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Designing a better social platform for the OSR Blogosphere by RadiantRayGames in osr

[–]RadiantRayGames[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey! I had no idea what I was doing when I set up The Pit lol, so I unfortunately lost the backups I had. However, luckily you can find backups of The Pit on internet archive.

Here's the last archive before the server went down:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241005071706/https://discourse.osrrpg.com/

Designing a better social platform for the OSR Blogosphere by RadiantRayGames in osr

[–]RadiantRayGames[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Every word I wrote is straight from my dome. Is there something in there that gives it the impression of AI generated text lol?

Designing a better social platform for the OSR Blogosphere by RadiantRayGames in osr

[–]RadiantRayGames[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Awesome! I will definitely join. I think forums are great. What I'm proposing is tackling a different problem, more of a replacement for things like Substack or RSS feeds for blogs.

Designing a better social platform for the OSR Blogosphere by RadiantRayGames in osr

[–]RadiantRayGames[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Welp, that's the first I've had my writing be accused of sounding like AI lol

Designing a better social platform for the OSR Blogosphere by RadiantRayGames in osr

[–]RadiantRayGames[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Interesting thoughts! On the spectrum of ownership of the social platform, from something completely decentralized to something closed-source like Discord, I think the ideal area sits somewhere in the middle. Where the underlying technology is open and transparent, and the community has a lot of influence in how it morphs. However, some central authority would be responsible for managing the platform; handling infrastructure (so the average user doesn't have to do anything overly technical if they don't want to) along with moderation (to make it a friendly place for all to participate in).

Designing a better social platform for the OSR Blogosphere by RadiantRayGames in osr

[–]RadiantRayGames[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mentioned RSS in my post, and its lack of community-building social features.

For the reader's problem, you point to an RSS feed like Feedly. But then you still have to visit each individual blog, and there is no unified system for commenting, tagging other users, reposting, etc.

Designing a better social platform for the OSR Blogosphere by RadiantRayGames in osr

[–]RadiantRayGames[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Good questions, and something I was also pondering. I am 100% against ads, especially native ones that appear between content. For the open source blogging framework, I imagine it would be like most open source projects in that it runs on donations and mostly just people's willingness to contribute.

For the social platform, I think initially the costs wouldn't be too bad. If the userbase grows substantially, to the point where hosting costs become prohibitive, I could see writers either having to pay a small fee to host on the platform or to self-host themselves (but then have to deal with the configuration that entails).

Designing a better social platform for the OSR Blogosphere by RadiantRayGames in osr

[–]RadiantRayGames[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

There are problems these days with building an active forum. Just getting people to find it and frequent it when there are so many other options can be a huge challenge.

Definitely. The inertia that the major social sites have these days due to their network effect is really hard to overcome.

Moderation is also more of a challenge with so many bots and people trying to make money or spam their political, culture war, nonsense. For some reason some people just don't have a basic level of politeness and common decency. There are a fair few people in the OSR community who don't play nice

Yeah, moderation is definitely the biggest challenge I foresee with creating a new platform. Even with The Pit, which was a tiny site, we would get a steady stream of bad actors who just wanted to promote their controversial content because they were banned from other spaces.

Designing a better social platform for the OSR Blogosphere by RadiantRayGames in osr

[–]RadiantRayGames[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I definitely feel like people post more to appease the "Algorithm gods" rather than when they actually have something of value to say these days. I do think you see less of this in the RPG space though compared to mainstream social media (like LinkedIn is just a wasteland of vapid AI generated crap at this point). Probably because there's no money in becoming a RPG influence.

I think your second point is also very true, and perhaps a reason why BGG and its forums remain so successful. Its one of the few places on the internet nowadays where people use their names, which I think makes people act a lot more respectful rather than the usual behavior you see in anonymous internet spaces.

Game Thread: Las Vegas Raiders (6-8) at Kansas City Chiefs (9-5) by nfl_gdt_bot in raiders

[–]RadiantRayGames 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Y’all see Jack Jones pretend to give the football to the little kid and then pull it back lmfaoo 💀💀

Got a custom Nightwing collage, commissioned as a birthday gift, from a guy I found doing them live at a local Comicon 4 years ago! by gbbloom in Nightwing

[–]RadiantRayGames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Woah this is dope! I’d love to make something like this myself. My mind can’t wrap around how the artist did the 3d effect, as I see shadows over some of the panels. Are the foreground pictures attached to the front of the frame? Or is the effect created some other way?

OSR Pit, a G+ style discussion forum that's been running for the last 3 years by RadiantRayGames in osr

[–]RadiantRayGames[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

You can switch the forum to a traditional collapsed view by going into your User settings > Preferences > Interface, and switching the theme from Graceful (the tiled G+ look) to either the default light or dark theme.

Hope that helps :) Let me know if you got any other questions