Realtime imageboards might be the solution to the problem traditional imageboards have of exit being very difficult, since they require a large volume of people at once to build up sustainable momentum and not stay dead. Realtime seems to only need a small amount to build active discussion, while still retaining anonymity and transciency, and all the benefits that come from it. Up until now they've really only been used by the insular, hidden /a/ communities that built them but I always thought they had a lot of potential for the rest of the imageboard user base - they're just not that well known.
To test my thesis, I launched one earlier this week using a lightly modified fork of meguca. In 24 hours, it hit 6000 posts, which is a higher rate than 4chan's slower boards. This may partially be due to it targeting the oldfag diaspora, but it points to the fact that until now, true exit from 4chan has been exceedingly difficult. It wasn't even intended as a launch, but just a test run that ended up getting a community. Traditional imageboards struggle desperately to achieve what a realtime imageboard did on accident.
I feel like the attempts to build decentralized imageboard software miss the point. State intervention is a looming threat, but the only immediately critical issue of imageboards has always been ease of exit. imo realtime boards are the future, more people should know about them, and more people should be starting them.
It was a great experiment but the interface could use some more polish. If you fix that up I can see myself using it more often
Xavier Green
imageboards need to be decoupled from the Web if they want to survive in the future internet
Look how NNTPchan repurposed the old new protocol and then built a separate web frontend around it.
Wyatt Russell
NNTPchan is a good project, I've had some good discussions with Jeff on fedi re: the right direction for imageboards. Once the css gets cleaned up for chen2 I intend to port it for the default NTTPchan frontend.
But as I noted, I think focusing on decentralization alone is missing the point; robustness alone is not enough for a long-term future. The primary failure of imageboards is its lack of exit, 4chan exists as a monolithic empire, draining all other alternatives from existence. Unless the surface web imageboard is entirely deleted, no one will move, as a minority, onto a dark web platform that is functional only at scale.
Realtime solves exit today, decentralization solves robustness tomorrow: the truly future-proofed imageboard would achieve both.
Wouldn't it just be a chatroom with pictures then?
Christopher Jenkins
*Anonymous* chatroom with pictures. Where do you think are?
Matthew Wright
An imageboard, not IRC.
Thomas Torres
Low amount of content per post, weird-ass responding to future posts because people want to have big posts full of nothing, rather than little posts full of nothing so they can stand out, loading screens, javascript. That's all my thoughts on the meguca board software.
Blake Gutierrez
I see a hectic mishmash of low-quality posts being the result of this. Still beats halfchan though.
Logan Reyes
sage for offtopic., but what are the skills necessary to run and monitor one's own chan?
Jayden Gutierrez
***ones
Samuel Myers
So your plan to replace 4chan which you can't compete with is to compete with discord?
I've used meguca. It has a problem of massive thread sizes which take forever to load and just don't get read. At the end of it all you just have a chat room that archives it's self and is difficult to read. Take 4 posts who reply to each other and you have a time travel paradox where you can't figure out what leads to where. If Post3 only had 2 lines when post 1 replied to it, which then replies to post 1 you get a weird time loop which lacks the timeline needed to understand the two people chatting during it.
I like the idea of meguca but reality makes its a bad system. Chat rooms and forums aren't the same thing.
Levi Walker
Traditional imageboards fail because they have too many boards which splinters the tiny userbase, a lack of new features is a very minor issue by comparison.
why? just make better version of what we have and solve are the problems that are supposedly there?
Samuel Brooks
"muh dead boards" is a complete red herring and it doesn't help that cuckchan-addled retards think a board with 20 posts a day is "dead". A fast board has shit quality because effortposting is no longer worth it since it gets buried in shit immediately. I prefer a slow board over a reddit-tier spam show every day of the week.
Leo Diaz
"dead" boards are comfy. the fast boards are full of cancerous shit thats usually not even related to the topic.
Charles White
That's a self-contadiction. Imagine features that significantly improve your ability to browse and post on many boards and threads at the same time without having to clutter the fuck out of your browser tabs list and have your browser take 8 gigabytes of memory as a result. And then a way to group boards so that rather than browsing Zig Forums you'd be browsing all tech boards that you've favorited. The splintering would have a very negligible effect given appropriate features.
