New blogpost about the age assurance of #discord
https://blog.boykisser.nl/2026/02/11/discord-the-alternatives-et-al/

#stoatchat #forums #phpbb #smf #blogpost #ageverification

Trying to replace my book club discord server with a #Zulip instance... not sure this is "it" but it's probably more "it" than matrix, stoat, etc.

Not sure if #Zulip is gonna be it or if I'm just gonna have to spin up a #phpBB forum for it.

Ugh. Fucking enshittification of Discord.

WRT #Discord, there's an effectively unsolvable conundrum we can't really face, folks. We'd all like the high moral standards that are found in the #OpenSource community, when done right: nobody screwing each other over for their PII, and other forms of leverage (walled-garden lock-in). Geeks get this, normies don't. (This gulf is very hard to cross, IMHO, without resorting to actual educational curriculum explaining it in schools.)

But then we have conflicting desires: we *also* want the buttery smoothness to a secure messaging ecosystem - total convenience, total functionality, *complete with a level-playing-field, "Net Neutral" infrastructure to run it on*, with no lobbied government or tech-bro interference skewing the traffic rules (QOS Rules). Good luck with that one, without strong gov't control, and solid grassroots lobbying behind it.

Lets be honest: #Signal is so great *because tens of millions of dollars were charitably spent on it*. Moxie didn't do his genius work *for free*. Where are tens of millions of *more* dollars going to come from, to make a Discord alternative? Would that be nowhere? Look, there's no quick and easy answers to Discord enshittifying. I've looked at #XMPP, #Matrix, #Deltachat, #Discourse, #Flarum, #PHPBB, #Zulip, #Mattermost, etc. and *each has its warts*. You'll dislike each of them, for different reasons. Each paints itself into a different corner. *There were no tens of millions of dollars upfront, at an early design phase, overlooked by qualified Computer Scientists, to prevent this, in each and every case.* #IRC doesn't bear mention in this comparison. None is the perfect replacement or answer. *None had those tens of millions of dollars which Signal had.*

Alas, they don't stand a chance to be the all-singing, all-dancing solutions that the techbros can finance, *along with their predictable, rotten lack of a moral compass to accompany the slickness.* Every non-geek teenager will side with the techbros, owing to 1) convenience, and 2) that's where their friends are, *which mean the world to a teenager*.

So in summary, we are doomed by our own psychological limitations, as a demographic. The psychological predators - the techbros - can't help but prey on the normies, and the normies can't help but turn to the predators, who at least offer convenience, if no other thing. And the geeks who have a moral compass stand in the middle, ignored by-and-large, feeling anxious and powerless, not having any tens of millions of dollars behind their altruism.

#infosec

#CassandraSyndrome #actuallyAutistic @autistics

There are a lots of alternatives to discord.

IRC is essentially the same thing as textchannels on discord. For speech you can use teamspeak, or mumble.

You can also set up a forum using phpbb, or simple machines forum. All you need is a webhost that supports PHP, and MySQL.

Blog post coming

#discord #IRC #forum #phpbb #smf

Insufferable Retro-Minimalist Web Dweebs are Nostalgic for an Internet That Never Was

There is a piece of nostalgia that I do not understand that verges on being a simulacrum. Gen X thinking sites in the 1990s were HTML-only, with no databases or scripts. I have been coding websites and participating in various forums since I was a teenager, which means I was there for the rise of PHP- and MySQL-driven sites. I used to write IRC scripts for mIRC a long, long time ago.

The bulletin board forums they are so nostalgic for were powered by HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. phpBB and SMF were the ones in the late ’90s and early 2000s that many Millennials and Gen Xers recall being on. In the mid-to-late 1990s, many sites used Perl via CGI to generate dynamic content. Some used flat files, while others used early databases.

In the mid-1990s, many sites were already generating pages on the fly using server-side code. A lot of them used Perl via CGI. These scripts handled things like guestbooks, counters, forums, and form submissions, then output plain HTML to the browser. The end result for the visitor was always HTML; however, the site was actually dynamic. For some weird reason, a lot of Gen Xers believe that the Internet was static. It wasn’t, lol.

