Communities in the modern day - A-Net Online ANetBBS

Communities in the modern day 2026-07-17 10:12:50

ANSI view

I've been talking with a friend yesterday about centralized services, and what issues I take with them. I often have trouble articulating what is bothering me about services like Discord and such.

The biggest thing that bothers me is the fact that for all of these services the lion's share of their income will undoubtedly have come from user data collection. Having a cut of your userbase pay for a $10 subscription will never cover the expenses of having millions of users using high quality video streams, tons of uploads and full servers histories that are preserved for good.

My friend hopes that things will go back to being more decentralized but I'm not so optimistic about that. Setting up a server on your spare computer (if you even have one) is hard. Setting up a Discord server is very, very easy as long as you don't care about the power they wield over you. If you wound up getting banned off of Discord one way or another (I know some people that were unrightfully caught in sweep bans) it will cut you off of a lot of communities. I think everybody here already knows that though, but we all still use Discord because of the network effect.

This is something I brought up in my post yesterday already, but I've been hosting a personal website for a while now. No idea if anyone is really looking at it though. There's a blog which I should really dust off, and I used to have a forum on there - which I rolled up because no one was using it. That was in the midst of the Discord age verification panic back in february too. Also been rolling XMPP, but even the privacy-conscious folks seem to prefer Matrix which I (and some other people) have problems with.

I guess another thing is that every website more or less looks the same. YouTube used to allow you to customize your channel's look to your heart's desire but that has changed. Plugins like Stylus help with that though, so I'm not going to be too picky about that. Besides, accessible design is good so maybe I'm just tilting at windmills here.

I'm just kind of rambling at this point. Maybe I'll do a refresh on my website. I actually found something called Moebius, which lets me try my hand at making some ANSI art. Gonna see if that's something for me.

I've been talking with a friend yesterday about centralized services, and what issues I take with them. I often have trouble articulating what is bothering me about services like Discord and such.

The biggest thing that bothers me is the fact that for all of these services the lion's share of their income will undoubtedly have come from user data collection. Having a cut of your userbase pay for a $10 subscription will never cover the expenses of having millions of users using high quality video streams, tons of uploads and full servers histories that are preserved for good.

My friend hopes that things will go back to being more decentralized but I'm not so optimistic about that. Setting up a server on your spare computer (if you even have one) is hard. Setting up a Discord server is very, very easy as long as you don't care about the power they wield over you. If you wound up getting banned off of Discord one way or another (I know some people that were unrightfully caught in sweep bans) it will cut you off of a lot of communities. I think everybody here already knows that though, but we all still use Discord because of the network effect.

This is something I brought up in my post yesterday already, but I've been hosting a personal website for a while now. No idea if anyone is really looking at it though. There's a blog which I should really dust off, and I used to have a forum on there - which I rolled up because no one was using it. That was in the midst of the Discord age verification panic back in february too. Also been rolling XMPP, but even the privacy-conscious folks seem to prefer Matrix which I (and some other people) have problems with.

I guess another thing is that every website more or less looks the same. YouTube used to allow you to customize your channel's look to your heart's desire but that has changed. Plugins like Stylus help with that though, so I'm not going to be too picky about that. Besides, accessible design is good so maybe I'm just tilting at windmills here.

I'm just kind of rambling at this point. Maybe I'll do a refresh on my website. I actually found something called Moebius, which lets me try my hand at making some ANSI art. Gonna see if that's something for me.

Posted by Terminus in General Discussion