For one, I think the idea of the catalog needs to be deprecated in favor of a better overboard, or the other way round. The overboard should be able to load an arbitrary number of boards and use a socket connection to listen to updates that happen to each. The realtime system will allow you to do that since a well designed system for listening to rooms takes almost no resources from either party, unlike loading the entire fucking catalog over and over again even when nothing happens in the boards.
I've tried to do some of these things myself but there's a limit to how much you can do with the current website. But even then it already helps a ton. For instance I can see when someone posts in the nearly-dead /prog/ within 5 or so minutes, without ever having to go there or even open the catalog. Ideally you should be able to follow all boards that you have favorited like that, but currently you have to load the entire fucking catalog to find out if anyone has posted on a given board. There's ways you could make it much easier and I've asked for them, but nobody that's running Zig Forums will respond to anything anymore.j
I seriously want a new imageboard to beat Zig Forums just for the sake of replacing this shitty fucking software.
Kevin Parker
image board apps already do that shit. So what exactly are you adding that cuckchan doesn't already have?
Luke Sullivan
Needs a javascript-free fallback or a protocol autists can write clients for.
Ryan Walker
yeah, and it looks like it's all low quality irc circlejerk shit. Remember when /animus/ was popular? Well, now it's at position 40 on the board list. PPH is terrible metric of quality, especially on such a short time frame.
Doing it wrong. The timeloops make perfect sense when you're observing them form. It takes engagement in the moment, not review afterwards.
One thing I've noticed in newfags these days is their inability to grok presence. Normies gentrified the imageboard with catalogues, thread watchers, etc. because they treat it as something to check up on periodically on a second monitor while they code python on the first. They don't understand the nature of actually having a home board you live on, where you devote full presence to, wasting dedicated hours on and going lucid and losing hours in minutes, because they're coming from coddling 2.0 platforms which feed them infotainment in constrained cycles, just like matchmaking in games, and whatever mediated interaction is not being fed to them piecemeal is packaged for them in a readymade product to be consumed on their own time.
The idea of actually paying attention to and engaging with a direct stream of communication is just totally alien to them.
Back when cuckchan was just starting out you would have a thread up for days on slower boards. You couldn't watch it in real time and would often come back to previous threads. You're just a faggot weeb who has no idea about imageboards and screams newfag at people.
Real time imageboards are shit to archive because they allow multiple moments of time all mixed up together as explained. It's a bad chat room and a bad image board so it serves no purpose you weeb trash. You're just a novelty seeking freak who can't read an entire thread because you want nothing but constant attention and simulation.
See how easy shit flinging is faggot? You have a shit idea. It doesn't work very well Just fuck off back to Meguca with all the other homosexuals
Dominic Rodriguez
I don't like the format of meguca, nothing against them at all, I just feel like it's contradictory to the point of imageboards. If you want instant chat there are a ton of platforms for that already. A decent fork should at least let you disable the live-posting if you don't want it. I hate that others can see your typing live, since I often leave a reply in the box for a while before, or go back and reword a post 2 or 3 times before submitting it. I feel like seeing all the characters appear as they are typed rushes you into finishing your post and not putting as much thought into them as you would otherwise, leading to lower quality discussions overall. One thing that I found especially annoying is when you are in the middle of posting and the next person down starts quoting you. It's disorganized and messy and having circular quotes and conversations is confusing and tedious. I can see the appeal for a shitposting board but for any serious discussion I would just end up opening up a text editor and writing it out and copy/pasting it anyway.
Jonathan Nguyen
Partially true. F5'ing within thread was common, but also F5'ing the front-page to engage in multiple threads at once as they were rebumped to your purview.
This is not at all the same thing as thread watching marked topics of interest, allowing yourself to disengage until the dopamine ping comes to tell you your entertainment has arrived.
