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Exponential, to a point - Discord is collapsing in on itself
Kind of hard to avoid the latest Discord news. At least on cohost, one of my ex-Twitter haunts and one that skews young and queer and seems to have a lot of feelings about the news that Discord is changing how it handles usernames (changing from UserName#WXYZ to @username).
Basically:
Eh. This is a nuisance for most of the use cases, except for one: right now (in the old-style system), it's hard to search people unless you have their exact username, which in turn makes it harder for harassment, and makes it easier to form hard-to-discover communities away from the worst people on the internet.
Which, you know, is good.
But I'm a little torn because in the same way that Reddit came in and sort of single-handedly destroyed forums, Discord has done the same to the remains. There are fewer independent places to congregate. All the forums I used to enjoy in the 00s are gone or ghost towns. But a lot of people have a Discord server, and form communities there. And also: place their online time, and that of their friends and acquaintances, in the hands of a corporation its associated capital which will never love them.
Discord Announces Forced Name Changes, Pisses Everyone Off
Discord says they want to make it easier to identify and add your friends. I guess they've done that. People are complaining that Discord has also made it easier to find and harass people. I guess they've done that, too.
I use Discord begrudgingly. The main project I work on has a channel on a server. I check it daily, talk with people; it's good, but for my own use case, it's nothing that wouldn't work on IRC, the way things were done for decades. And IRC has its own set of problems, but it doesn't involve shilling Nitro at you every time you log on, or telling you that you can earn things by streaming to at least one viewer for fifteen minutes. If your server or network sucks, you can move, and just announce it on your website or mailing list. IRC feels like 80s tech, but it also sort of feels like a solved problem. And it doesn't try to gamify your life.
People know they need to step away from the corporate net, though they won't. Too easy to stay, act like a don't-care tough guy and say you'll be here watching it burn, even as you feel the lingering malaise, that feeling that things are getting worse (Google search, Discord, Twitter, it's been a year) and staying that way.
The "Technological Futures" Letter
But maybe some small minority will shift. We don't need absolutely everyone on IRC, or Gemini, or elsewhere, though that'd be great; it's just not realistic, not aligned with how people want to spend their time. Some people won't have the inclination to try something new and unguided. Some lack the patience. But as more and more people watch their communities get obliterated on the altar of the unsatisfiable dollar, I hope there'll be some kind of shift, towards something defined by its lack of control. Something immersive and malleable, perhaps not invented yet, expanding outwards forever. I don't want to think the best days are done. As Sunset writes in the gemlog linked above, "I don't want to live in the future that Microsoft/Alphabet/OpenAI/Meta are selling."