I used Discord for a while and I'm confident I can describe most communities on there.
There's an #\offtopic or #\general where most of the activity takes place. There's a #\memes with moderate activity. Maybe #\animals for cute animal photos. #\rules and #\announcements of course. If the server owner is a creator they have an update channel for their own works. #\welcome to greet everyone the millisecond they joined which is just GREAT for people like me who want to check the vibe first. Maybe there's a forum channel, and it's basically dead.
I really can't overstate how much I hate seeing how homogenous the idea of "online community" has become. So many of them just being slightly different Discord servers that look fucking identical. "But Volpeon, they have different banners and emojis" OH WOW. A DIFFERENT BANNER. Clearly things aren't all that different from those old online communities I grew up with which had their own wacky website and a forum using a custom theme etc.
Like yeah, sure, everything is now easier to navigate because it's consistent, but in that process it became samey and boring.
@kopper It's such an endlessly frustrating effect. A lot of people clearly don't like chatting to be the mode of interactions for everything because it has a lot of really annoying downsides and in many cases other solutions would work way better, but it's the mode with the least friction. Like microblogging. Just write and send, write and send, write and send, no need to think about categories or tags or anything else. It's the peak of laziness. I'm not exempt from that, and that makes me hate it more.
What people should do isn't to take communities living exclusively on Discord and move them exclusively to another platform. Chatting should be just one part of a community. Add a forum. Add a website where you can share whatever makes sense for your community. Add a Minecraft server. Play as a guild/clan in a game. Have fun events. That's how things used to be, and it had way more personality and was more resilient.
@catsalad I don't know why people keep saying it's AI. I looked for the indicators I've seen in other videos, especially changing details in the background when they get temporarily obstructed, and it's all consistent.
Please, at least let it be something that isn't siloed off and all chat. I don't want to get rid of chatting because it has its upsides, but I don't fucking want this to be the regular mode of interaction because my brain has no capacity for that.
Weird software problem to solve right after the holidays: Why the fuck does the MQTT client close the connection on its own when I save an object in our application a second time?