Archiving is a redditor impulse. Why are you so obsessed with it?
traditional imageboards fail because retarded newfags don't understand the concept of multiple boards and instead post shit that should be on another board on a place like /v/ because they're drawn to high metric stats like redditfags.
Lincoln Myers
This is how the current /v/ and /b/ with their completely shit moderation happens and is perpetuated until the end of times. It's also how Zig Forums with it's completely shit administration and software is perpetuated, it's how 4chan is still alive. The devotion to the old crufty pile of shit with some cringeworthy sense of "pride" no matter how shit it becomes, whoever happened to be in control can do whatever they want and have no urgency to improve anything because people are too "devoted" to move to a better place.
Caleb Fisher
It's a common stupidity of poorly run splinter boards, but not the primary reason they fail evidenced by the many splinters have tried to be single board and still were unable to successful form a sustainable community. The issue is needing a large user base to achieve sustainable momentum, and the inertia of posting that leads dead boards to stay dead.
Software isn't the problem, it's the design - lynxchan is already well enough optimized to host boards cheaply. It's pointless, though, because you need a mass movement of people to successfully fork a board, like Zig Forums or Zig Forums. It only happens when people have completely given up on the awful mainstay.
A large portion of the users on 4chan want to leave, but know there's nowhere better to go, so exit being difficult is obviously a problem that needs to be solved. Realtime solves it by lowering the user count needed to achieve sustainable momentum.
So is right, the meaningful metric isn't pph. It's ease of exit: can they form sustainable communities easily? Yes, even with a tiny userbase.
Zig Forums's ~200 user count could splinter into 20 active realtime boards, independent, fully formed and distinguishable in their own right, instead of limping along as a semi-active "/g/ but better" alternative: the knowledge transfer and conversation performed in 2 months would outpace what Zig Forums's produced in 2 years.
Took this screenshot last night of some good conversation. The idea that transiency precludes intelligent discourse can only come from the newfag who's never experienced 4chan before it succumbed to cancer.
We need to stop making imageboards accessible via web browser. Make a dedicated application for viewing "standardized imageboard data" so it can work with many that adopt the same data organization.
Levi Ward
I didn't mean archive as in a website archiving them, I mean the conversation as a thread. There's no way to make it functionally readable.
Very good point in this post. It encourages people to chat to each other and "be social" rather than make quality posts. And real time recording is a bad idea due to people wanting to correct their posts (which have already been replied to) or copy and pasting something by accident. Say you just copied your address for a website, thought you copied a url and went to link it then put your address on an imageboard for a few seconds. It's enough for glowy niggers to catch you.
People don't move unless they have a reason to move.
Thomas Morris
You are a retarded mother fucker aren't you? Have you ever seen an IRC room of 20 people or a Discord of 20 people? They become 2-3 people actively posting and then die out completely. You're designing a chat room and think it's some how an innovation that will save image boards. Yet you're designing something less functional than Twitter
Cameron Williams
"decoupling from the web" meant making it independent from web browsers, not going full darkweb with tor. It doesn't matter if the software is centralised or decentralised if one can only access it through the web,
Just to give you an idea, look how Pleroma can be accessed from Gopher and SSH.
This isn't IRC. It's a realtime imageboard. The required active userbase to achieve sustainability is different for every platform; for realtime imageboards, it's apparent ~15 is the lower boundary, while still otherwise only retaining or extending the inherent virtues of the imageboard: anonymity & transiency.
Why are you so upset?
Readable after the fact. That's your mistake. You're expected to maintain an engaged presence; it's not for passive, packaged consumption.
They have very good reason to move, exit is a topic brought up often enough on most boards. There just isn't any good alternative - reddit-tier deadboards do not count.
That sounds like a good idea. Imagine it works like irc or Matrix, people can set up their own server to run their own boards, and you could link to servers with >>>/board/ links and favorite them to your client so they appear in the board list. The entire frontend works on your own client so there's no risk of malicious scripts or undesireable data collection or anything.
Plus that would be maximally customizable since you don't have to parse some shitty Zig Forums html documents where the page is structured like an African mud house and half the elements don't have classes to identify them.
