The Children Yearn for the Forums

I'm going to condense a 19-page haterage essay about reddit and social media and discord etc. into this simple concept:

I prefer forums like EoFF to any other form of online interaction with internet friends/strangers.

With the specific exception of, e.g., live chat when you're playing video games together or a cheeky zoom meeting or whatsapp chatting etc.

But, in general, forum > everything else.

My hope and general sentiment is that I believe, with the overreaching sheer smurfing annoyingness and general entrouttification of the internet, people will revert back to little tribal groups where it's relatively easy to be passive and quiet and not bombarded constantly unless you really opt into it.

So anyway, hoping that EoFF and all the myriad feel good places of when the internet was young and run by feckless nomads see a massive resurgance in the coming years. Would love to reconnect with y'all and, hopefully, see more new blood finding A Place To Call Home.


Yes, I'm explicitly referring to FF9 Main Theme and core theme, because FF9 remains the best FF.

Also maybe if Square could smurfing develop more FF games, we'd have more content to discuss, god damn.

I did read something the other day about how if EU decides to disentangle itself from the US's social media then perhaps we should just go back to the old days of posting on forums owned by random people who just happen to love a niche. And I was like "hell yeah."

Yeah, I'm hoping the general collapse of US hegemony will enable the world to segregate itself from the entrouttification caused by the inherent anti-consumer and anti-human practices of US businesses.

Either leading to more regional products that don't suck, or the returns of locally owned forums.

Get a load of the boomers!

I keep seeing this sentiment elsewhere too. I would have said a week ago "yeah but discord also fills a place for that" but then they've gone and shot themselves in the foot for goodwill this past week with them wanting to require ID to use for everyone. So who knows, they may be back

I completely agree. I think this format of thread/post enables multiple discussions with people on different topics without getting cluttered (reddit) or stuck missing out in a real time conversation (discord).

It is why I keep Eyeson going. Challenge with this place is the clunky website and forums software it is built on. If we could modernize this place, I think it could bring some of the magic back. But I also don’t want to lose all the history. I also have too much to do anyway!

That's my conflict too. I could put a lot of effort in to help modernize things and what not but oof life has gotten too lifey. Between the kids, the job, the authoring thing, it's a lot.

Too bad the FF series as a whole isn't attracting the youths in here like it used to. We could use their lack of life responsibilities to do extra work for us haha

Yep, it was definitely an advantage of youth to not have much to do when we ran this place back in the day. Damn Gen Z! :argh: