The amount of niche info that would have been found in searchable forum posts in years prior, that has now gotten sucked up into Discord where it can’t be found, fucking blows.
Absolute tragedy tbh, discord won’t be around forever. I weep for all the game knowledge that will be lost
Well, forums are not real time, and that’s what most people these days want apparently.
So, on to the alternatives:
Element / Matrix:
- Lackluster moderation tools
- Voice channels not ready
- Signing up is hard / federation not well explained
Revolt Chat
- Run by very talented kiddies
- Not stable
- Not easily self-hostable
well, the problem is not that forums are not real time. the problem is that people use real time chats for things that should’t be done in real time. like guides, which should stand on their own as an organized post, easily searched and found.
“real time” chats, that is, instant messengers, have their time and place. they have been around for a while, but they never really replaced forums. until discord came, which kind of then did. which i guess also resulted from facebook groups, twitter, instagram, and reddit first kind of partially replacing forums, after which then forums really fell out of favor, and discord really is way easier and better to interact with than any of the others mentioned (aside from maybe reddit). people are also just lazy and jusy use whatever works.
and people then started using discord like a forum since forums are almost dead and discord is just simple and easy. so many guides, info, announcements, etc. are put in discord like it is a forum since the admittedly amazing features for roles and bots make it convenient.
it all gets lost in a sea instant messaging organizing. to find something, one must go to one of a a bunch pinned messages in one of the bajillion channels that links to a post (i say oost, it is actually a message) which in turn links to a series of messages where someone knowledgeable posted something useful intertwined with shitpost messages fromither people. if you are lucky, someone made a google doc for a guide, but those also suck, and they are also not easily found unless you know the guy who knows the guy who knows which pinned message in which channel has the link to it.
Once again, privacy-disrespecring discord is nuking things to keep its own ass safe. FOSS devs, when will you ever learn?
Matrix is literally there.
Just host your own god damn servers alongside your webpage (assuming it’s not running on Guthub pages)I looked into matrix servers the other day for an unrelated reason and tbh the amount of resources they ask for is way more than you need for a webpage (dendrite asks for 1gb ram minimum for a number of users, and that’s without accounting for postgres)