And they have plenty of reasons to move from Zig Forums, plenty of reasons to move from /v/ and /b/, especially plenty of reasons to leave from 4chan. Zig Forums isn't a shining example of perfection either with how many shitty threads are allowed to live.
Ayden Ross
Why are you so retarded that you think this is a good idea when everyone is telling you it's a bad concept? You just want a chat room with a bad interface.
Go back to meguca and jerk off to children like all you pedo anime watchers do
Oliver Jackson
give us a list of functional differences between the real-time image board versus a chat room. I'll start:
Of course most posts look like they're 5 words long so that only comes in to play about 1% of the time. Sounds an awful lot like irc to me.
Zachary Torres
You're already in a chatroom, only difference is that the posts are loaded in a shitty, slow, bloated as fuck way.
Joshua Flores
By "that" I mean point 1.
Jayden Collins
any big realtime chat thing becomes a unreadable mess. no one is going to read anything if the messages scroll at speeds that the screen can barely handle.
Kevin Rivera
This sounds like a step in the right direction, honestly.
Bentley Thompson
Opinions of newfags mean nothing to me. Your glaringly obvious, even in your belief that a community consensus should have any relevance.
Similarities to imageboard:
Similarities to IRC:
Unique to realtime imageboard:
The similarities to IRC are only convergent parallels due to increasing the velocity of imageboards. It's much simpler to understand it is an accelerated imageboard, not an IRC except with anonymity, post embedding, thread creation and imageboard CSS - where the only similarity to the IRC is the auto-update is closer to 1 second than 5 seconds.
Untrue. Here's a cap I took just now. Can you really tell it's realtime? During periods of discussion, longform conversation is normal. I find it phases in-between shitposting and discussion as interesting topics and interested posters come and go.
The thing about real-time image boards is that they are actually just ordinary image boards with less functionality
Sebastian Sanders
See if I actually wanted people to see what I was typing as I typed it, I could just do this.
Camden Robinson
4chan looks similar yet is neither updated in realtime nor has realtime meme typing like meguca. There's also >>>/animus/
Chase Morales
What's more, if I change my mind or make a mistake, I actually have control of when and how each message is posted.
Gabriel Reyes
The only real benefit of the rt image board is that all these posts would be combined in to one, but as others have mentioned, that just creates time paradoxes anyway. It's really just a novelty feature.
Hudson Carter
Not really, though. It's clear the simple change in function radically alters the way the community and discussion self-organize. imo this is a result of imageboard existing as a chaotic system, leaving them highly sensitive to even small changes in the fundamental environment.
As I said, it oscillates between discussion and shitposting. But the discussion phases disprove the idea that realtime cannot facilitate them. The shitposting is merely time-killing until posters and topic converge, phase-shifting into conversation.
I think we need to make a distinction between realtime post loading and meguca's realtime typing. The former is just a better version of what we have now, the latter is a mixed bag which is great for shitposting and making fun of slow typers but works against thoughtful posts and meaningful discussion.
I don't know about OP's board, but as far as I recall the discussion in Meguca always congregates on general chat threads with no particular topic for discussion aside the over-arching board subject, so it's not surprising that the discussion tends to derail into low quality chatposting. There was also very little to no effort to curb low quality off topic posts, the whole website from mods to users basically ran the website with a /b/ mentality.
wtf is exit? Why do we care about it? If your whole thesis is how great exit is, you should at least explain what it is.
Christopher Gray
This protocol exists already, it's called SMTP.
Michael White
Or you could just write a basic client and server that passes around packets where you parse it yourself.
Juan Torres
This is specifically because 4chan is so fast. Look at a slower board and you can often see legitimate discussion. The whole goal of realtime is to make the board move faster, so it shouldn't be surprising that it causes 4chan like posting.
It oscillates between a normal imageboard, in which case the real time is vestigial, and a chatroom, which is when the shitposting occurs.
Michael Hall
There is literally nothing wrong with wanting to get a better high score than the pleb channers.
