Re: [Meta] Proposed FreeGameDev changes
Posted: 21 May 2021, 20:11
Forum posts to appear on Mastodon feeds, that's bad, for me that is. That indicates we do not just disagree on means, but that our objectives are likely incompatible. Given that you are the last remaining admin, and that only 5 other people posted on this thread, I'm guessing I'll lose.
If the phpBB developers came over, made and maintained a Mastodon bridge for us overnight, with every other technical feature remaining the same, this would still drastically alter the nature of this forum and break certain usecases. Mastodon has been built as a social media platform, as such, it incentivises form of messages that would traditionally be seen on one. The same goes for Lemmy and it's tree-ed chat. This forum, on the other hand, caters to longer messages, linear discussions, etc. Now, at first current users might continue as usual, with only light interference from people coming over from other sites. However, more and more often someone answering through Mastodon would apply the standards from there even if answering to a topic originated from here, slowly making the behaviour of people more homogeneous. This is why keeping conversations on multiple sites with different visual identities is a good thing: it allows users to compartmentalise their behaviour easier. For instance, I wouldn't want all my news sources to be aggregated, as this would make it harder for me to analyse on first sight the credibility of the article. If I read an article about potted plants on fsf.org or potted-plant-consortium.example.org, I interpret it very differently.
Another issue with merging communities like that, is that even if you might end up with a group bigger than the biggest starting one, it comes at the cost of creating many very small/unary groups. You might manage to keep the initial splinter small, but if the new giant group does not cater well to someone's usecase, that person will have a suboptimal experience, or hopefully realise they where having one and exit.
Then, people in very small groups will have a much harder time gathering others to recreate something that corresponds to their specific usecase, because most people will either be in the giant group, or not see the point of not joining it instead. For instance, say you managed to agglomerate most of the free FPS community into a single game/federation of compatible games. This would single handedly solve the issues about FPSs we where discussing in another thread. However, this would also means standardising certain things. I for one like FPSs with exceptionally long TTKs. With that giant group in existence, finding enough players to play like that seems even harder than right now.
If the phpBB developers came over, made and maintained a Mastodon bridge for us overnight, with every other technical feature remaining the same, this would still drastically alter the nature of this forum and break certain usecases. Mastodon has been built as a social media platform, as such, it incentivises form of messages that would traditionally be seen on one. The same goes for Lemmy and it's tree-ed chat. This forum, on the other hand, caters to longer messages, linear discussions, etc. Now, at first current users might continue as usual, with only light interference from people coming over from other sites. However, more and more often someone answering through Mastodon would apply the standards from there even if answering to a topic originated from here, slowly making the behaviour of people more homogeneous. This is why keeping conversations on multiple sites with different visual identities is a good thing: it allows users to compartmentalise their behaviour easier. For instance, I wouldn't want all my news sources to be aggregated, as this would make it harder for me to analyse on first sight the credibility of the article. If I read an article about potted plants on fsf.org or potted-plant-consortium.example.org, I interpret it very differently.
Another issue with merging communities like that, is that even if you might end up with a group bigger than the biggest starting one, it comes at the cost of creating many very small/unary groups. You might manage to keep the initial splinter small, but if the new giant group does not cater well to someone's usecase, that person will have a suboptimal experience, or hopefully realise they where having one and exit.
Then, people in very small groups will have a much harder time gathering others to recreate something that corresponds to their specific usecase, because most people will either be in the giant group, or not see the point of not joining it instead. For instance, say you managed to agglomerate most of the free FPS community into a single game/federation of compatible games. This would single handedly solve the issues about FPSs we where discussing in another thread. However, this would also means standardising certain things. I for one like FPSs with exceptionally long TTKs. With that giant group in existence, finding enough players to play like that seems even harder than right now.