nitw:
*jumps up and down waving my hands and yelling in a crowd* DISCORD WAS NEVER MEANT TO REPLACE FORUMS AND WIKIS!!! IT’S JUST EMBELLISHED CHATROOMS WITH MULTIPLAYER GAMING FEATURES AND LOOTBOXES AND SHIT!!! PLEASE PUT FAQS AND MESSAGE BOARDS OR AT LEAST A DIRECT EMAIL-BASED SUPPORT SYSTEM ON YOUR WEBSITE!!! 1GB NEOCITIES DOMAIN ZERO DOLLARS
I am working SOOO hard on putting all the online writing I want to save on a Neocities html site… And yet the bigger fear is always:
people won’t read it.
Even when a page contains information that people say they are ACTIVELY LOOKING FOR, as in the Discord FAQ example… they STILL will not look at it unless it is on The Site They’re On.
This is why I’ve been frantically searching for The Browser/Extension That Would Save Us All in case Tumblr and Discord die or become too awful to use. But so far no luck.
who cares if people don’t read it. put it on a website anyways. if you continue to do nothing but wait for a hypothetical solution that magically fixes everything to pop up then well. you will just do nothing forever.
if you are really concerned about your stuff being on centralized platforms that can die then you can take action right now. you don’t even have to abandon tumblr just to post on a website. you can post to multiple places… you can link them together. that’s what websites do. that’s the whole point.
Very true.
And I do have a lot of my website done already– and of course I am continuing to add more whenever I can.
But in the meantime I’m also trying very hard to plan for how I will stay connected with other people who also have backup plans (either personal websites or accounts on different platforms) …if our current shared platforms cease to be valid options.
As it stands now, it looks as if such an eventuality will result in me losing the vast majority of my connections. I will be able to stay in touch with some, but not many.
And this is because currently there is just no widely-used method of checking on multiple different websites to stay in touch with people on all of them.
And in the absence of such a thing… the communities we have now will be pretty much obliterated.
I can’t expect very many of the people who connect with me, here and now, to make the effort of connecting with me (and others) elsewhere. Online socializing is mostly a low-energy activity. So despite my best efforts, most of my current contacts will lose touch with me, and end up just making do with whoever they are able to follow on whichever platform they end up joining next.
I know there’s probably no way to preserve current communities in their entirety, if their home platforms die. But my goal is to try and save as much of my present online community as possible… however much that may be.
So, while I build my backup, I’m still looking for options on the multi-platform connection front, as well.