General Chat Thread

[Altair]

That depends. I'm sure this is mainly forced on anyone using a VPN, Tor, or other privacy layers? Admittedly, I'd never browse the Internet without one of those in place.

Also, since Discord is a chat room, and I'm not a chat room person, that turns me off even more. I like forums better because you can always think about what you're going to say next. It's easy to derail discussions and go on the personal side of things, so I don't wanna involve myself in that ever again...

Even though I was not active nor participated on meowsepad, I am sad to see the forum go. Forums are dying because of discord and I'm sad to see another forum shut down to transfer to discord.
I agree. That is the advantage of forums.
I also feel forums have a personal charm you can't get on discord.

[slooroo]

I don't think actual management of forums are as bad as just trying to build a community, especially in this day and age but even 10+ years ago it was a pain when I bothered to run forums.

[Megan]

I don't think actual management of forums are as bad as just trying to build a community, especially in this day and age but even 10+ years ago it was a pain when I bothered to run forums.

Its hard to get people to join especially these days. It was a bit easier some years back but still not entirely easy.

[slooroo]

Nature of the beast I guess. The internet is a lot lonelier than it used to be.

[Spook of the lost]

[mention]slooroo[/mention] bah, this is nothing compared to what I've heard about the bbs days and the arpanet. Everybody was on Usenet back then and BBS's were rare oddities you had to dial into with local communities for the most part. What helped them out however was banding together and sharing information and links so the communities cross pollinated. Kinda like what Juneberry, MeowsePad, makestation, caluden and the coffee house are doing, only more interconnected.

In the 90s personal websites and forums faced a similar problem, that's why web rings were created, though later destroyed by search engine popularity.

I'm certain that this cluster of communities will survive despite the loss of MeowsePad, and I understand why they shutdown the forum, it's happened before and it'll happen again.

Btw, fingers crossed web rings make a comeback, search engines only benefit the most popular websites and web rings make it easy and simple to hop through communities.

Sort of like, the internet is the interstate and the web ring is the main road through town.

[slooroo]

By lonely I mean I find it's getting harder and harder to find new communities to break into. Most forums are rather incestual and share members since the way people go is social media and Discord and even a lot of those will be pre-established groups of people who know each other.

[Spook of the lost]

[mention]slooroo[/mention] you aren't wrong... Then again neocities isn't very large either and it's a community made up of personal websites.

[slooroo]

All of the old ways are still around and I imagine their niche will stay around as longer as the internet itself exists. I just find after a certain point these methods aren't always the best to meet new people because you just end up bumping into the same circles over and over again.

[Spook of the lost]

[mention]slooroo[/mention] what would you do then?

[slooroo]

Admittedly I can't say there's really an answer and some of it may just be the difficult of making new connections in general as one gets older.