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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Fuck Discord
That can also be seen as "nature healing itself" in context of giant AI botnets scraping the whole internet every second. It's only natural to go private nowadays.
No, it isn't.
Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.
By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to people.
Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.
Discord may offer to sell chat histories in certain communities (after "anonymizing" the data, yeah right like they will do that effectively) directly to AI companies.
Discord is only private in the sense that you are advocating for only a private for-profit corporation being able to enjoy the benefit of scraping and collecting our conversations.
This is not healing, this is the vision of the internet as a truly open shared space that benefits all... dying because people like gamers were too foolish to see the coming catastrophe from putting EVERY community under the control of a single company struggling to make a profit.
I agree that Discord shouldn't be trusted and might turn out to be a bad actor some day. Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing. So it's best to do the same as with Discord but without Discord. In the upcoming era of AI hiding knowledge is a good thing to do, and I'm personally not used to this yet.
Let me emphatically say that NO it isn't.
If you need to anonymize or disguise your identity because you feel threatened, I never want to make you feel like you shouldn't take whatever steps of protecting your privacy that you feel you need to.
That being said, no, I fundamentally consider societal progress to be roughly equatable to how open the systems are in a society both in the material and ideological realm. Public forums/the fediverse are progress because they allow anybody with an internet connection to read through conversations, learn and eventually participate and add to a general collective benefit and community. This is the power of the internet.
I think your point of view would be more relatable before AI happened. I don't see how it addresses AI problem anyhow. "Societal progress" isn't something that has self-worth. I see that as a tool of improving QoL, but if it's not only stopped improving QoL but actually started making it worse, than it's not something to pursue, and actually something to actively sabotage.
Well let me state this explicitly then, I don't consider AI to be some kind of existential threat in terms of becoming sentient, or stealing all of our information and hoarding it away.
LLMs are powerful and have lots of use cases, but right now we are going through a really tiresome scifi novel delusion where tons of smart people are mistaking the current wave of LLM innovations as being somehow able to transport us to the singularity or whatever boring tech bros are calling it these days.... instead of being a boring, lame regression into fuedalism.
yawn
longish response, no pressure to read
What scares me is the massive energy use of AI, it also doesn't make money.
If some AI scrapes all my stuff on the fediverse, ok that sucks but honestly that LLM they train off my posts is going to be constantly complaining about corporations, going on off-topic rants about AI bullshit hype and centralization of corporate power.... yeah you can sanitize the data, they can profile me... yeah I know.
I feel like that is already a threat enough and there is a tsunami like power that comes from reaching a public consensus through discussing things in public forums and putting our beliefs out there as a form of vulnerability. The more of us that do this, the more that people who disagree or agree can learn, the more we can establish conensus of shared values, the more we can build trust.
The metaphor for our current late stage capitalist society on the afterburners of surveillance capitalism/mass dragnet surveillane and censorhsip is clearly the panopitcon
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
If you suspect you are in a panopticon, or in an environment that is threatening to collapse into an authoritarian panopticon type situation, than the best defense, because lets be honest if you are in this position you don't have much power realistically do you? is to publically have conversations, share opinions, discuss honestly with people in a way that floods whatever commons that are left, whatever equivalent of yelling chants out of the prison bars to other prisoners... however you want to map the metaphor here....
That is how we defend ourselves.
The relevant question is whether you are in a situation where you can safely do that, if you can't than take care of yourself, hide. Adopt good digital hygeine and help others out in an unjudgemental way how to do so themselves.
If you feel at all that you can safely speak out, or honestly, if you feel like realistically you don't have much to lose (because at the end of the day that is the position we are all existentially in, it is just a matter of who will suffer first and thus who has the right to want to delay that suffering the most) then the best defense here is to make as much as you can public through art, through any kind of discussion, because no matter how sophisticated and supercharged the methods of the oppressors are and no matter how overbearing the mazes of false-consensus become...
...they still can't ever really win in a moment to moment interaction with any half decent artist, any half decent person who knows their worth, any person willing to be vulnerable and say it how it is, and indeed really anyone that is willing to extend solidarity to strangers not because of some emotional need or ideological sense of superiority, but because it is something they try to do out of principle (and of course are imperfect at, so what, society shouldn't be reliant on people being ethically perfect in the same way safety regulations in society shouldn't assume people aren't going to behave like idiots, as frustrating as that is ).
The nice thing is, we are talking about snowball effects here. One of the best drugs in life is doing a small good thing that ripples into a slightly bigger good thing all by itself, that takes a little life of its own. I don't claim to be any kind of altruist, or someone who constantly does selfless acts but that isn't the point. Most people feel a basic pleasure when it is easy to help, to help so long as it is simple and direct how to do so. Some don't, so what.
The power of computers, of software and of social media is that it allows us to help, share, educate, illimunate and reinforce one another in small, tiny ways with barely any effort, barely any energy usage, and we can reach across basically ever barrier humans can be thrust behind by the cruelty of chance to reach them and bring them into the conversation.
Hell yes, keep yelling out of those bars, keep telling it the way it is, keep being you if you can
While I agree with many of these takes, I believe there is more to this. For example, your point about defense from falling into panopticon by speaking publicly about things doesn't actually require publicly speaking about anything other than politics. I mean, you can still hide all professional, creative or fun talk and still have the benefits you listed covered by only ever publicly talking about political issues. Another issue, is that publicity and interconnectedness of all discourses we have nowadays, increases a homogenuity of thinking patterns, in other words it hurts the diversity of the ways of thinking, that is also something that can be improved by more people going private and having closed interest groups in chats invisible to public web.
