Is it worth it making new boards and forums?

I've been considering making new web projects to expand my programming skills and an imageboard sounds like a good place to start. But leaving technical skills aside, I don't know if I should have the ambition to make it a real community where people actually spend their time, get together and learn from each other. Everyone is cozying up in their walled gardens now, AI and glowies are invading public spaces, politics divide people, boards are dying all the time as if entering Eternal September. I don't know if I could keep up with moderation, I'm not sure if I would find fun people with good posts in them, and I've considered centering my native language (spanish) but that could be an obstacle in itself. But if I make things right I could bring some magic back to the internet, you know? Maybe that's naive thinking, heh. Maybe the only way to know for sure is trying it anyways, but I still want to know what lainons have to say about it.

Writing things like these are fun and you can use them for gaining experience. I wrote a couple in my time just to get a better grasp of whatever language I wanted to learn, it's useful since it has you working with a different language or two and the web at the same time. Though I have the very same problems as you regarding moderation and getting the right people to use your stuff, so I never really put any of the code I wrote to use and just did it for the learning experience.

I dont think its too hard if you go about it right, bring on your friends, whatever. Maybe you dont have to be the only moderator, maybe you set it up somehow so moderation doesn't happen, many options. Don't need to set your sights too high, many comfy forums exist without many members. Such small comfy communities have certainly changed my life.

Forums are better. Imageboards the users dont really get attached to eachother because no one has an identity which is part of why they disappear so frequently while some forums have stuck around since the 90s. You get less toxic users that way too.

>>76851 >But just don't just spawn another vichan This. Def start a chan or php board. WITHOUT JAVASCRIPT. So use https://gitgud.io/LynxChan/LynxChan NO VICHAN. Also compared: github.com/kennell/imageboards Gatekeep by monetizing. Like unfiltered access with a temp weekly key through monero or some other monetization tactic. But realize that image boards are inherently anonymous, it's not social media. So don't try to monitize through recognition, such as big pictures or having a name or identifable avatar pics next to post. Old chan users aren't interested in these things.

>Is it worth it making new boards and forums? It depends. Are there any existing communities for the topic of interest? What does your website seek to offer compared to the alternatives? What does it do that others don't? >76836 >Forums are better. Imageboards the users dont really get attached to eachother because no one has an identity which is part of why they disappear so frequently while some forums have stuck around since the 90s. You get less toxic users that way too. I strongly disagree. I honestly think the lack of attachment is a good thing. However, I would not mistake circle-jerking for genuine attachment. The opposite end leads to cliques. Then, if you aren't a part of the clique, then your opinion will be dismissed. It leads to people saying whatever they can do to raise their rank in the forum hierarchy. They will ass-kiss the mods or whoever exists in the inner circle. Likewise, they censor and limit themselves to avoid offending higher ranking forum users - e.g. those who have been there longer. All sense of discussion has been hampered by social games that become existent as a result of the users having an identity, creating a hierarchy and value system. Anyway, you can not say that such a system inherently leads to less toxicity. In fact, I think it leads to more because it allows over-arching drama to exist - drama in imageboards that would just be limited to a single thread. It becomes "this user did this!" and creates existing conflicts within users - they know each other and can thus become "enemies." If this dynamic exists, then the conflicting individuals have biases in their perception of each other based on previous interactions. In anonymous spaces, I can argue with you in one thread and praise you in another thread and not know it. If a person has a post history, then another person can go and say, "Hey, you said this, this means your opinion is no longer valid." "Hey, you're this type of person, I don't trust what you say." Forums are full of this nonsense, and I loathe these dynamics because they mimic that of real life at times.

There are two main problems with making your own board or forum. The first is dealing with CP spam and making sure poletards, strom users, tranny whiners, and lamers who make it their mission to blame their flat tires on whichever demographic they've chosen to arbitrarily hate, and other bad actors stay out. The second is actually getting enough people to use it. A small number of users can be cozy but if your only getting a post a day (or worse) then it gets boring fast and nobody wants to post on a dead board. There are really nice sites out there that would be great if more people used them. For a new board to work it has to fill a niche. e.g. Lainchan was basically a /g/ away from /g/ at a time when 4chan was really beginning to stink and people were getting tired of the place. There wasn't an imageboard dedicated to cyberpunk and Lain so it filled that niche and gained a solid enough userbase to keep going so if your going to make one don't just make another 4chan clone. >>76836 Disagree. Anonymous imageboards are a mess but the reason for that is 4chan and so called chan culture. The anonymous format has become tied to 4chan so everyone thinks it must be a 4chan-like site and mimic in someway that site's culture for better or worse which nowadays means a mix of /b/ee, /p ol/, and /g/. It doesn't help that rouge 4channers and scum from sharty are always roaming around looking for new imageboards to colonize. On the Japanese net there's a lot more diversity among anonymous sites and as bad as Futaba can be it doesn't have the same cancerous culture as modern day 4chan. The only real advantage old school forums have is that they are much easier to moderate and harder to spam.

>>76922 >There are really nice sites out there that would be great if more people used them. Some places are good precisely because they have small amount of people having cozy conversations, but these small sites are ridiculously hard to find. I do not even know where to start when I feel an urge to escape the flow of retardation you see in e.g. /hum/ or /r/. It's not like all posts are bad, but sometimes you don't feel like seeing bad posts at all. I've went through allchans, idk if there are more lists, but even there you don't really get to find much.

>>76829 (OP) Short answer: No, don't bother. I tried a few times, it's a lot of work for a small, short-lasting reward. The old Internet is dead. Every single time, people end up asking for a discord server. And every single time, the discord ends up killing the forums/boards. MalwareTech (Marcus Hutchins) tried to make a infosec-related forum a few years ago, he has a big following so it attracted a few hundred people. Guess what ? People asked for a Discord after 3-4 months. The Discord killed the website. Every. Single. Time. The old Internet is Dead.

