Social media is nice, if you want to post and share art, if you want to throw things into a void and mostly forget about them after a week has passed.
Blogging is nice, if you want to put a bunch of words out there with no direct interaction and leave them hanging around as finished pieces.
Discord is was nice, until it reached a critical mass of being shit and caving to the powers that be about data privacy more than it already had. A shame, really. Good option for persistent group messaging, for what it’s worth. Looking at one of the alternatives but setting that up will take time.
But there’s still the edge cases that have never really fit in any of those other places, and can’t just be written down in a notebook.
I find a forum works pretty well for talking long-style about things in progress in a way that’s easy to find days or weeks or months down the line, and even doing other permanent stuff that isn’t quite a blog post or a social media post.
For example: I’m translating かませ役♂ for fun (when time permits). Once I finish a volume, I’ll throw it up somewhere to share around better, but I want a spot to put a shitton of text bit by bit so people can check it out in between the volume breakpoints! And I don’t want to set up a translation-specific blog because that seems sort of pointless to me. It’s in a very weird space between TTRPG letsplay diaries and A Project like dovecote.
For other example: Discord just sort of sucks anyways? It’s too fast, it’s impossible to find things, it isn’t built for long-term socializing and is more of a glorified and rapidly-losing-justification-for-being-bad Voice Chat With Text Chats. The Forum feature is just sort of an insult to injury, as someone who knows what forums are actually like. Still sucks ass to browse and check in on.
So, there’s a forum.
- Ostensibly, this is “For people who create.” That is really the only “requirement” to join, other than “I’d really prefer if you were 18 or older”.1
- Realistically, if you have ever made something, want to make something one day, or are in the process of making something, consider this a casual invitation to check it out. My one aspect of gatekeeping when building for a community is that there is something different at the core in individuals who are open to creating and those who are not. You can join and never post about anything you make, I just want this to get people thinking about making things because it’s good for what a lot of people call “the soul”.2
- This will be around for as long as it lasts. I intend to keep it running in tandem with the main website, this blog, and the imageboard, but social stuff is a little trickier and it is a little more expensive. So, check it out while it’s around, make it feel worthwhile?
- I am not going to be posting too frequently because it’s hard to post everything everywhere all at once, so also feel free to fill out what you’d want if you do join. I thought about making more topics and threads in advance, but, eh.
If that interests you, then…
Maybe we’ll see you around?
Footnotes
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Possibly we’re over-thinking this and it would be fine, but assuming we do have to draw any line at all about mature content on a forum we’re trying to host, lenience will mostly only show up for artistic reasons. Unfortunately, disagreeing with bad laws doesn’t make them go away! And picking what gets to stay always sucks! So maybe the people writing them can all quickly age out of existence or something idk. Post about your stuff and talk about your interests just don’t post like it’s an NSFW channel in an art server bc then it’s harder. This footnote is way too long. God I hate censorship and advertising and— ↩
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|Not that we are particularly fond of the concept of the soul, but hopefully you get what we’re getting at. ↩