Not only a lot of communities are hidden because of Discord (at least with Reddit they were more discoverable), the worst part is the fact that they are unsearchable or behind a paywall.
Like the "join my discord if you pay at least 3$/mo!" is pretty innocent but you are gatekeeping a community that before was pubblic.
If we are talking about something like a content creator focused about an hobby or pc problems you can see how Google will become even more useless.
Reddit was the least bad choice between it and Discord but has failed the "i want to be a social network".
The big thing about discord is you can chat now with people but the knowledge is not in a good format to come back to later.
However, if you managed to find the forum on a search engine and took the trouble to sign up for an account, you are more likely to abide by the general vibe of the place, rather than Redditize it with shallow, meme-y comments that reliably get a lot of upvotes.
Independent forums (phpBB, and the like) often came up on searches before this communities moved to Facebook Groups, where they’re mostly set to private due to spammers.
Similarly there was a time when Google indexed tweets more or less live, so you could find information for very recent events. I think Twitter asked for money and so that was the end of this.
Now I think Reddit, and maybe Stack Overflow, are the only things helping Google be anything more than an extremely hostile version of the yellow pages. I fear Reddit might at some point withdraw their content from Google and that’ll be the end of it.
I upgraded to VPS for $500. The other admin spent 15-20 hours fixing/troubleshooting/transferring. And you know what? At the end of all this, I paid to give my data to these jerks, to keep it online for them to harvest. The forums are dead quiet.
Now I think, Discord is fine. They'll just sell the data to AI companies directly, the burden won't fall on me.
The open internet seems increasingly predatory and a place where some gigantic ML company just vacuums up your stuff or resells your content for ad revenue, parasitic.
I don't mind the fact and think it's honestly a natural reaction to this that people guard their information. It's sort of like a medieval monastery version of the internet where people recognize that information is cultivated rather than just some commodity you scrape off the web.
I think many of us (wrongly) have a tech-centered view of online communities -- witness the multitude of "Show HN" posts that are "look! I made an online place for humans to congregate and discuss X".
The tech stack matters little (if at all), but bootstrapping the community's trust and culture (and maintaining both) are most of the heavy lifting, and the differentiator for success.
I recently (re)discovered an HN post by one of the core community moderators of deviantArt, and its success was made possible by its culture:
If a business is only on Facebook, I don't do business with them as I don't use Facebook.
A win-win in my book, as I prefer doing business with people whose ethics overlap with my own.
But it's clear that continuing to use Facebook in that manner will only strengthen the isolation effect. Voting with your wallet and going against the machine invariably involves some level of personal sacrifice. For me, sacrificing patronage is incredibly easy to do. There is more to life than commercialization.
My girlfriend says she only uses Facebook to interface with small stores, who use it as a sole point of contact or distribution. Let that sink in for a moment. Breaking this cycle will require hard work.
I have avoided a place with only insta, simply because i couldn’t see anything I needed to.
You used to be able to see a custom feed of a selected friend lists but since they removed that option the site has been completely unusable, unless perhaps you do something like remove 90% of your "friends" and groups but that would hurt usability in different ways.
I liked more the Facebook that showed me the humblebrag posts of my friends/connections (and I'm not being sarcastic)
The topic is FB groups. They aren't spam, at least for those I'm a member. Some groups may be quiet, some are active, but I don't recall coming across spam posts from any of them. A particular group has a rule that members can promote their business once a week, enforced by the group's admin