social.noyu.me

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

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