Whatever the fuck appened to forums or finding alternatives to other Internet applications? Like what the people at the Indie Web are doing? What about the people who are deshittifying things.
I know people are fighting back but I can't help but feel like we have to be submissive (thanks doomers). Because all this and the reactions have nearly made me doomerist.
Anyways I hope this leads to riots.
There are still forums out there, and people still use them! Check out the spacebattles.com forum for one of the biggest out there!
Honestly, part of this is a *scale* problem. There are so many more people online nowdays than there were in the days of forums and personal websites. And a lot of those new people are, well, normies. People who don't really have either the know-how or a good reason to run their own forum or website. So they gravitate toward the big sites where everyone else is.
There ARE barriers to creating your own site or forum, we can't pretend there aren't.
If you use free hosting, you have to abide by the terms of use and community guidelines of whoever is giving you that free hosting. Often, that includes content guidelines about what can and can't be discussed on the platform. Sometimes it even includes giving up the rights to whatever you post there.
The other option is of course to pay to host your own forum or website (like I do). Then no one can tell you what to do, but it does cost money.
And the "normies" like I mentioned above, who don't have a good reason to host their own stuff, certainly don't want to pay to do it. So they just, again, circle whereever everybody else is.
for this specific case of discord, people definitely ARE looking for better alternatives. Stoat (the platform I've been suggesting as a discord replacement) is an open-source project run by a small team.















