For professional (and also personal) reasons I hang out in a lot of different spaces where not mostly gamers, but people who work on and maintain free/libre and open source software also hang out. Generally the opinion is that open platforms (self-hosted or ran by non-profits) is preferable to walled gardens ran by for-profit companies. One name that comes up more and more is Discord. People complaining that open projects choose Discord as their point of contact over forums, IRC, Matrix, XMPP. There are a lot of good reasons for this criticism and I fully agree.
And yet I’m also hanging out in a couple of spaces that are mostly ran by non-technical people who play games. These spaces (at least the ones I am part of) are on Reddit or Discord.
I remember running forums and TeamSpeak for my WoW guild. It’s some amount of work, and that’s when you already have the server or webspace. Alternatively it’s some amount of money per month, probably “just” as much as another MMO sub, but still. I mean, I would not mind paying that for a certain group, but I would absolutely not for others (usually the ones where I just poke my head in once every few weeks)
Reddit and especially Discord solve that problem, and especially for bigger communities with hundreds or thousands of people. Think class discords or the awesome No Pressure community in WoW, or what I recently discovered, the Guild Wars 2 university.
Yes, maybe some of them are in fact ran by technical people – but then I wouldn’t know as a casual observer, everyone can run a Discord server (bad name, it’s also not an instance, they are called guild – but everyone calls it a server, so let’s stick to that), or just get some mods to help out with stuff, without handing them access to your rented or physical server.
So it’s probably all to easy to say: What’s missing is a combined chat/audio call platform based on free software, but also a non-profit that offers free hosting. And that’s usually where it breaks down – even if we ignore that Discord is generally working well and people have figured out how to join and use it. Their mandated use of phone number based verification for newer accounts sucks, though
Back when Facebook was big, we had these same discussions, but the common theme was usually “but that’s where all the people are” – and I think that’s now also true for Discord, but it’s not such a problem, because not everyone plays the same games with the same people.
A lot of rambling, and I don’t have a solution. I guess I’m hoping the free software projects will choose different platforms (but I also don’t see a big problem here, because these free offers do exist for that kind of comunity) and while I would hope some gaming communities would also do that, I think it’s usually just not feasible because no such open hosting platforms exist, and that’s even ignoring that everyone has a Discord account already.