Hi all!

Hi all!

Hi all!

Since Google announced the slow slow death of G+ last October, I’ve been thinking about options for this group. Among my criteria are that the place be friendly, welcoming and inclusive and that not be a burden on my time that delays actual game design and production work.

With those in mind, and following the conversations last October (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+HamishCameron/posts/RBcukQMEA8a), I’ve been scouting some options and I’ve found two new ones:

The Sprawl has had a fan-run subreddit for a while (reddit.com – r/thesprawl). From what I’ve seen, the atmosphere is similar to the G+ community: welcoming, helpful, and enthusiastic about the game.

Through that I also discovered a fan-run Discord (https://discord.gg/HpDp9et) that also fulfills my criteria but offers a different medium for those that prefer this kind of chat community. It also plays to Discord’s strengths by hosting games.

I’ll also add a reminder of the other official digital spaces that I do run: https://www.facebook.com/TheSprawlRPG/ and https://twitter.com/thesprawl_rpg and of course http://www.ardens.org

I think the combination of these spaces satisfy all of my requirements and I will continue monitoring them and contributing to discussions in all of the above. If those options lack something for you, I welcome the creation of new positive and welcoming community-run spaces. If you know of any that exist already or you’d like to create one and want me to share it, let me know below or send me a message or an email (hamish at ardens dot org)!

15 thoughts on “Hi all!”

  2. Mischa Krilov Possibly. I downloaded the “data” but it seems to be just a list of links to the relevant G+ pages, so I’m not sure what will happen when G+ closes down.

  3. Has been MeWe been considered? Most Spanish speaking I know have moved to there. It is kind of a mix of g+ and discord having posts and a chat.

  4. I’ve looked into it before, KaribuI, (and I looked into it again just now), but MeWe’s business model is explicitly permissive of hate groups and that seems unlikely to change.

    (I understand that lesser versions of the same charge can be leveled against most social media environments, but there’s a difference between realizing that a nasty thing is in the same space as you and deliberately moving into the same space as the nasty thing.)

  5. I’m a little sad that so many G+ groups are going over to MeWe, which suffers from being a walled garden as well as a haven for the alt-right. Reddit may have its share of lowlives, but there are plenty of tools to block them while still making the content easily searchable and viewable by nonsubscribers. It’s also very easy to create new subreddits so discussion groups can fragment themselves as much as they want to, even to the point of creating private groups.

    The only thing I don’t care for about Reddit is its focus on anonymity, which seems to always bring out the worst in people. The one good thing you can say about Facebook is that people are more likely to watch what they say when they know their mothers and their bosses can see it.

  6. Hamish Cameron I’ve been using the G+ Exporter tool to export communities for folks. It spits out meaningful and useful WordPress, Blogger, and JSON formats.

    Doubleplus upvote for no Mewe, BTW.

  8. I have only recently become aware of MeWe as gaming sites have moved there. I have yet to run into anything untoward, though, I am not searching for them so maybe if one isn’t looking for alt-right or alt-left crud, one can simply ignore them. It seems that the more public nature of G+ lends itself to the potential of more political trolls than MeWe does given that you have to join a group to review it, for the most part. And, as a guy who deals with unsavory elements as part of my day job, let me tell you that there is no haven against them, and there are plenty of them on the far more public and prolific groups than I have ever found on G+ and have yet to find on MeWe.

    Sadly, with some sites effectively evaporating into the ether into multiple locations, I’m afraid the support that some games receive will be further divided. I found G+ to me an excellent resource for my gaming needs, and have so far found MeWe to be a distant but moderately adaptable second. Discord and Reddit can get overwhelming and can be difficult to manage when the conversations get lengthy – not to mention that the Discord application or .exe running in the background can be annoying when you are part of many groups.

  10. Carl Walter I definitely share your concerns about the interface and technical aspects. As much as I like G+, it also isn’t perfect either, especially when it comes to navigating long conversations. The community and the accumulated knowledge are the things I’m most concerned about, but also with a realistic assessment of my own resources, particularly in terms of time.

  12. MeWe is great, you should not feel threatened by its free-speech model if you truly have no control-freak tendencies within your soul. Ideas don’t get any “safe space” there and bad ideas can be criticized, yes, but this has a cleansing effect. The Tabletop RPG forum there specifically forbids political incursions of any sort.

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