one day i will try to make a long proper writeup about discord because good god if i don't spend a silly amount of time thinking about it. i've been appreciating everyone's thoughts about it here; especially appreciating those with completely different digital upbringings to mine. people who were raised in chatrooms or forums or blogs or twitter or whatever else.
my first proper "social media" was instagram because people at school used it; then i went to skype because my friendship group used it; then to discord because an indie game i liked had a community on it. and there, pretty much, i have spent nearly every single day for the past 6 years (4/may/2017).
i could never really do twitter or tumblr. i struggled with public social media and i still do. i don't know what to post or how to interact with people in the way twitter refugees do. how do you make actual friends and not just a network of acquaintances? hell, i don't know how to write posts: i've written versions of this discord rant a million times and deleted the draft every time out of fears that it's not up to snuff.
what i do know, to an acute degree, is how to use discord. while my forays into public social media had always resulted in inertia-bound doomscrolling and overload, discord was all about talking. making friends. meeting people. expanding my social circle through conversation. i am intensely plagued with anxiety irl but on discord most of that melted away. it is the social environment where i am more confident than any other. i lead communities in ways my material body would meltdown if faced with.
but over the past god-knows-how-long, i have come to hate that platform. betterdiscord makes it slightly more useable — especially for my specific accessibility needs — but it is still a convoluted and hazy webapp hell hole of a place and i can't help but dream for something better.
i don't want to— i can't say goodbye to the method of communication and interaction which has empowered me so, allowed me to meet almost all of my friends, intertwined so deeply with Me. cohost is lovely, but it's going to take me a long time to fully grow into This, if ever at all
