If PieFed is so great at replacing chatrooms (like Discord), why are we on zulip and Matrix?
I asked this as a rhetorical question, and then I realised the answer, at least for Me. Chatrooms are harder to miss information on than forums. And PieFed does have a feature to address that, which is that you can make a community notify you of all new posts. But the trouble is, chatrooms do better at getting others’ attention, because not everyone sets a community to notify on all new posts.
Which is why I have a new feature suggestion: a setting community moderators can toggle that makes all new subscribers automatically ring the notification bell. They can still turn it off if they like, but by default, it’s on. For communities where the usual way to engage is that everyone sees every post.
This is an interesting idea and yeah it would, in theory, help replace Discord better.
But in practice, I’m having a tough time thinking WHICH communities would be good like this. Definitely not a !games community. Maybe something niche like !stauf_mansion@lemmy.mods4ever.com lol but I’m not sure if the subscribers there would actually want that.
I don’t think there are any (public) communities like that yet, but if the feature existed, then new kinds of communities would be possible. Like a private admin chat community for an instance. Or something like a crisis help community for suicidal ideation or gender dysphoria. “Post here if it’s an emergency and someone will tell you you’re valid”.