Random thoughts thread

Backlash Мир! Труд! Май!

Man, have I ever mentioned how I love being schizophrenic~?

I was listening to a song at work earlier today, and randomly started hallucinating. Only instead of anything bad, I saw the main character of this ninja romance anime, attending a summer festival.

What followed were, essentially, stills from an anime - her dressed in a red yukata, shooting targets with a bow, getting splashed with water at the rice paper fish game, and generally being very happy. Seeing that made me happy, so I stood there, replaying the song and remembering the dream for a good fifteen minutes.

It makes me want to write stories in medieval Japan, now... Maybe have some adventures in that setting, too. Not everything needs to be grim and gritty. c:

Backlash

So where are we all supposed to go now?

As far as how humans connect to one another, what’s next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to a time when we mostly just talked to the people we know. Maybe that’s a better, less problematic way to live life. Maybe feed and algorithms and the “global town square” were a bad idea.

---

Discord is probably the tool best-suited to capture users’ social needs right now. It’s definitely the best Reddit alternative we have. It’s a clever mix of chat app and broadcast tool, a place where lots of like-minded people could conceivably hang out and connect. But, uh, have you ever been in a Discord with thousands of people? It’s pure chaos, and requires you to either devote your life to keeping up or resolve yourself to missing everything. Discord’s moderation tools are a mess, too, and everyone’s still mad about changing their username.

Speaking candidly, I've recently shied away from Reddit and the bird site myself, returning to places like 4chan, the Fediverse, and especially various Discords. Small ones, the kind you can catch up on in one night.

Perhaps Lewd will rise again, yet? ... I'd say it'll rise, if we lift it.

Backlash Heh, one can dream~

I hope so though. The benefit of sites like Reddit is that you have so much information on pretty much any topic imaginable all reasonably neatly organised in one place. Forums like this will always be somewhat niche in the face of sites like that.

twitter is horseshit now. everyone knows the algorithm so all content is perfectly tailored for it, all replies to every somewhat popular tweet are twitter blue accounts trying to grow their own accounts.

i don't really like using reddit.

discord is making weird changes, hoping it doesn't become awful.

tempted to code a twitter clone but adhd brain prevents that/i doubt it would get much traction. i do have ideas for how to make a twitter clone that isn't just a twitter clone though (like threads/mastodon).

i miss small forums like this one.

clare i miss small forums like this one.

Then fekin use 'em >:|

malmon i'll try. but here i feel kinda obligated to work on the site and help get it active again and i don't really have that energy anymore.

prob the only way i get to that point again is by making lewd 4.0 and even then that would prob just turn into another year long project.

clare That's pretty fair tbh. Hmm, how did Lewd attract people in the first place? Like, I followed an ad on uh... I think it was pomf.io? I doubt it's the same from day 0 though.

malmon people came from a lot of different places.

it started off as just like a few friends from a tech forum and their friends, then people came from all over the place. like:

• i brought in some friends of mine from a site called player.me
• i overpaid on humblebundles to get our link in the top donators until they stopped me from doing that
• we got some ads on 4chan and 8ch.
• our affiliation with lainchan brought in a few people until i was weirded out by their new owner during their weird civil war thing
• i bought out a couple of similar forums and merged them with this one
• we had some advertisements on big general forums

and probably a lot more things i don't really remember

clare Ah, so money. ^^'

i overpaid on humblebundles to get our link in the top donators until they stopped me from doing that

Heh, really? One would think they would be grateful for the extra donation!

malmon Ah, so money. ^^'

@clare doesn't know this, but I've expressed my willingness to pay cash to get ads for the forum.

As for placing a link somewhere visible, I'd be open to ideas.

Backlash
As would I, however, even if we do get ads out there, we'd need some activity to be here for the newcomers, right? I probably wouldn't have stuck around much if this place had only one or two posts a day max. when I joined.

malmon
Hrrm, true... I wish I had friends I could convince to join the site, like Clicky did initially. The past two years have done their damndest to isolate me.

There's gotta be some way we can drum up activity, though. Maybe asking @Steph chan to come back, and start posting again? Timezone differences mean I can't talk to her, but a forum like this would be a great way for us to communicate.

Backlash Timezone differences mean I can't talk to her

If you can talk to me, you can talk to-- oh right, she's in Germany now >_< Well that's only an hour ahead of me ^_^'

i think advertising only goes so far though. i think a large part of lewd's initial success was because i was perma on here working on it so much that i would just instantly dm most new members and try to make friends with them.