Where is your evidence of this?
It is a mistake to think pushing everybody to talk only in private will increase the diversity and quality of discourse. It will NOT, it will collapse conversations into simpler more reductive narratives.
Everywhere? Every decade humankind becomes more uniform worldwide, but especially last few decades.
I feel like over the last two decades everyone on the internet was pushed to talk only in public, even more so, on the few biggest platforms only.
What? Do you not listen to music? Or enjoy art? Do you not watch theater or tv? Do you not enjoy going to local craft shows and seeing local artists? No matter what happens in the 2000s, the 1900s will be remembered as one of the most artistically prolific, free and diverse periods of human expression and art. Yeah there is censorship, yes western culture is very conservative in ways it doesn't want to admit sometimes, but in general the shear volume and variety of art created in the 1900s is immense.
Companies putting their stuff into discord is like all the businesses that ditched a dedicated website and moved to facebook however many years ago. Yay, now it is on a format that doesn't work well for presenting static information and will inevitably require account registration!
Newest iteration of "this meeting could have been an email" has become "this Discord could have been a wiki".
wiki + ai search = discord except ppl are the ai remembering stuff said in the chat lol, reddit + google was once good, nowadays I click on the other results since the reddit reply is its already been answered use google
And someone (on the Far-Right) is always trying to buy Wikipedia, monetise it, X-ify it, or take it down. I think Wikipedia is abusive - exploits volunteer unpaid labour - should have been created by an NGO like UN and kept safe for mankind like our Library of Alexandria. But it is what it is. Preppers download the whole site regularly in order to have that knowledge under their control in case is ever gets taken down or spoilt and they are rebuilding civilisation post-Armageddon. I keep meaning to download it myself (note to self: do that soon you lazy b. no more excuses!)
Take a look at Kiwix. Makes it super easy plus some ideas for a good Raspberry Pi project.
I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it's original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!
I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums... but it's so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.
In that regard, fuck Discord.
In my head Discord = toxicity. Not sure how it got that rep for me but it has gotten it. Thus, wont lose sleep if it dies out. Perhaps I am wrong. Reviewing rationality of this prejudice is on my ToDo List after a million other things...
No worries! The only reason to evaluate (or re-evaluate) a piece of software is if you have a need or desire the software might fulfill. And if you don't have either, it literally doesn't matter, lol.
Yeah anything ephemeral is fine like chats and what not. But this idea of using it as support platform is just dumb. You end up with people asking the same question over and over and it either doesn’t get answered because no one is around to answer it or likely because they’re annoyed at the same questions over and over. There is no organization and no institutional knowledge. It’s like it ends up being set up by people who think it’s what the cool kids want. And these giant communities just exacerbate this issue. Everything ends up being noise. It’s the reason I usually ended up turning off the world or general channels in WoW. It just ended up being annoying and distracting.
When I’m trying resolve a situation that I need some sort of support I wanna be able to search if others have had the same issue and see discussion around that topic. I don’t need synchronous communication for that. I don’t care if it was 3 months ago someone had the problem if they figured out how to fix it. The way to do that is forums, Reddit (well before the enshittification), or even Lemmy.
Ie. The equivalent of sending the output of your wiki to /dev/null
Yeah that’s a good analogy.
yep its horrible really should start suggesting discord servers move to lemmy, self host their own, a lot of them would be better off with a forum like structure, but lemmy isnt easily crawlable either, everyone hates being searchable
I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
This is exactly what I was gonna say: I'm amazed that so many millions of people can tolerate its atrocious UI. Even now, the amount of notifications I get from the constant text channels across "servers" (which is such a misnomer for merely "communities") is so ridiculous that I ignore 99.9% of it.
I think that naming was fully on purpose. People argumented with me that they had their own "servers" so that was good, right?
Grrr.
How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
Element needs to be better. Discord is awesome with the way it auto-plays looping videos/gifs and has animated emojis.
Seriously: That's all they'd need to do. The element devs need to focus on fun.
Also, people forget that Discord's streaming capability is, unfortunately, absolutely top-notch; no other community-screensharing platform has fewer issues, and my friends and I like to watch each other play games often.
Fun is always great to capture the masses!
thats why I want misskey the emoji reactions to anything are always more fun than just likes
Isn't that a client side issue though? Element is just one Matrix client. I haven't used it myself but heard from others that Fluffychat (another Matrix client) is more like Discord.
Yeah it's probably just a client side issue but the OP mentioned Element, specifically 🤷
I just wanted to point out that Element is no fun! No fun at all!
It works and it works great for what it does. Even voice and streaming are great with Element. It's just got a terrible, no-fun interface and pointless limitations on things like looping videos. You can't even configure it to make them play properly (as in, automatic and endlessly, the way they were meant to be played! 😤).
Looping videos and animated emojis are super fun ways to chat with people. Even in professional settings! It really breaks up the humdrum and can motivate people to chat and share more.
Element is all serious all the time and going into a chat channel there feels like a chore.
It is, but Element is still the "Gold standard" Matrix client and the most popular. And if you're going to create a brand new chat protocol, you should make sure that your flagship client measures up to the competition.
Or Matrix?
According to history:
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
If it reaches a critical mass… You can't. See: Facebook.
The Fediverse can adopt a few nice communities, but honestly bringing the larger population seems hopeless.
Discord is going public soon, so start the timer...
Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.
Element is a Matrix client
Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn't a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.
Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.
XMPP / Jabber is better.
Because there hasn't been a single proper alternative until very recently, and even then they're not as user friendly.
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don't know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.
Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don't dispute that. Sure there hasn't been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase....
What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.
Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo'd conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.