Alexander Butler
Do you know what usenet newsgroups are? The original web based anonymous discussion forums, 2channel, were designed after the model of newsgroups and brought it to the web. There's no reason why we cannot have an NNTP server with extensions intended for imageboards and clients on different kinds of platforms.
Tyler Martin
Not sure such a thing will work for more hobby oriented boards like Zig Forums. To me this seems like something that would work well for shit/funposting boards, boards that really only need one thread like /animus/, and boards about a specific fanbase like /fast/. Since /v/ has an /agdg/ thread I could see it working well for them as well. Posts on Zig Forums tend to be longer with more time in between posts. Not only that, but older threads often get bumped. I could see a matrix chatroom working for Zig Forums, but then it's no longer anonymous. Same with maybe /co/ and /v/.
By the way, not saying this isn't relevant to Zig Forums. Zig Forums's just an example of a board that might not mesh well with your idea.
Gavin Green
Ayashii World is the first to get popular.
Robert Gray
I too have held this exact same theory long ago. It seems you've proven it also.
I believe it's best for building the initial community. After it gets way too fast, then you can go back to traditional mode. Slows down? Re-enable live mode. Only issues with live imageboards:
-Eventually it stops scaling -Prone to abuse; people can post cp and cp links if it's not implemented in a secure way
You have, my friend, hit the nail on the head for what the perfect imageboard should have at the minimum: Decentralization and Realtime Posting. The only difficult part is the decentralization. I think it's best to just have a huge public dataset that anyone can download. Imagine: Anyone can download/mirror 4chan at any time, and instantly restore it. You could have 3 servers in a pool, each having a secure realtime backup of the site. If one server is shut down, 2 other guys will have the data at the time it shut down. The site can instantly resume. Solutions like NNTPChan are harder to moderate, and you have less control of the site itself. Whether this is a positive or a negative is up to interpretation.
Every single time a small imageboard has gotten shit on, it's usually for a pitiful, simple reason: A lack of backups. Database failure. The site not being scraped and put into an archive. Remember when endchan lost 99% of its media? if it were archived anywhere near the amount 4chan gets archived, none of its data would have been lost.
the content of imageboards is not meant to last forever and any good board bans archivers.
Hudson Howard
I'm glad to see that you're the definitive judge on what an imageboard is supposed to be and how an imageboard is supposed to be ran. You're also clearly the sole judge on what qualifies a "good board".
Christopher Jackson
OP you have proven you're another cow waiting to be milked when you have a melt down from your own stupidity and failure of an idea. Please keep us updated so I can enjoy your thread on /cow/ when you get doxxed and revealed to be a fat tranny with a fetish for anthropomorphic camels.
Zig Forums is fucked anyway. It should be some kind of forum not an image board.
Thomas Thomas
You can improve it all you like, but no one wants to be going to multiple places that have 1 post a day just to have a conversation. Overboards are a bad attempt at trying to fix that problem because people are still trying to be forced into splitting off once they leave it.
Levi Long
You wouldn't be going to multiple places, you would congregate them into a group and browse that group, did you even read the post?
/g/ gets several posts per day, /sudo/ gets even more, /prog/ generally had more on-topic discussion than any of those including Zig Forums before it died. Then there's cases like /animu/ vs /a/ where both boards have the same topic and a similar userbase because, but one is /v/ with anime and the other has Hitler bots that ban you if you for bad punctuation. Who are you to decide which one of those should exist and which shouldn't? Just because you want to bring everyone under your thumb doesn't mean they should be, I and many others enjoy the smaller boards and their different types of discourse. The only problem is that most people don't have the means to use them without manually visiting them, splintering is only bad is because the board creation was just slapped onto the 4chan formula without giving people appropriate ways to inhabit it. Overboard is a bandaid but not a full solution in itself, our overboard isn't even a proper overboard since it's in a different subdomain which causes all your favorited boards and userstyles and settings to disappear and thus completely defeat the point, and is different from a real catalog in several other ways.
So does that mean when you entered this thread, you left Zig Forums? It's not any different for the user.
