Discord has recently started that they’ll be limiting everyone to restrictions they impose on teen users unless face verification is provided: Discord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings Globally
Quite a lot of folks are discussing various alternatives from TeamSpeak, Matrix, IRC, etc.
Is there a way we can make forums appealing? I know discourse has chat rooms associated with channels, but I’m not sure if that gets the kind of rapid-fire communication or seems people thirst for.
Any ideas?
I am here from Discord, never particularly having liked discord to begin with. Give me labyrinthine flame wars argued in the comments of several blog posts, or those halcyon days of G+ (I was there early on, and saw its fall).
Honestly? I think this is a matter of simply sticking it out. I honestly think people will filter back to forums at some stage, when we realise that other platforms are otherwise horrid for archival purposes.
PS: Now that I know this place exists I do intend being on here more frequently - I have been looking to “slow down” my media consumption.
I’m definitely for a return to forums but would really like to see the purple OSR community survive in chat form as well. I think a forum and something like stoat or matrix would be ideal. Forums are better for archiving and more structured discussions but casual chats get ideas expressed quicker and allow for a better social experience which leads to closer friendships and more play.
I’m primarily hitched to Discord’s free, unlimited voice chats for ttrpg gaming. Any suggestions on where else to go?
That’s tough. Right now probably the best option I’m seeing is Matrix, but we’re still in the early stages of configuring and testing that here.
I saw this: Chat | Discourse - Civilized Discussion
seems to be pretty close to the vanilla discord chat functionality! How is this forum hosted, if ya don’t mind me asking.
We have that plugin enabled by default (it should be on the left pane at the bottom, although I’m not sure on mobile).
This is hosted on a personal server of mine.
OH huh, cool. I like that you have to opt-in to channels. The default little popup screen is small and weird, but it looks alright when you expand it.
It’s a tough question. A lot of the same features like instant chat and convenience that make Discord appealing also seem to make it more addictive and hurt the quality of discussion.
There’s an open source Discord clone called Stoat, if you’re into that kind of thing. But if a forum absolutely needs an instant messaging platform, I think IRC would suffice, no?
I made an OSR Stoat server but I am the only one haunting those halls tbh.
Looks like the Purple/Rainbow server is going to move to Matrix, but like you I am partial to IRC. Never liked Discord, was disappointed we moved to it.
Edit: Here is the Stoat OSR invite but don’t expect much - Stoat is barely managing as is. Stoat
Yeah, the primary advantage of a forum is the slowness, which encourages a higher quality discussion. Which clearly is less addictive to something engineered to keep you glued to the screen.
Focusing on quality, though, will probably pay in the long term. With forums being searchable and better indexed on search engines, the more good stuff there is, the higher the chances more people will find it.
Just joined the OSR server on Stoat (just in case).
Also, I wouldn’t mind frequenting an IRC server, too, even though I rarely need instant communication. I know that Liberais the most popular IRC server. So, registering some sort of OSR channel there would be a good starter thing, I guess?
I’m currently sitting in #osrrpg on Libera. There’s also chat capability on discourse - see Testing chat on discourse
Downloaded an IRC client and connected to #osrRPG on Libera. Will do that again 
I’m trying to figure out how to get the federated stuff for Matrix to work.
I think with the little text chat option there is nothing that this forum has that Discord doesn’t, except the spontaneity of voice chat available to anyone at any time. That’s the biggest issue because, when you can’t see a game currently happening, the feel of the community shifts. Especially if people aren’t actively discussing their games.
I don’t think there is anything that can meaningfully be done to make them more appealing, speaking as someone who doesn’t like forums very much. I think some folks prefer the slowness and that’s about it.
That said, whenever I go to a server and they have a huge megathread of “general discussion” with a current discussion going on, that’s something I don’t want to touch at all. Getting context from a forum thread takes a lot more time than a Discord conversation because the conversation is longer, it’s bad form to go “what are y’all talking about” (since you can just read it), and it typically involves a couple people who already know one another and you can tell.
However, then the issue becomes another one: it feels much more momentous to start a thread than it does to just pop into a channel. This is a double edged sword as it forces more consideration before saying something, but it also reduces spontaneity, when some of the best conversations there have been on the server were the product of someone saying something relatively innocuous and then spiralling out from there.
I think the second one is not a big issue because it’s self-regulating, but it depends on the community feeling like it’s fine to just make a moderately innocuous post, and I think this is done by just generally being chill. I am, however, staunchly against megathreads unless they have a very specific purpose, and I think they’re unnecessary when chats are available.
Asides from all that, the issue ultimately is just getting people aware of the forums in the first place.
Roundabout way of doing it but Steam groups do have text and voice chat channels. It’s what “we” used to use instead of Vent and Teamspeak before Skype got actual quality and then Discord popped up.