nycki

Nycki

@nycki

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she/they, 1993, WA. Ask me about card games!

warning: I reblog 18+ content here. filter it if you want.

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nycki
@nycki
dwoboyle
@dwoboyle
dwoboyle
@dwoboyle

What if we had an Post Cohost forum?

I have no idea what modern forum infrastructure or hosting options are like nowadays, but what if we all helped put together one together with threads and sections focused on some of the most popular tags?

I'm imagining a place that could be potentially a less toxic something awful or resetera. Something that carries on the spirit of this place and allows for both long form and short form posts. It probably wouldn't grow, or have the same sort of image/audio hosting, but still.

Would that be something folks would be interested in? Do you think something like that would be worth looking into?

Edit: doing research...

Edit 2: Ok it looks like there's definitely a lot of interest in something like this. In terms of hosting there appears to be a tons of options ranging from free to paid. I think later today/this week I will set up a discord for folks interested and try to organize it's channels in terms of platforms, community guidelines, and everything that a community might need discuss. Gosh, I get to put my union organizer training to good use, I guess.

Edit 3: I have created a planning discord for this!
https://discord.gg/Zgp3qCQC

Since this is a public post I have an extra step to try to verify people as actual cohost users. It's manual though, so it might take me a while to get everyone who's interested in the planning stage in.

dwoboyle
@dwoboyle

So how is this project going?

Well, slow. We've set up four test forums across multiple different services to figure out which we like the most. We haven't made those links public yet but there's not much there.

I gotta say, a lot of the backend on these services are either incredibly old with awful unhelpful documentation OR extremely covered in techbro stink and try to come off as very slick and cool while being neither. None of them really have the features we would want out of the box, but some have some interesting community made plugins.

Feel free to come and join the discussion forum though. Especially if you're willing to lend a helping hand. The discord invite has been updated.

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in reply to @dwoboyle's post:

dwoboyle
@dwoboyle

Yeah, moderation is my biggest initial concern. Especially when it comes to dealing with bad actors like far right brigades, bots, and the like.
It would require a dedicated team of, likely, volunteers but could be potentially mentally harmful. I'm sure many of us have either experienced or heard horror stories of being an online community mod.

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Cania
@Cania

Count me as an interested party. And RE: moderation, IMO the short term risks are pretty much bots and mega assholes. Most of that can be prevented by a good Captcha on sign up. The rest can be banned as long as the rules are good enough to support quick, decisive actions.

The forum I used to roll on, Selectbutton.net, had a specific category where much of the socialization took place. You could only see it after logging in, meaning it was not scraped by Google and therefore much less likely to attract bad actors. So another prevention method is simply obscurity - it's hard to brigade a site that you don't know exists.

The long term risks are much fuzzier and I think involve a lot of unhealthy ways of managing conflict, but much of that is going to be papered over by the enthusiasm and good-will of the first new entrants. That's the kind of bridge you cross later, but setting up solid rules that allow Mods to ban/timeout people as soon as they start being shitheels is going to do a lot of work there.

Anyway, long post but YES I am interested and would sign up. I love forums!

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dwoboyle
@dwoboyle

Thanks, these are valid criticisms and I appreciate this sort of reply. This would not be a project I would try to be the head of. my main goal at this point is an interest check and then helping to facilitate discussion with those interested in making it real. It's about getting people together and figuring out what we can do more than anything. Not to rush into things blindly.
One thing I absolutely do not want to be is a becomr a salty forum admin.

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dwoboyle
@dwoboyle

Oh ahah. This person has been banned. Welp, they did have a handful of valid criticisms to be honest, but they were being incredibly argo. I had apparently muted them some time ago. Considering this interaction it's not surprising why.

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sundry
@sundry

hi I saved a link to this post and some other post-Cohost plan things over the past week but hadn’t really had the spoons to look go through them. I’m coming back to it now but the Discord link seems to have expired. Is there a new one?

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