lee jump from something that is not quite a forum, not quite instant messaging, but also has a voice/video features, is incredibly convenient.
The problem with Discord is the company for the most part. If you took 80% of the current features and package them the same as idk five years ago? It would be unbelievable. I’ve seen some projects like guilded and revolt attempting to make an open source alternative, and they actually don’t run poorly at all, but it’s the classic problem of trying to get everybody over to it when the big client is fine for 99% of people on it.
You can do forums for a community on Steam.
You can do real time chatting on Steam.
You even have a huge set of emojis!
You can also do real time voice comms via Steam, even in a group setting.
You can also stream your game, or with a little bit of tomfoolerly, your desktop, or other applications, via Steam.
This all works on basically all OSs at this point, and a large part of it works on mobile as well.
Steam is also way, waaay more secure than Discord.
And you also get MySpace-esque customizable personal homepages for yourself.
From a technical standpoint... here you go here is your solution for basically all kinds of social media/online interaction.
Why do more people not recognize this or use it this way?
/Because the vast, vast majority of internet users are uninformed, highly susceptible to peer pressure , and love to build and follow social norms for superficial reasons./
When it comes to socializing on the internet, the vast, vast majority of people will /say/ they would prefer to use some kind of system that works some kind of way, and then not actually do that and instead just go with whatever most of their friends are using, or with what is wildly popular, or with whatever some niche community they are interested in is using.
If you have ever looked at much market research data, for basically anything really, but especially tech and double especially video games, you will soon realize the vast majority of people are hypocritical and inconsistent about a great many things, and seem to /think/ they care about things that their /actions/ clearly indicate they do not really actually care about.
/Because the vast, vast majority of internet users are uninformed, highly susceptible to peer pressure , and love to build and follow social norms for superficial reasons./
I offer a less patronizing explanation:
Social interaction requires other people to interact with. A platform with more people can provide more social interaction. The average person does not make the choice to use larger platforms because they are uninformed or affected by peer pressure. They make that choice because the thing they value most in social media is a large userbase.
The average person does not claim to want something more out of social media. They don't care what advantages or disadvantages a platform has.
There are of course people who claim to care about these things and still continue to use more popular and worse platforms, but they are far less common than you seem to think. Also the fact they aren't changing their behavior doesn't mean they don't actually care, it just means they care more about other things.
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If only Steam mobile apps weren't so goddamn awful, you might have had a point.
One of my buds runs a mumble server and that shits great.
Except stack overflow. Fuck stack overflow.
What is the recommended forum software to host these days?