Thread with 29 posts
jump to expanded post
there are so many problems with discord, sure, but it also might be the last bastion of the idea of online spaces that actually belong to their users and not to the Company, among the big social media services that are not user-owned-and-operated
it is for better or worse the de-facto modern-day equivalent of webforums and IRC chatrooms and whatever
i'm feeling this particularly profoundly lately because of [reasons] but there is something so incredibly precious and important about how discord as a service allows you to create and shape your own social environments. they are there to give you tools, rather making you a tool
i think at this point losing discord would be more devastating to me personally than losing all the other social media services put together. it still feels uncynical, utopian, optimistic, real. sure it may suck in some ways, but it lets us build our homes there, damn it. nothing else comes close
everywhere else is hostile to the idea of you owning your own spaces. facebook is this creepy guy that wants everyone in the neighborhood to know eachother and is pointing a gun at you to achieve this. wikia (we Shall Not Utter Its False Name) thinks it owns its communities
reddit has become more like that too.
and then there's twitter and its many clones, and they… well, at their best, allow us all to participate in this frighteningly, beautifully democratic shared space. but it's just one space. it belongs to everyone. it's not your own
discord, to their massive credit, realised that sometimes what you want is not a Microblogging Site or a Instant Messaging Service. discord realised that sometimes what you need is a clubroom for you and your friends, where you set the rules. and somehow they still get this.
as much as it pains me, signal for example may be better at privacy but it is not better at user agency in the way that discord is. signal has a very facebook/apple type design. i will not elaborate
i think i'll put my money where my mouth is and subscribe to nitro again. i don't need the features, i just… want to feel i have some contribution to this vitally important thing continuing to exist
oh god, i will have to make this into a blog post too. there's a few things i want to write about and i can see in my head a beautiful illustrative skit i could begin it with…
new blog post: “dreams of a pluralistic world, or: why discord and twitter are the last good social media”
https://hikari.noyu.me/blog/2024-11-07-dreams-of-a-pluralistic-world.html
i don't think this is as good a post as my twitter one. it's like 10% as developed and i'd lost a lot of the spark that made me want to write it by the time i sat down to actually write. but maybe there's some redeemable parts to it
And for private communities that's not a problem; but for public ones it creates this entire separate ecosystem inside those walls that's invisible to everything outside it. It's utterly hostile to the open web, and Discord structurally encourages it
@erincandescent @hikari there’s a reason that I try to direct people to github issues and discussions before discord, yeah
it’s great for what it is but people really like using it for what it’s not and discord ain’t complaining
@erincandescent oh, i can't disagree, it does also sadden me, but i also feel like it might be the only way they're able to make this work while being a single large corporate platform, tragically
quoting my reply to someone on twitter (sorry if it's not entirely relevant but):
the silos are sad but i also think they're the deal with the devil they have made to allow it to exist at all
all the sites that allow things to be truly public inevitably fall victim to the eye of sauron saying they should take away users' ability to moderate themselves and instead impose the Ultimate Truth on them
discord is a lot like twitter in that if you do not use it you have no idea what the appeal of the site is and that's what allows it to be good
@erincandescent reddit has struggled with this very hard. there is an endless stream of journalists and pundits and whoever else to ask why there can be a Suicide Subreddit or a Fascism Subreddit or a Problematic Media Subreddit etc etc etc
And worse, the people who don't use the platform can't see the other things that are there
@erincandescent certainly, but it makes their enemies have to work a lot harder
@erincandescent i do wish there was something in the space between discord and reddit. i don't know what it would be, though
But they won't, not because they fear the Eye of Sauron, but because making you join dozens of Communities is in their interests. For the same reason that the default notification settings are "bloop so often it'll cause a meltdown"
@erincandescent I'm honestly not sure that public chat message history is a good idea for any service. I've only used a handful of things that attempt this, and it's very very weird. maybe the forums-like thing they added could be public, but…
@hikari It doesn’t seem that odd to me, the IRC logs of a channel I participated in heavily 14-8 years ago were publically logged and are still on the internet (and occasionally show up in my search results!)
I don’t necessarily think its the ideal form factor for things but given what Discord is. And also given its ancilliary features (it is also a web forum now)
@hikari @erincandescent Gitter also did it for a while
@hikari @erincandescent I thought Lemmy had a very good concept, possibly a concept that actually makes more sense than Mastodon
It may have stopped growing tho
@mcc @erincandescent huh, i'll keep that in mind
@hikari iiiiinteresting, we find that discord is... very much *not* that, whenever we've made attempts to use it. to us it feels very much an unremarkable "yet another" player well within the "new norms" internet. wonder why our experiences are _so_ different...
@hikari i totally agree. there's something anarchic and like the old web about it, about how the spaces actually feel in practice. shame i just can't get much use out of it for annoying personal brain reasons