That being said, I am guilty of helping building Zig communities on Discord, but in my defense none (literally none) of the FOSS alternatives was good enough at the time. And I'm also not really happy with plenty of the newer ones.
I'm now working on my own take of what an open source Discord alternative should look like and I plan to move away from Discord by the end of the year. You can find it on codeberg, it's called awebo, I'm intentionally not posting a link since these are super early days.
Maybe you have to accept that communities are here and now, but they can dissolve at any time.
But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs. In addition to environmental, economic, political reasons not to build something, also consider the cost to potentially breaking existing community bonds. We shouldn’t build new high density housing because the new residents will never be able to replicate the community of the previous low density single family home neighbourhood.
You can tell this is a NIMBY piece because it doesn’t touch on how to build new communities, just that existing ones exist and new ones can’t be built and even if they can they’ll be poor imitations of the old ones. So instead of trying to build new things, let’s preserve what we have already. It would have been more interesting and honest if it had explored the role of say, third spaces and how consciously creating the right conditions can lead to community formation.
After all, even the communities that exist today were empty land once upon a time, until we built the infrastructure and community within. If all we ever did was preserve we wouldn’t even have the communities today that we value so much.
How much are NIMBYs actually a problem these days? It seems to me that YIMBYs insisting on building anything, anything, anything at all, damn the cost, be it a privately developed five over one or a publicly funded ferris wheel downtown, are a much bigger issue now. We should be intentional about the communities we are developing (say, FUCKING PUBLIC HOUSING), and ideally not spoonfeeding capital more of our lifeblood as most YIMYs insist on
NIMBYs are doing great, I’d say.
NIMBYs, or just typical anglo incompetence? How can you tell the difference? It's easy to blame other people for systemic dysfunction.
I think you could ascribe this to either NIMBY or YIMBY harebrained thinking. We need a third option that's pro-human.
We need public fucking housing.
If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs would really oppose the idea.
Also, the article touches Moses, right, but it is about communities as a concept, with a heavy emphasis on online communities, where 'new things to buy' do not come at the expense of 'tearing down the old' - and where, when you tear down the old, behaviour patterns change. Take, for instance, the reddit re-design, which changed the page's culture. Or usage patterns of RSS post Google-Reader-shutdown.
Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.
Migrants or refugees have to find a new community because their old one was broken for whatever reason, be it war, financial troubles or something else. So in that case, that first breakage of community should have been prevented and the community preserved.
Out with this garbage. Defund the bullies.