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Comment by apitman | Hacker News Reader

We don't need large scale social networks in the first place. The Discord model of small communities is the way forward. Keep groups small enough for natural human social rules to apply. Slows down global dissemination of information for sure, but that's what the news is for, and anything important will eventually travel between communities anyway.

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I don't understand how you can seriously pose Discord as an alternative in this conversation as it's entirely centralized and full of all sorts of toxic behavior and failure modes.

Like at least suggest old school forums, IRC, or usenet.

Discord is technically centralised but in a way that mostly doesn't matter at the point of use, and its design avoids many of the failure modes of old school forums, IRC, or usenet where moderator cabals take control of any community and bully lowly users.

how does it avoid that? i have experienced just as many power tripping mods on discord as i have on irc. the only difference to me is that i have never seen an irc channel with over 20 million users

By making it very easy for every user to start their own server, rather than the multiple tiers of ircops/server admins/etc. where some users genuinely do have more power (and/or a level of technical ability that becomes a difference in power) than others.

The GP didn't say Discord itself, but the Discord-like model of small communities. Ironically it's also the old web forum model.

Almost. The key difference is I can log in to Discord once and post in unlimited communities. The auth UX is excellent. Joining communities is very cheap.

We need an open protocol of this concept.

I can't help but laugh at the irony of posting this in an ATProto thread.

That's essentially exactly what they're trying to solve for although focused on the Twitter use case rather than Discord. And also one of the key advantages of ATProto over ActivityPub.

Yep. Once a system gets too large, its starts to break down and everything you do to make work ends up centralizing the process just like in real life. If you want things to work you keep it small and distributed.

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