Time to start a forum

11 Jun 2024

It’s been a dream of mine to run a forum since I was single digit years old, but forums have fallen out of favor in recent years.

There appears to have been a “vibe shift” - Twitter, which once usurped ‘front page of the internet’ from Reddit, has lost some of its appeal. Many people are moving to TikTok, a platform that seems even worse for serious discussion than Twitter and with just as many harassment problems. Others are leaving to private solutions like Discord, where you can form community in a more private manner.

I like Discord, and it has brought back a lot of the fun to being online. However, Discord is not great at some things - long, thought out posts, multiple threads of thought. (The ‘forum’ feature was supposed to solve these issues, but in practice it’s a place for people to post short q&as without clogging up main threads.) At heart, it’s a chat, and you’re meant to reply like a chat. Be quick, direct, get to the point. Responses are immediate and you can see when people are typing. The immediacy of it can cause a bit of an adrenaline spike if the topic is heated.

This difficulty of not easily having different places to discuss things has been a problem for me. I have a Discord for a group of friends in my town. I sometimes consider adding new friends to it, but there is only ever one active channel, so anyone there who wants to post has no choice but to post in the main channel. If they don’t want to hear my friend talking about his job, they don’t really have a choice. This can put new people off, or force people who may not like each other to interact. As such, in practice my local friend discord is quite small.

A forum can solve this problem in certain ways. If you want to talk about music, you don’t need to wait for the main channel to unblock. Just make a new thread, or talk in the existing music thread. You are encouraged to make a long, thoughtful post that is reflective. You can post and leave, without needing to wait to see how people react to what you have to say.

A discord I’m on has a great feature, which is that everyone has a personal channel that they can just write whatever they want on. It’s like a little blog. If you don’t want to see someone’s blog, you don’t have to see it. This way, if you want to post about something that doesn’t fit anywhere, or if you want to elaborate on something you may not think merits a thread, you can just write about it there.

The forum will likely fail but I think it will be fun to try anyway. If I can create a safe private space for my friends to coexist, that would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?

Tags: internet