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Hmm. I have pretty much the same kinds of interactions on private Discord servers which I had on IRC 20 years ago.

It's harder to find particularly skilled or like minded people in some niche areas or fields, but with simply more people online, this seems inevitable - more haystack to sift through. Of course there are worrying corporatization or centralization arguments vs. IRC, but ultimately the end result doesn't feel that different to me in terms of community.

I'm not really involved in any fan communities or anything a Wikia would involve, so I can't comment on that facet.

I suppose for what I do (reverse engineering hobby stuff, mostly), what would have been a "team" or "group" blog site, possibly with some useful collaboration plugins or the like, is now a GitHub repo, but that's more of a convenience than a drawback compared to the "old" Internet to me.

Overall, it does seem like things are more centralized and therefore a bit less unique, but at the same time, I have to spend less time securing bespoke web servers, buying crappy VPS hosting, and dealing with routine maintenance and setup to collaborate with like-minded people on projects.



Yeah, IMO Discord (putting aside the whole open/closed software thing) is a pretty good upgrade on IRC. My problem is when a community that either used to have or would have had a forum 10 years ago is now using Discord as the primary communication hub. Discord's ephemeral by design, well suited for engaging in on-going conversation, but goddawful for finding past information, or longer ongoing conversations.




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