So it's no secret that I kind of despise Web 2.0. Back in the 2000s it was novel, but as time has gone on, reality has time and time again smashed these sites in the face.

Twitter is dying, for like the 243808th time this year. As such, many people have jumped over to Bluesky. The main thread through most of the discussions I've had with my friends regarding Bluesky is whether it will ever actually take off and achieve dominance over Twitter, and whether one should even bother using it. But I think the more pertinent question is whether or not the world even needs yet another Twittter.

I had a Facebook account from 2009 to 2014, and I've had a Twitter account since 2014. I've seen the social media rodeo several times by now. It's good for a while, then the tired for-profit-isms set in and soon the site will be just as unusable as every other platform. It's also an issue on smaller alt sites like Mastodon.

The main way you get any kind of conversation on Twitter is by getting on your soapbox and talking like you're shouting from the mountaintops. I hate this. I've always loathed attention whoring, and a platform where you have to behave like that to sustain basic social interaction gets under my skin very fast. And the way it encourages others to behave is also something that annoys me a lot. Thus you get a lot of inane takes, trendchasing posts that kill most fun interactions and a lot of edgy politics.

I believe, that quite a lot of the aggression we see in the world today is mostly thanks to the algorithmic promotion for profit in social media. But that's a post for another day. The point of this one was that I'm making my own social media, with blackjack, and hookers! Yeah it's a forum.

Distant Illusions, the indie game "studio" I'm running with Mors, will get a new website this year. Hopefully. A part of that refresh is that I wrote a custom forum implementation for the site. Sorry, adoring fans, no Catonator.net forums for the time being.

A few months ago I tried to write a post about why BBSs are superior to anything else. It never got finished, because once I'd finished describing the tiring nature of modern online communications systems, the post was already 4000 words long, and the BBS description took even longer.

I'm still in the belief that the only form online communication really works in is with something that resembles forums. Anything that's based around an attention economy like Reddit or Twitter breaks down over time, since you're never really limited to being seen within your friend group, and as comment sections get more complex, the chances of getting ostracized by the system increase.

The only reason why people are enjoying Bluesky right now is that there's less dipshits in there, and the website doesn't yet have to fight with massive data pools eating away at people's abilities to see everything. The site will suffer the exact same fate as Twitter as time goes on.

Really hoping I'll be able to show off a little more of the system later on. Currently it's all very unfinished and looks like shit (as you can see). Also very much hoping to see some of the people reading this hop over there. I still much prefer using the few forums that have managed to limp on until today, and would like to see them prosper again.