Readit NewsThis is all pageantry.
Edit: whatever the answer is, it needs to work when this pops up frequently, because it will.
Group sizes were smaller and as such easier to moderate. There could be plenty of similar interest forums which meant even if you pissed of some mods, there were always other forums. Invite only groups that recruited from larger forums (or even trusted members only sections on the same forum) were good at filtering out low value posters.
There were bots, but they were not as big of a problem. The message amplification was smaller, and it was probably harder to ban evade.
So do it. Forums haven't gone away, you just stopped going to them. Search for your special interest followed by "Powered by phpbb" (or Invision Community, or your preferred software) and you'll find plenty of surprisingly active communities out there.
If you desperately need a distraction, PBS shows are less bad. A few moments of pacification may be worth not disturbing the other airline travelers.
Daniel Tiger may be helpful to parents too. Interacting with children is not intuitive. Techniques from PBS shows have helped me. For example, singing to kids about trying food is move effective than a well reasoned monologue.
(Of course, you and I know it is, it's just that you're asking it to do a lot)
Decoding it without help would be difficult for the average consumer, but it's not an impossible task.
I played Eve a lot when it first came out up until about 2010 or so. The Alliance politics isn’t my cup of tea. The sandbox is great though. It’s just sad that gamers no longer see that and only want quests or missions or some direction on what to do next.
I’m hoping that with LLMs and AI, we’ll break free of this “waiting to be instructed” mentality of the youth and we can make games that are more diverse and open. Rock Star Games does some wonderful little scripted events and things in their games, they know how, but they still force you down this linear story arch. RDR2 was as close to the kind of game I’m talking about except for that fact. The fact that each “chapter” was a linear progression across the open world map.
Either way, if it does come to pass, I hope it doesn't become the norm. I am not interested in playing a game nobody was interested in making.
My take is that there are two layers of friction:
a) people that care about chat encryption and would be willing to change, already did, to Telegram and/or Signal. "I'm not going to install yet another chat app" is a real answer by a friend of mine
b) no one wants to either host their own server, nor pay someone to host it for them. If it wasn't for me and a one of my friends, none of the people I chat with daily would be on Matrix.
And yes, there is the matrix.org server. Out of the ~13 people I chat frequently with, 1 is on matrix.org. "What's the point of changing apps if I'm still going to be using the centralized server" is another answer I've gotten.
I don't know what the solution to this dynamic is other than us, the power users, setting it up and paying for the group of people around us.
I hear this every time anyone brings up a federated chat/social media/anything service, and I just don't get it. If you don't want to host it, don't. There are plenty of servers out there, and a lot of them are free. Yeah, you have to trust the person hosting it, but why is that only a problem for federated services?