So I made a forum in 2023 AD.
A bold move, I know. Forums have largely been replaced by Reddit, Discord, and social media. I can guess why: there’s less friction. From the admin’s point of view, you can make a group without dealing with technical issues like webservers and domain names. More importantly, social media makes it easier to stumble into a community. You don’t need a new account to contribute. You don’t need to learn where things are, since every community on a given site has an identical UI and layout. Most of all, you don’t even need to seek out the content deliberately, as it can randomly appear in your feed.
Is this friction-free experience really a good thing, though? We all live on the same 5 websites without thinking and consume whatever we find there. Not so much “surfing” the web as drifting on its algorithmic currents.
The old internet was different. There was something its forums, blogs, hobby sites and terrible Geocities pages had in common, and I don’t mean the garish 90s design. On these sites, you felt like you were in a clubhouse for your chosen niche, with no outside distractions. Everything from the layout to the usernames suited its tribe. Websites had atmosphere and a culture, and you’d want to visit a particular one when the mood struck, the same way you’d visit a mom-and-pop diner or a dive bar.
This is my dive bar. An out-of-the-way place to discuss Mage Hand and do some collaborative worldbuilding for its fantasy setting, The Veiled Age, away from the algorithms and the push notifications. A quiet corner for the sort of deviants who want to play a game that’s 99% reading.