[inDheart]

i had a chat with someone recently about depth of online experiences vs. their permanence and availability to outside observers

i think we ended up deciding that discord wasn't really the killer (AIM, IRC, and like, prochat have always existed - hell, i used to twitter DM people i met online) but the way discord works makes it easier to close off - servers are often baseline private rather than in public listings, and embedding multimedia, etc lets you do more with it

this might be changing with how discord lets you explore for servers, or whatever they just added, and how you can have "official" communities for things now that are based entirely on discord

we didn't really reach the question of the effect on websites and fora. i figure as the average person gets better quality net, they're probably more able to sustain a connection to a chat app than need to post on a forum as much

i still frequent a couple sites with rather active fora, and i figure the activity is because of what they're stapled onto, but also maybe how they come off as more hobbyish and how a forum is a good place to run into people who share your hobbies. biggest forum i was on that died? wasn't really attached to much

+ every so often we do get a new user whose first point of contact with the community is here, so that's when the forum is nice to have

anyway sorry for being serious in your meme thread