Bring on the Discourse

My personal call to arms! Let’s move discussions to Discourse whenever possible!

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Obviously I give this a hell yeah. Hence why I’m here.

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I’m not sure my participation here will stick but I’m really trying to give it a go. While I love the ‘Between Two Cairns’ discord, I hate the feeling when a good conversation occurred a week previously and it just feels wrong to try and dredge it all up again when everyone else has moved on.

I have to say the last time I was using a forum on a regular basis was about 17 years ago so the Discourse interface is pretty nice compared to what I remember dealing with on other forums back in the late 00s.

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I think discord is great for small communities (I think someone mentioned 50 or less as a good size somewhere) but really I don’t think it facilitates a conversation for more than maybe 10. After that it’s just shouting in a room that’s already too loud to hear in.

I really hope we can keep up the conversation here, but I think too its relative permanence makes the decision to respond a bit weightier. Which is good for overall quality maybe, but bad in that it’s easier to feel like an idea or response might not be worth sharing. Might contribute to some lower engagement overall.

For what’s it’s worth I feel like actual engagement on Bluesky is really pretty poor. Lots of likes, but mostly people talking to themselves with few replies. Very sterile and lonely thing.

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I’ll give it a try. Can I be “tagged into” convos tho? I mostly only check discord or really anyplace when I have notifications drawing me there like they’re quest markers

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I’ve been (mostly) a lurker on various RPG Discords and while I appreciate they exist they never really worked for me for the reasons outlined in Yochai’s post. I’m going to make an effort to engage here since it seems to be more my speed.

Also Shacknews, another forum I’ve been a member of for 25 years, has recently had an upheaval which has caused most members to migrate to Discord. It’d be nice to have somewhere to have deeper discussions, and hopefully I can help to build some community here.

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Yes you can @PrismaticWasteland!

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Love this post!

Let’s hope this will bring more momentum. I feel like if anything forums need more convincing to work. One way to achieve this is not to give the appearance that nothing is going on here.

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What can be kind of frustrating is when a good conversation is happening in one OSR discord server that could just as easily be happening over in second OSR server. Often I feel like its the even largely the same mix of people its just sort of a dice roll over which one I happen to check on a given day. I think the Cauldron could help with that (or conversely add yet another place to check but at least here there will be a post trail).

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You have my axe! :muscle:t5:

Déjame hacer eco de este post! :wink:

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I love Discord but I’m happy for there to be more platforms that more people are comfortable using. I like to keep an eye on the conversations here and I’m sure I’ll jump in from time to time as long as it continues to be active.

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I definitely enjoy the dopamine bump on Bluesky. The hurtling speed of Discord surpasses my ability (or desire) to keep up.

I generally agree that forums promote more cogent, fleshed out concepts that can be explored with more depth. I look forward to more.

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yeah forums live and die on activity. Itch.io could have the biggest TTRPG forum on the web, but nobody uses the forums like that, so the momentum just isn’t there

This is a killer forum feature. Damn!

Well ok it was either here or go back to /tg/

I had forgotten about this forum but the post is great one. The loss of forums as diy spaces into the homogenized reddit ball was a real blow to internet so I’m ready to be back on a more traditional one.

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I think you make some good points that ring true to me. I find that I tend to think about my responses a lot more on forums versus in discord. And sometimes that means I type and retype a response a few times before realizing that I’m not really adding anything…so I end up deleting the draft and moving on. I like that you can follow threads here. That way I have reminders to come back to it. And hopefully by then I have something to say.

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I always prized forums. They’re a great way to exchange, especially with the international. I’ll try and be less of a lurker and more of a poster.

Hey, question for I think Yochai. Is this forum indexed and discoverable in search engines? I tried a number of search terms and post titles but was unable to find a match outside of manually going to your blog and using the link.

Could just be my weak Google-fu. Or might be intentional? Anyway, just wanted to check in case you were hoping for any organic growth through search engines.

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interesting. I think Bing has it indexed but not google. Yochai miiiight be able to use the Google Search Console to get it indexed but i’m not sure.

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