TTRPGs as Community as Technology Backslides
The other half of Alex's blog posts about Big tech killing community
I guess the point is all find and keep your community however you can, and here are some ideas if your community largely plays online.
This is part of a cross-site blog post series, the other is on https://alextheward.com/blog//big-tech-is-wrecking-community/
I've been thinking a lot about community lately, especially how it relates to technology, my work, and my hobbies. For those of you who are just coming to this blog post blind, I have a split professional life. On this site, I discuss TTRPG topics, and promote the TTRPG games and adventures I've made. I also write some fiction. Over on the other side of the house, I'm a software developer / architect. Most recently I've been doing work in the authentication space. In both spaces, I loathe LLMs. I don't want to bring them up, but I think they're a symptom of the world we're finding ourselves in.
In many ways, this is an extension of On Closed Ecosystems, where I talked about this problem almost a year ago now. These two posts are much angrier, as the problem has only gotten much, much worse, and we're being forced into more closed spaces by platform concerns.
Over on the other half of this blog, I discuss at length the degradation of online spaces, especially those that claim to be a "public commons". Here, I want to expand upon that to discuss both TTRPGs as an anchor for community in the turbulent ocean of online space, and some ways I'm working to preserve community as every platform seems to get shittier.
This is partly an admission that I, too, will be creating more closed platforms from necessity, but I'm also leaning heavily into federated services in an attempt to keep connected to the wider web. So this time, I'm going to talk about what I'm actually doing.
Some Grounding
Let's talk a bit about the scope of this piece. I am a member of a bunch of TTRPG Discord servers, but I don't regularly participate in the main conversations there. I will sometimes chime in a lot for stretches of time, but I find it difficult to keep engaged with more than a few communities at a time, and tend to spend more of my effort on a few communities rather than broad swaths. So, keep that in mind as we discuss.
I also have two separate TTRPG groups that meet virtually, regularly. One of these groups is my regular recreational group, we've been playing every week for nearly two decades. The other group is more playtest focused: We meet for a few hours to try out the games we're making or the adventures we've written (frequently both at the same time).
Both of these groups meet over Discord, and use various online tools to interact with one another. For the first, Foundry VTT is important to our game, along with some other self-hosted things I'll get into shortly. The latter largely shares things over Google Drive.
We've tried other systems before, I've been running a forum for years after taking over the forums from another member (which went completely sideways for human reasons, and we lost a few years worth of posts).
Anyhow, let's keep that in mind as I talk about this.
Discord is the main point of failure right now
So, you'll notice that both groups are currently using Discord for real time communication and event planning (using Discord's event reminder feature). The majority of TTRPG and software communities I'm a member of are also on Discord.
I feel like this is a problem, because Discord is currently planning an IPO and there's a very solid chance they're going to make the user experience worse as things progress. Maybe they won't, but every single platform that I've been a part of that does an IPO has eventually turned to crap.
It's like we're on an endless hamster wheel of "scrappy company comes along to challenge bad incumbent, captures enough user / market share, tries to cash out, becomes the crappy incumbent" of chat platforms, except this time with more synthetic text.
There's not much I personally can do about the larger communities, they're going to congregate where it's easiest and they'll stay there until the cost of leaving is less than the pain of staying, and that might be for a long time yet. But for my smaller groups, the cost of switching is pretty low, and if I can make the authentication experience easy and make myself the not-single-point-of-failure, I can maybe make this work.
For my smaller communities, I'm back to investigating self-hosting different chat systems with WebRTC support for voice / video chats.
There are a lot of things in this space, and all of them have various drawbacks. I'm not sure where it's going to land, but I'm leaning towards running a Matrix home server. Here's a brief summary of the things I'm looking at:
Revolt
Revolt
Revolt is very much a Discord clone, which can be self-hosted. The main issues right now is that they've broken their voice chat integration on self-hosted installs, and are in the process of a "total rewrite". It also doesn't support threading, which is important to my communities.