People do not tend to think of flat files as databases. One of the first things drilled into your head in any introductory database design course is what a database is—and why a flat file counts as one. The development of PHP, which powers this blog, was a reaction to Perl being a pain in the ass.

In the early web, dynamic behavior like forms, guestbooks, and forums was usually implemented with Perl via CGI. This meant the server launched a new Perl process for every request, manually handled inputs, and printed HTML line by line. It was slow, verbose, and difficult to maintain. Developers were forced to juggle Perl’s idiosyncratic syntax, CGI mechanics, and HTML generation all at once.

PHP emerged as a response to that frustration. It allowed logic to be embedded directly into markup and ran more efficiently alongside the web server. PHP grew out of the frustrations of writing Perl CGI scripts for server-side HTML generation.

At some point, a weird Mandela Effect occurred, where Gen Xers recall sites being static HTML-only. This gave rise to a strange aesthetic that Neocities capitalized on. A lot of Gen Xers who weren’t actually online back then—and thus have no understanding of the CGI scripts that ran the early Internet on the back end—are creating minimalist narratives and protocols. Gemini capsules are very weird places. It is very bizarre and frustrating.

I have noticed this weird phenomenon among Gen X and millennials where they are nostalgic for something they collectively remember that never happened. This is essentially the Mandela Effect. They create stories that crowd out the memories and records of what really happened, so that we end up with a hyper-real fiction and simulacrum. The nostalgia for an Internet that never existed has led to really bizarre, extremely online Internet cultures. Neocities is one of them.

One of the first sites I ran was on the original GeoCities. Neocities, with its static flat-file aesthetic, and GeoCities are nothing alike. It’s just insane to me how malleable people’s memories are. An Internet hyperstition can reprogram people’s memories and make them recall an experience they never had, for a time that never was. Sites on GeoCities used CGI scripts, guestbooks, hit counters, webrings, frames, and Java applets. One reason they were so tacky was that people would make them far too dynamic for absolutely no reason.

There is a very obnoxious professor I’ve written about before on my main blog. They are part of that weird retro-minimalist web aesthetic dweby gooner Neocities culture. This person has a minimalist HTML-only site where they posted this:

I’m not going to post more than this because, honestly, it is god awful, which is my point:

I told you that it was pretty bad, didn’t I? This is their blog. They have the personality of drying wall paper, don’t they?

This style of writing that you are reading me write in is called stream of consciousness and confessional. That is part of the reason why it is meandering. I am literally writing on the fly. More specifically, this is a personal essay that is meta-critical, confessional, and stream of consciousness. It’s a creative work, in other words. When you are writing in a journal, that is the style people tend to write in. That is different from argumentative or persuasive forms of writing. I’ve outgrown that stage of my life where I feel the need to argue or debate. I may seem very hostile, but in actuality, I like very pluralistic, collaborative forums and formats.

Debates come across as very competitive and, by their nature, performative. In public, random, chaotic forums on the Internet, you’re speaking to much more than the person you’re arguing against. You are also speaking to, and trying to influence or persuade, an audience. It’s competitive, theatrical, and performative. I don’t feel the need to posture or argue, so the way I write is very stream of consciousness and confessional.

It’s just very interesting when a professor fails at confessional writing when there is no adversary, yet is very polemical and articulate when there is one. When this professor is trying to influence, brigade, tear down, criticize, bully, or take on any other polemical tone, they can be very articulate. But when it comes to basic journaling—where there is no one to pick on—they somehow lose their ability to write eloquently.

This, of course, is going to be publicly published. One reason I journal privately sometimes is that it strips you of an audience. The only person who will see it is you, which makes it very apparent when you are performing or trying to lie. Only you are in that space, and you end up trying to lie to yourself. But I guess lying to yourself is how you hallucinate an entire decade of the Internet, lol!