Jayden Young
Basically this. OP basically made a big chatbox, which is cool and a pile of memespam can be fun, but are not viable for having in depth discussion about a hobby. Post numbers aren't actually why I'm here.
I do think this concept could have a useful place though.
Carter Walker
You can't have something that is easy and also interesting.
eh yeah much as when I entered Zig Forums I stopped seeing threads about Star Wars when I enter this thread I stopped seeing usenet blocks of text.
Wyatt James
looks like Zig Forums has already fallen to terminal cancer, who in their late-stage aims to dismantle the host's immune system altogether.
Angel Stewart
what even is this? I've read your op and your shitty hipster bullshit "we envision" image, and both say absolutely nothing about what a "realtime image board" even is. An image board with realtime updates so you don't have to press f5 all the time? Zig Forums already has that, retard. How very "future-minded" of you. You harp on and on about the concept of "Exit", whatever the fuck that is, without mentioning once what you even mean by that word. Art college dogshit, all long fancy words that reek of middle management with no actual meaning or substance whatsoever. God you're a faggot.
Andrew Hill
He really is He's attempting to shift the blame for why his shitty imageboard hasn't taken off. The problem isn't the lack of content on his board it's the fact that people aren't willingly leaving a place with OC and a user base. He's rephrased it as "a problem with exit" in an attempt to sound like it's an original concept. As if anyone wants to post on a board populated by reddit and cuckchanners. It's basically a JS laden imageboard where you can see people typing replies in real time. It just turns into a chat room which while fun means there are just long general threads instead of separate threads for each topic. I frequent one and it's alright but it does come with its own set of problems. It's pretty much just 7-10 faggots blogposting all day.
He thinks an IRC circlejerk shitposting on his imageboard is a big accomplishment because they made 1,000+ low effort posts in a general thread. Notice he didn't link/shill it because it would ruin any point he's attempting to make and most of the anons here would just call him and his friends faggots.
Gavin Phillips
Forgot to mention that newfags consider this a new/unique concept when the original BBSs had this by default.
Julian Collins
Why the fuck do I want to see what people type in real time? Just so I can see the typos?
Jaxon Martin
...
Henry Powell
Amorphous, unpredictable discussion is a hallmark of the imageboard. You don't get complex self-organization without chaotic actors.
Ironic, the phenomenon of dead board posting is a late-stage imitation of reddit, totally eliminating 4chan's essential transiency. Even the slowest boards didn't have threads lasting more than a couple weeks, unlike the new breed of deadposters who are loathe to lose information and think "effortposting" means reading and re-reading your tryhard posts every time they resurface because they're so insightful.
If you like your dead boards, you can keep them, but you lose everything of the self-organization, hive mind, free market of ideas and delphi effect of a true imageboard - something most newfags have never had the chance to experience and can't grok even if the chance comes, and so can only ever enjoy its fruits second-hand.
Imageboards excel in velocity. Deadboards are a shell in comparison, their only redeeming feature is they attract the posters quality enough to both seek anonymity and reject modern 4chan's cancer, because there's no other alternative.
Realtime's transiency is obviously anathema to the 2.0 bred normalfag, perhaps an even harder pill to swallow than anonymity.
realtime imageboard..... hmmmmmm..... you mean discord?
Christopher Cooper
Napalm.
Samuel Bell
no thanks, I'd rather avoid cancerous tripfags and egos
anonymity is supposed to represent ego-death, not privacy. There is no such thing as privacy in this world. The quality of posts on a chan is directly related to the number of enlightened anons participating in the conversations. If you cater to them they will come.
Jeremiah Gray
realtime Zig Forums would be fun
Samuel Adams
What the fuck happened to the site?
Parker White
Newfags
Oliver Hall
There's one on Meguca. A fully real time Zig Forums, that is. Everyone who isn't a weird anime nazi roleplayer seems to have left within the first few months. It's horrible for anything serious because people type slowly yet have the gall to start replying before you even get to your argument, forcing you to use strange english syntax to prevent your posts from being incorrectly replied to and overlooked.
Caleb Ward
images broken, css fucked especially on mobile, navbar links broken with noscript what were you thinking