Element 🕸️
Element and Matrix are federated chat protocols. You can run your own Matrix homeserver, your own web client, and then interact with the rest of the Matrix ecosystem. It supports threading, end-to-end encryption (E2EE), and a number of other good features. Also supports OIDC logins, which is a plus for my groups since I also run a bunch of authentication services. Voice and Video are provided by Jitsi. The main downside is that it's slow.
An XMPP Server 🕸️
I love XMPP. I've used it on and off for decades. There are several server implementations, it supports (E2EE) kinda sorta, OTR chats, group chats, voice/video servers over XMPP, and the like. My main problems are the lack of threading support in most clients (this is XEP-0201, but not well implemented), and there's only one real "modern" web client (which will be important to friend accessibility).
Zulip
Zulip is weird. Everything is thread-based. You have to type into a topic or start a new one, and all topics are grouped together. This is very handy for one Discord I'm in, that uses the "forums" feature, but almost everything else about Zulip is just clunky.
Mattermost
This is very much a business Slack-like, and I'm not sure how well it'd work for communities. It's got a lot of the features I'd like, but it's not free and the pricing model isn't designed for just friend groups in mind.
Rocket.Chat
Another Slack-like. I've run Rocket.Chat for my group before, and I could do it again. It was "fine". Fine is good.
Discord also provides forum features
As you might recall, back in On Closed Ecosystems I spent a fair amount of time that Discord was also taking over Forums that can't be exported.
This one is easier for my group, I've been running a Discourse server for years. We've not really been using it, but it's easy enough to get it running again as I've been quietly keeping it updated over the years.
The other stuff I'm doing
Like I mentioned before, one group makes heavy use of a VTT for our games, and this is provided by me hosting Foundry VTT:
Foundry is a one-time payment for the software, and then you can host it wherever you want. I've got it on a VPS. It works well, aside from some weird issues with music not wanting to play.
Another thing is we keep a bunch of campaign notes in a wiki, for which I'm running Outline:
For Voice / Video, there are a few other options, but Jitsi has worked the best for me in the past:
This does require a bit of knowledge about RTC / STUN / TURN for effective comms, but otherwise it works peer-to-peer.
Collaboration
I've become increasingly wary of Google Drive. To the point where I prefer to not interact with it. Instead I'm using hosted Nextcloud through Hetzner's managed service.
Unfortunately, getting online document collaboration working requires some configuration. So I'm currently running a separate Collabora CODE server that is connected to Hetzner. Hopefully they'll get the OnlyOffice integration working again, but it's currently broken and Hetzner won't run CODE for you on their managed service due to the system requirements.
What about Social media
I've been running my own Mastodon server for a long time now, but it's on a domain that no one but me wants to use (probably).
If any of my direct friends wants to get on the Fediverse through Mastodon, I'll stand up another server for them or direct them to https://dice.camp.
Relatedly, I run a Peertube instance for my video content here, and that's open to my friends as well, but it's unlikely that anyone in the RP groups have a need for this unless they want to live stream.
This seems to require a lot of technical know-how
Unfortunately, it does. I'm not sure how to solve for this, because it seems like getting away from walled gardens requires building up the knowledge and skill to DIY software, which is not an easy task.
This is one reason communities wind up on closed platforms, it's easy to set up and maintain. But it's someone else's garden.
I think this is why I like Federated social media so much. It's a bunch of different community gardens that can all talk to each other, and collectively block themselves off from bad servers.
So, my current thought on this is that we should spend time helping community organizers find folks who want to maintain infrastructure (who might be the same human) and also get them easier tooling. There are a lot of spiky edges out there we can rough out.
Otherwise, I'm considering putting together a package for docker-compose or kubernetes that will stand up the whole stack with an SSO provider that you can more easily run, but I'm not sure if there's enough demand for that to warrant the work. Lemme know if this is something you'd be interested in.
Thanks for reading my rant, friends. Stay safe out there and build/cultivate your communities.