I know this #Discord nonsense has a lot of people searching for alternatives (like Matrix, Stoat, etc), and those alternatives have a chance to shine right now.

@myTerminal @killyourfm I feel that discussing larger topics or resolving issues really turns to shit in the Wall-Of-Text era of discussion.
If one had suggested in the time of the forums - with the huge, deeply threaded discussions quoting several people in posts - that maybe we should just do this in IRC, people would have called that out as absurd.
Yes, the forums have a much bigger potential in large groups.

@killyourfm fediverse is the forum tho

@GlitchGhost @killyourfm RSS isn’t any part of activitypub some servers just happen to implement it.

@sun @killyourfm i know, i just like having RSS as an option to follow stuff online becasue you can follow blog,forums, video channels and many more stuff across the web. its pretty much like the subscribe system of the web the way i see RSS

@killyourfm federated forums exist, just use them.

Oldschool forums that you need to register to are dying and that's expected.

@killyourfm I still visit the refuge of what once was the Facepunch forums do this day.

I also set up Stoat for my friends if they want it, which they said they do, and because Stoat is receiving a "Voice v2" overhaul (and is thus inoperable on self-hosted according to my experience and understanding) I set up Jitsi which disconnects me from calls in a few minutes.

Why is Voicechat for Open Source so hard, arghhh.

@killyourfm Fourteen comments about discord and I have no idea what the hell any of them are talking about. Y’all have been using it as a replacement for forums this whole time?

I’ve just been using it for essentially 20-way international voice calls. There’s a text section to help coordinate times, but the bulk of my time is spent in voice chat. I’m not looking forward to needing to set something up to handle that, and I’m sure most people don’t even have the minimum requirements to even start hosting it locally.

@GlitchGhost @killyourfm yeah it’s a good system

@sun @killyourfm damn right it is and its great for people who just want to follow and read stuff from outside of websites and not to make accounts on sites or give out your email to follow stuff, a lot of stuff can be made into RSS feeds these days and there are many sites out there that can convert sites that dont have RSS feeds as well and depending on what RSS reader you use it can all be done for free so thats another plus about RSS i see

@killyourfm

Who is the "we" in this case?

Community owners and managers?
Somebody else?

Because forums still exist, they've never gone away. So if people are using Discord instead of a forum, they've likely got a reason for doing that. So before yelling that they need to expose their communities to the open web, I wouldn't like to know why they chose not to in the first place?

Don't you want to know?

@killyourfm The great thing about forums is, that they never really went away. Most of the folks on the internet just got lured in by the promise of "easier" and more convenient platforms. Plus the old culture of "use the search function" and "just google it" really poisoned forum culture for most of the folks. Which in turn really facilitated the rise of people pleasing AI-Bots as search engine replacements. Fun thing: I recently asked the same question as you in a friends discord server.

@killyourfm to avoid having to make a new account on every forum you want to post on, it would be cool to have an ActivityPub Single Sign On system. Another idea (which I believe Discourse has already?) is to implement ActivityPub in the forums directly, so that you can post on any forum from your main one.

@killyourfm However I fully agree on your sentiment on discussions and knowledge needing to be again search- and discoverable on the open web in lieu to them being hosted on closed platforms. I am insanely grateful to everyone still maintaining proper documentation and searchable forums with actual knowledgable people providing insights there instead of machine-yes-mans.

@killyourfm I'm still wondering: why not have both, a public forum that's also accessible through a client that has chatrooms and voice channels for that community built-in?

It's all web tech anyway, literally nothing is stopping anyone from implementing things this way. We can have our cake and eat it too. How did we end up in this mess, with Discord enshittified but no properly working, comprehensive alternative (which isn't "go back to have 5 different apps").

@Natanox @killyourfm just have a chatroom embed on a page of the forum, like one of those web IRC clients. I remember seeing some forums doing this already many years ago.

@killyourfm @gianmarcogg03 Doing it with an app (even if it's just Electron) does give you better ways to handle UI/UX though, especially when it comes to Voice channels and navigation on touch devices. I don't think the old style of forums gonna cut it.

I don't understand why 99% of all so-called Discord-alternatives do not get the damn voice channels right anyway (or just ignore that feature entirely). They're a crucial element, and WebRTC isn't dark magic anymore.

@killyourfm@layer8.space its not the same usecase

@killyourfm It’s amazing to see how issues that have essentially been solved decades ago were thrown out instead of refined. Usenet was federated from the get-go, FidoNet as well. The UX was challenging for casual users though.

The issue is the same everywhere in OSS tech: it’s dominated by engineers, not designers and UI/UX experts. They work for commercial entities because their expertise is valued there. Try working as a capable UX designer with OSS engineers and you’ll see what I mean.

@killyourfm One of my local online news orgs just launched a forum. They mentioned how we are overwhelmed with social media nowadays and it’s a good time to return to the humble forum.

@killyourfm maybe something like Discourse could be workable since it’s more like forums