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.‬

@hikari I just can't stand it because Discord isn't a part of the web. It's a walled garden accessed over the internet.

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 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

@erincandescent

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

@hikari the eye of Sauron is upon them anyway. If you follow the news all you'll hear about is exactly the same set of discord servers

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

@hikari can you imagine if they allowed you to make a guild truly public? As in, messages are on the internet, searchable; you can look at what's within without joining?

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"

@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