I am on Discord and the balkanization+homogeneization is still as prominent there as everywhere else.
Server admins are just NPCs providing @everyone announcements from time to time, to keep the player engaged (spoiler: the average Joe is just irritated by those). Sometimes you get a quest from them.
Also: 99% won't read profile bios (and you have to pay for actual customization, don't you?) while forum signatures were front-and-center.
I have to say I'm surprised to see Discord mentioned as an opposite to social media instead of... just yet another iteration of the same ploy.
Fuck discord. Another big for-profit platform that is swallowing big chunks of the internet. before discord there were lots of self-organized forums with their own communities and rules. Now I need to register with some big overlord and download their shitty app just to read what has before been just an URL away?
Nah. Right in the browser works great: discord.com/app
You’re going to keep running into a wall thinking of discord like a forum replacement; It’s designed to be an IRC replacement.
The invitation system intentionally creates some privacy so you can build a sense of enclosed community around them, and so you have some control over who sees what. Not having your conversations on full automatic blast to the public is a feature.
IRC works in the browser now thanks to IRCv3. Matrix is another option
The invitation system gives a false sense of privacy. There are bots that crawl publicly posted invites, public IRC channels, etc. Eventually people will understand that IRC and discord are public in the same way we understand usenet to have been public
People are desperate for an identity. It has always been that people would latch on to things that seem fitting for them - maybe they put a lot of stock in their identity as a soldier, or as a fan of a band, or maybe as a member of a group like skateboarders. And, interestingly, most of these historic manifestations also have an aspect of "stamp on their forehead advertising their identity" - patches, shirts, other identifying aesthetics from their community.
I feel a weird mix of extreme amusement and anger that there's a fleet of absurdly powerful, power-hungry servers sitting somewhere being used to process this problem for 2.5 minutes
reply