My thought on this: people hate making new accounts.
There’s like a threshold in the human brain where the desire for membership has to exceed the loathing human beings have for account creation. Like if Mastodon didn’t require users to make up their own passwords, I bet their userbase would double overnight. It’s the reason why so many apps now just text you a one-time pass, so you don’t have to remember your own.
What Discord does is lure people in with invites from your existing irl social network, your guild, your subreddit, whatever. And once they get you over the password creation hump you’re now part of a walled garden ecosystem with thousands of chatrooms that can be accessed easily if you just have the link. Discord increases engagement because it allows users to be lazy. Anyone who makes a server there taps into that massive snowballing userbase.
It is really funny, though, how the game store didn’t work out. The paradigm seems to fall apart a bit once credit cards get involved. I imagine people don’t want their financial info tied to the account they use to trade porn.
I get what you mean, but modern Oauth2 login flows for forums allow you to link accounts to services you use anyways and thus are pretty much two clicks with no passwords involved sign-ups.
True, but unfortunately it’s not widely used on fedi platforms. And I think Gitea is the only fedi Oauth provider?
Funnily enough, I felt nostalgic for phpBB and decided to look up how older forums are doing. None of the major players have apps or apps that seem to work. Tapatalk’s reviews paint it as advertising hell. Lack of mobile support seems like a big hindrance to adoption.
Discourse and Flarum are good mobile ready open-source forums.
Open-source Oauth providers are not that common, but Gitlab and Gitea have it and Nextcloud also but it is a bit buggy. There are also some stand-alone implementations that can be linked to OpenLDAP or a SQL database. But IMHO that kinda defeats the purpose I outlined above as rarely do you already have an account with a related open-source service. Thus you need to create an account anyways.
However I think Fediverse platforms could very well offer more Oauth2 login buttons with popular commercial services and as long as it is purely optional I don’t really see a problem with that.
My thought on this: people hate making new accounts.
There’s like a threshold in the human brain where the desire for membership has to exceed the loathing human beings have for account creation. Like if Mastodon didn’t require users to make up their own passwords, I bet their userbase would double overnight. It’s the reason why so many apps now just text you a one-time pass, so you don’t have to remember your own.
What Discord does is lure people in with invites from your existing irl social network, your guild, your subreddit, whatever. And once they get you over the password creation hump you’re now part of a walled garden ecosystem with thousands of chatrooms that can be accessed easily if you just have the link. Discord increases engagement because it allows users to be lazy. Anyone who makes a server there taps into that massive snowballing userbase.
It is really funny, though, how the game store didn’t work out. The paradigm seems to fall apart a bit once credit cards get involved. I imagine people don’t want their financial info tied to the account they use to trade porn.
I get what you mean, but modern Oauth2 login flows for forums allow you to link accounts to services you use anyways and thus are pretty much two clicks with no passwords involved sign-ups.
True, but unfortunately it’s not widely used on fedi platforms. And I think Gitea is the only fedi Oauth provider?
Funnily enough, I felt nostalgic for phpBB and decided to look up how older forums are doing. None of the major players have apps or apps that seem to work. Tapatalk’s reviews paint it as advertising hell. Lack of mobile support seems like a big hindrance to adoption.
Discourse and Flarum are good mobile ready open-source forums.
Open-source Oauth providers are not that common, but Gitlab and Gitea have it and Nextcloud also but it is a bit buggy. There are also some stand-alone implementations that can be linked to OpenLDAP or a SQL database. But IMHO that kinda defeats the purpose I outlined above as rarely do you already have an account with a related open-source service. Thus you need to create an account anyways.
However I think Fediverse platforms could very well offer more Oauth2 login buttons with popular commercial services and as long as it is purely optional I don’t really see a problem with that.