The first online community I joined was focused on the RollerCoaster Tycoon series, featuring a website with an upload system to share your creations, and a forum as a gathering place where you could talk about the games, get help for game-related issues, organize contests and more. In addition to that, people would often use instant messengers to stay in contact with some members. It was the typical anatomy of online communities at the time.
Today, 20 years later, the landscape is very different and I'm left with a growing feeling of frustration. Forums have been replaced by microblogging and Discord, two types of platforms which can't possibly fulfill the same role since they are (closer to) ephemeral real-time communication than asynchronous communication. The kind of interaction I like -- discussions spanning weeks or months or even years -- has become a rarity buried under a never-ending onslaught of small talk, text bites and memes.
I get it. Not having much of a barrier to overcome makes it so much easier to share your thoughts on anything that comes to your mind, and it's for this reason that I use the fediverse very actively myself. Small interactions certainly aren't worthless, but sometimes I want substance. I want to read pages of discussion about a topic which draws me in with interesting insights and different perspectives and without any distractions between every post. Forums gave me exactly that, whereas the platforms that succeeded them don't.
Discord simply isn't a good replacement for forums, even though it tried to introduce some structuring features with threads and forum channels. Nobody uses the former, and the latter rarely have any activity or merely serve as showcases for art or hobbies. To its users, Discord remains a regular chat platform first and foremost, and that experience sucks with a lot of members.
You get small groups of people who flock together and dominate most activity on the server or the #general channel with blabber and make it hard for others to join in. Conversations of any kind are hard to follow, with multiple of them taking place in parallel and people replying to posts way up in the chat history because they still wanted to contribute to a topic even though they were late. Everyone tries to have the advantages of asynchronous communication on a platform which simply doesn't handle it appropriately, turning the chat history into a chaotic mess.
In that fake channel above, someone replied to my post. Did you see it? Now imagine that with a real chat with continuous activity and you found the reason why I dropped Discord.
Microblogging is almost real-time, but rather than having casual interactions, its focus lies on sharing your thoughts with the world. If there were communities as a feature and no character limit, it could be suitable for quality discussions: Combined with the fact that it's not as fast-paced, longer posts would be feasible and visible to audiences you hope to get good and relevant responses from.
What we're getting instead is a comically bad "global town square" pile of garbage causing nothing but problems and incentivizing shallow posting tuned to elicit a high number of reactions. The advantage of not being actually real-time is completely negated by the lack of structure which forces people to deal with one huge feed and which means that anything you post will rapidly disappear in the void and not get much attention. And if that's the case, why put in effort? Even on the fediverse with its lack of an effective character limit, this kind of posting is prevalent for this reason.
Other platforms all have similar drawbacks of their own.
Why have communities switched to Discord as their main hub despite being a chat platform? Why do the features Discord added in response to this trend -- threads and forum channels -- get so little use? Why do people stick with microblogging despite it's horrendous core design? The answer, I believe, is convenience.
It's more convenient for communities to run a Discord server than it is to run a forum and maybe a website. The former doesn't require money for server hardware and technological skill to install and maintain the software. A lot of people already have a Discord account as well, so they don't need to create a new account and get familiar with a different user interface, which means they're more willing to join new servers.
It's more convenient to do microblogging than to post on forums because all you need to do is post whatever comes to mind, with no regard for form, substance or relevance to some overarching theme. You don't even need to formally create or join a community; just follow people and you get a vague sense of being part of certain communities from the activity in your timeline and the responses you're receiving to your posts. I doubt it could be any more effortless.
In trading freedom for convenience, however, online communities have lost a lot of their identity and individuality. They weren't just slightly different hangouts with slightly different small talk and memes; they were all unique with custom forum setups, websites with features nobody else had, and especially with a history. That little game someone developed 2 years ago? You can still find it and read about the development process and updates. You can discover how the developer's skills have improved over time. You can find the posts leading up to the start of this project. You can see all contributions, events, projects, conversations, perspectives and views; everything that shaped the community and turned it into what it is today.
Modern online communities have no history. They're all just the same [big platform]-flavored community experience which feels like the hundreds I had before. They're ephemeral and easily forgotten.
But as long as people value convenience over anything else, nothing is going to change. We're trapped in a situation where low-effort platforms get all the attention, and the problems resulting from this effortlessness can't be fixed because the solutions will inevitably require additional work by users. Like I mentioned before, Discord has identified its own shortcomings for larger communities and added tools to keep the channel history clean and make conversations easy to follow and continue at a later time. But nobody uses them because people resist anything that leads to more work for them, especially when the original, more effortless way continues to be available. As a software developer, I'm too familiar with this phenomenon. I've had colleagues come to me complaining that the new web app is literally unusable because that one workflow now requires an additional click over the macro Word document the app replaced. I wish I was joking.
So what's the way out? I don't know, but I decided I'm not going to take part in this insanity.