I am in total agreement. The only reason I have a discord account is for the handful of projects whose only option for getting support is in their discord “Community”
Could it be that people just don’t have the patience or interest to write longer posts anymore? I dislike Discord because it’s too much like a chat, I’m more of a forum person.
I think there is truth to younger generations being less interested in writing and more interested in audio and images and video. Folks who would have been making blogs in the 2000s are now making podcasts and video essays. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but it does favor large publishers that can afford the storage and bandwidth. Hosting your own blog is easy. Hosting your own video platform is decidedly less so.
I don’t feel too bad about the communities on Discord. If (when) Discord falls into the well of enshittification there will be some other platform ready to receive them. What I worry about is the number of projects that maintain important information solely in their Discord server. It’s bad enough trying to get information out of old forum archives, there’s no straightforward process for archiving Discord. A lot of projects people put work into will be at best invisible, but more likely lost forever.
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I hope we’ll see a resurgence in independent, community owned forums and the like. I think Discourse is a great platform option. This is my first Discourse forum, and it seems like a really robust, modern forum solution. I added the link to my iPhone home screen recently, and it’s a pretty great progressive web app. That could make it really easy for small groups to have communities and “apps” outside of the big platforms like discord and reddit. It has lots of the benefits of a native mobile app.
Discoverability is a problem, and things like independent fansites have largely been replaced by discord, reddit, fandom wikis, Instagram, etc. Mainstream search is unhelpful for finding authentic communities. At least when I see a Reddit group I’m pretty confident the comments are from real people.
I would love to see more community run, independent hobby and fan forums pop up. I don’t know if it would work. The web used to be more niche. Now it’s more mainstream, and some people will just never want to create new accounts for each thing they’re interested in to join a web forum. But maybe enough people will want a cozier web experience.
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I personally think Discourse is quite nice. I’ve never been a huge fan of synchronous, chat-like services like Discord, Slack, or even IRC. I have a day job, and a social life, and a bunch of hobbies, and I really don’t want to spend time left over reading through chat logs to find something that is relevant to me. I’d much rather have something like forum threads where I can catch up quickly on particular things.
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This is an interesting point. For many members here, this is their first forum, meaning they only joined because a community they were already participating in was opening up a forum. Additionally, since we still exist on Discord, many members join there, then learn about the forum and make an account. I wonder how one could encourage first-time users to register and participate in a forum without an on ramp on centralized platforms like Discord. It seems to me that even dedicated hobbyists, people whose would be most likely to join a forum for their hobbies, often just go to Reddit instead.
FWIW, I stumbled into the Forum through the small web, rather than through discord.
So a sign that the goals of this community is starting to work :) :)
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