We’ve been having unstructured conversation in General about the possibility of opening t/suki to the public. I’ve been pretty undecided on whether or not t/suki should be invite-only forever.
The benefits of being open to the public mean that we have several more possibilities open to us that we could provide as a benefit to streamers and game developers, like:
We could add categories and channels for developers and streamers.
Categories would be like having a mini-forum. Forums are usually otherwise difficult and costly to set up as a developer, if you want to use something other than what’s provided by your platform (like itch.io or Steam). We could share the costs of running the instance, including not just software but also human work like moderation (if that’s desired).
Channels would be like having an alternative to a Discord server, increasing our ability to be a compelling alternative to Discord.
It would be much easier to grow membership, increase activity, and reach more people.
But it also means:
Git hosting would either be accessible to everyone (and I would no longer feel comfortable with the current soft quota limits) or there would need to be some kind of automated or manual application process to gain access.
We have to do a lot more work to deal with bots, spammers, scammers, etc.
in general it's a bit of a catch 22 because it would make sense to host dev-adjacent communities of devs and streamers once tsuki is already big, not prone to being dominated by streamer-specific stuff, and can deal with the moderation workload of having many unvetted users join, but also, dev/streamer communities could help tsuki get to that point
I also like the invite-only culture, and would like to have it for longer, or at least see how far it can go.
I think it can also make it more appealing for some folks to join and become active. It’s a point of honour (even if a small one) to be invited, and the positive effect it has on the community, in terms of friendliness and quality of discussion, is attractive as well.
It may be a good idea to eventually open tsuki to registration, and I’ll support your decision to do it when you do, but in my opinion it would make sense to get there rather gradually. I presume we wouldn’t want a small community to become overshadowed by one or two streamers’ following, or disruptive users.
Another way I could see to start getting the benefits you mentioned is to have streamers with smaller, known good communities post invite links with shorter lifetimes (not 90 days but maybe 3-5 days?) in their twitch chat and such. That way folks we generally know to be friendly could join at TL1, and the potential numbers of disruptive users would remain manageable.
The streamers could get their own chat channels and possibly categories - though I’d be cautious to not flood the list of categories (and category view on the homepage) with streamer-specific stuff. Are subcategories a thing?
I dunno about the specifics, but yeah. This currently feels to me like this wonderful, idealized world, like every time I go to this forum it’s like a time machine where I get to use the internet during an era when people weren’t crazy. I used to go on the Mario World Central forums when I was far too young, and gained an appreciation fast for the kind of amazing work people could do from around the world, when united on a manageable scale.
The AI scraping and DDoSing going on, along with just the training of data, scares the living daylights of me. I know they’re reading and using these words for it, probably, which stinks!! In some ways, I almost wish the forum were even more private, like it couldn’t even be publically read by the robo-goons.
Being here has already paid dividends, and I hope I can repay some of the rewards I’ve reaped just by being a good community member.
But my reservations about the forum being public come from the following, which may not be assumed as true and I gladly ask that you challenge me on, as necessary:
Good culture online these days is hard to find; harder to maintain. The way everything scales means bad actors can work their way in pretty easy without notice. That is a way harder issue to solve as site-runners compared to slow growth, which I contend isn’t really an issue.
I like the idea of being invite-only mainly because right now, the forum is still pretty new, and I think it’ll be better to try and fix up and improve the forum before releasing it to the public. Plus, it’s easier to manage the community right now, mainly because the people here are supporting each other positively, and I think that maybe down the line, when you have more time, you can have some form of management and security measures to prevent griefing.
I’m torn. The big argument for making it public is how good that’s gone with the discord being pubic, but even then this space has felt more cozy to me than that one.
It woud mean an increased workload, which I’m not sure how that’d work, but forums have obvious handled in the past. I’m kinda growth-agnostic, both small and big communities can be great.
I’ve been thinking about this over the last few days, and I want to say I think I agree that right now doesn’t feel like the right time to open t/suki to the public. I don’t think I want to rule it out indefinitely, but we can revisit that conversation later.
On the topic of actually going the other direction, however…
…I surprisingly found myself open to the idea of making the forum only accessible if you were logged in as I thought about it more. However, I don’t really want to do it because it goes against one of the reasons I wanted to make a forum in the first place. I’ve found that as Discord has expanded its reach, when you’re looking for information or help on something you now sometimes run into a “join our discord” call to action instead. So much information gets locked behind closed doors.
I don’t want t/suki to become another place like that, where knowledge, wisdom, and advice is only available to those willing to make their presence known in a chat room and then trudge through disorganized chat logs. Being able to explore and learn freely by reading forums I wasn’t a part of was one of the things I loved about the internet growing up. It let me decide which forums I wanted to be a part of too, because I only needed to make an account if I wanted to post.
I think there’s a balance we can achieve here though. We could install Anubis to require a proof of work before the site is accessed, to make it costly for scrapers to read our website but still keep the forum available for everyone to view. Proof-of-work also comes with its downsides, as it could become an impediment to people with computers that aren’t very powerful. However, I believe Anubis handles this situation well, at least as far as the current arms race is concerned.
I wouldn’t mind Anubis (or similar) to keep the darned scrapers away. But if it hampers people from being able to use the forum… that probably isn’t worth the trade
I made a topic to discuss Anubis more, since it’s a bit too off-topic for this one. I’ve provided some information about who exactly it would affect there.
