I really like chapo because it feels like an example of a genuine community that exists mainly on social media, and I think that's pretty rare. So I was wondering what traits or or advantages chapochat had that contributed to its success in fulfilling this sort of niche. And maybe how this differs from other forms of social media. Any of you folks have any ideas?
I think what makes this community stand out is how you can be a lot more personal here. You can pretty much talk about anything here (within reason), and a lot of people have shared some very personal stuff here and have it been validated by others. You don't get that on a subreddit or a Facebook group, the scope of conversation is too narrow. On twitter everything is too decentralised for you to feel a sense of community, instead, you just feel like individual fish in a huge sea.
I get that, I wonder how much of that is the small size, and if you could theoretically have a website with millions of users but still retain healthy communities like this one.
The main draws of chacha for me are:
- the straightforward and topic-focused interface
- the non-chronolinear nature of recursively threaded discussion
- the voting mechanic
- and the fact the community argues in good faith and has some historical knowledge.
The first three grow from the developers and sysadmins, and I think the second one is especially vital to keeping me around — forums, imageboards, and especially discord have crippling structural flaws related to linearity of discussion that I think create a streak of validation-seeking emotional manipulation arms race posters. The third is just maximizing dopamine through those sweet, sweet upbears.
The fourth is partially what the community is centered around, and partially the vigilant admin staff. To wind up here, you largely have to be paying attention to the political situation around yourself and taking a leftist angle on it, which kinda filters out dumb shit grognards. That means I don't get the elementary sophistry in my inbox that shows up on reddit. Good administration means there isn't a bunch of transphobic or racist shitflinging, the avoidance of which is vital to my mental health.
A capitalist social network like twitter or reddit operates under some seriously perverse incentives of maximizing any interaction no matter how negative. Chacha operates under no metric whatsoever afaik — it's not like we have stakeholders. So the admins can be as judicious and banhappy as they want, all they have to do is maintain the mandate granted to them by the users, a mandate renewed every day by the fact that we show up.
It's sort of an online benevolent dictatorship, except since it operates in an inconsequential way relative to the flow of capital, it's permitted to exist. And if things turn sour I don't die in the streets.
This pretty much covers all my reasons for thinking this is a good site. For me, the potential of being able to discuss non-leftist-specific topics (current events, theory, history, etc.), like hobbies, pop culture, gender, life advice, etc., in a place where I know people are coming from roughly the same place I am is really refreshing. As you said, here we dont deal with the sophistry of debate-me CHUDs in our inboxes because they get banned. Also in other forums people who aren't CHUDs but aren't leftists can speak in ways that are subtly racist, transphobic, sexist, etc. which really gets on my nerves and exhausts me, but here we downbear the worst cases of that and people delete their comment, have it deleted by mods, or just get torn into by angry commenters which sets a kind of standard for speech that makes me very comfortable here and I'm sure others can relate.
the non-chronolinear nature of recursively threaded discussion
I am not a scientist please explain like I'm baby (I'm baby)
Comment threads can branch off in infinite branches rather than just appearing in a line
Oh yeah, that's good shit, discord was unreadable to me because it didn't have that
Chacha operates under no metric whatsoever afaik — it’s not like we have stakeholders
hipster social capital
Here is another example that might be interesting to discuss, although it seems to be a lot smaller than chapochat.
https://kolektiva.social/invite/2MeqvBNw
Its another social media platform called kolektiva. Its meant to be federated and decentralized, an interesting project I think. But as i said it seems to be dead unfortunately.
It looks to be based on Mastodon, which is to Twitter as Lemmy is to Reddit.
I more meant, what’s that mastodon instance for?
ah i see, I think its meant to be a secure platform for anarchists to organize.