>>76829 If you're in it to learn, sure, that's a fine project and you'll learn a lot from doing it. If you really want it to get used, but don't want to deal with running the site... nah. >>76934 I feel like the real answer is to not make a Discord. Those people can suck cock. It really is poison to the web, I've seen exactly the same garbage happen too often. If it causes people to leave, you genuinely didn't want them.

>>76928 If the cozy boards exist, there must be a link somewhere! But trust me you'll have to work 8 hours a day to find one, and still you may fail. That would require scrupulous investigation of all and every board, both bigger and smaller to track down anything relevant mentioned and then proceed further. This is why I say it is ridiculously has and why you learn conversation with gods. These niche cozy sites are scared to death (and for a good reason) of attracting people, so they will do their best to conceal their existence.

>>76829 https://wired-7.org (Spanish board, I don't use it , but I'm Spanish also) I think you should take a look into this, is the usual timeline: https://digdeeper.club/cemetery.xhtml I seen a lot of communities rebooting and die, and I there is always a degree of degeneration when get excessive public, people trying to get noticed or spamming etc. Is true discord is an excessive comfort way to publish, making the entry excessive low and can get a lot of nonsense. This happened with forums too, with the points systems and gamification, but I think this type of users are more interested in discord, because they have an instant satisfaction. My first worry about open a community owning server is people uploading illegal soykaf which could get you into trouble. I could prefer to force them to upload elsewhere and take the problem away , leaving only text for the server. For myself ( someday ) I have the idea of create a public community used like a honeypot, where you contact with the ones you found interesting there after observe them, sending them invitation to the real private SECRET server. Anyway you can do the same going to another boards and getting in contact. Yep, old net is ded. The niche places has become degraded to discord servers which appears and disappears and everybody is distributed, now there is a lot of places to choose, not easy to find by search, and they are not much better (walled gardens). Remember years ago there was not so much places to choose ( and not so big ) , and the level entry for use internet was higher: You needed a bulky pc tower with land connection, and there was not gain money involved. So found the right people could be harder now. Anyway I found some good mind folks online , but I had them from years ago. I'm not active looking now... But I think it must be harder.

>>76943 Yes lain, quality, and somebody really relatable. So simple. So ridiculously impossible. Anyway, I've got your idea with your site. Good luck, then? Just be prepared that you're signing up for a great deal of free trouble, but I wish you best and wish you whatever lain you are comfortable talking with.

>>76935 >I feel like the real answer is to not make a Discord. Those people can suck cock. Tried that too. Didn't work. They just end up creating unofficial discords and the most populated one just becomes their go-to place, they start advertising it on the website and even with heavy moderation it kills the site. Lainchan and some imageboards/forums survive just because of the 'schizo' mentality. Most people here are 'afraid' of discord privacy policy and/or want strictly anonymous discussions. It doesn't work for most communities. No need to make another one of those tho, it's already pretty hard to keep the ones that are active alive. Even big ones like Lainchan are on life support.

>>76952 Doesn't it ask for a phone number?

>>76956 you can just buy a throwaway phone number The worse soykaf is that they dont even accept many email domains. You have to make a fuarrrking gmail or something too. But it'll just give weird errors if they dislike you for reasons like this. It is pure cancer. I just gav e up on making an account since the difficulty of the account-making process offended me when i wasnt even trying to be highly private. I just wanted to use my normal email but that wasnt good enough

>>76960 I used to think this was important. Had workflows for roaming throwaways from multiple countries, esims, paying monero for aged accounts, buying twilio and voip accounts with vanilla gift cards. But after awhile of trying to stay connected to the main stream social media, I just realized that the only people on discord, facebook and any site that checks phone numbers are ultra garbage sub-specii to humans and there are better places on the net without them. Matrix is poppin now. IRC still good. BBS is coming back. Usenet is starting to open free zones again. And then theres fediverse, and other emerging protocols. Also there's packet radio that's starting to grow. People using POCSAG again. There are better places where the garbage portion of humanity is so dumb they can't even figure out how to get into these places. So it's better to not even try to stay on any network that is built to collect user data and where they make it extremely easy for the dumbest of humanity to join, with just a number.

>>76972 xmpp and irc years ago, now they're dead. irc is totally dead i've sat on every public server i could find so if there's activity it's hidden away. >>76973 i agree xmpp leaks a lot of information too, but it's nowhere near as severe as matrix, the one big issue with xmpp is keystroke deanonymization, but this is everpresent, i think all instant messengers suffer keystroke deanonymization.

>>76976 none of that soykaf is reliable. and wtf are you doing with your life if you type here same as with your public persona. Modern like is all about being shizo and managing multiple personas tailored to usecase

Like anything that's matured, it will only be successful if you think outside the box. Just look at the amount of "altchans" on ccd0's imageboards.json and 90% of them are totally dead.

>>76976 actually the keystroke deanonymization i meant was more like stanza deanonymization, i guess that's what you call it. basically whenever you interact with your client the client sends activity stanzas to all connected servers, so anyone in a chatroom you're connected to can know when you're at your client. the keystroke deanonymization you mentioned isn't a big deal.

>>76945 >Even big ones like Lainchan are on life support. I used to run a bot which collected PPD stats from various imageboards, but I haven't run it since 2021. I'm tempted to quickly update it (was python hack scripts) but lainchan was on the lower end, above 7chan but well below place like sportschan, leftypol and hispachan. To call this a big imageboard is(was?) questionable, even if it is pretty active and stable.