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.
For many communities forming a Discord seems to be the most popular option. The may not know any proper alternatives. This needs fixing, they could just run their own forums instead, they could form their own Lemmy instance!
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And the very features that makes forums desirable require good moderation, while on Discord a toxic community can be left mostly unmoderated due to the semi closed and transient (in appearance) nature of the chat. Having the same on a (google) searchable forum that make it easy for people to find and see the toxic content would pretty soon result in demands for better moderation.
I find it sad that this is the reality we live in, but from a business perspective I can kind of understand it as the target audience of these gaming websites can be quite toxic.
They banned nwordbot 😿 . Now who will check the chuds?
discord =/= forum
Probably why people are moving gaming forums to discord is for the fact that social connectivity works better with discord. you get to know people by talking to them directly via chat or voice call. and for gamers, well, they can find other players and play with them right on the go.
I do like forums for the fact that it can contain so much interesting info and events, people act more diverse. the themes are weird and some may cause seizures but overall pretty fucking great. weird shit may not be the stereotypical furry and porn or spooky internet stuff but also more onto specific kinds of topics you may not even know existed.
anyway Rest in peace (presumably) to the big three, phpBB myBB SMF.
What must be done?
In the days where these kinds of communities are dying, is the most important time for everyone to recreate a dying community, bring it back from the dead. Take examples of the successful communities of the past. look at guides like runyourown.social jot down what do you want to do in it. there is no point of a community doesn’t have a goal, or at least some fun stuff going on.
You have all the tools you have to create whatever kind of dogshit network service, and more. hell, everything you see in the internet nowadays you can run on a VPS. a voice chat server, a social network, forum, email, video streaming platform, game servers, you name it.
So, any of you who wants to save this thing. Write something down. and just do it.
and stop fucking complaining on blogs.
No one mentioned the fact that I only got 100 servers
