I’m new to this platform, but not new to forums in general. I jumped from discord to this place.
How does this work?
Do I understand it correctly that there are no sub-forums, but just posts. And posts are clustered by the categories (which can be used to make a sub-forum like view)?
Is there a chat? Are there other notable differences to discord?
I’m aware that this will have different features than discord and I do have to get used to it.
Things I noticed:
You can still react to posts, but only with <3. that’s a bit less fun, but fine.
No autocompletion of emojis. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ (there’s a button in the editor field though)
Markdown code escape still works with ´´, but you cannot make both accents right after another and write between them, but rather need to do accent-space-yourtext-accent for it to work.
This place works basically as an old-school Web 1.0 forum. You have threads, which you just created one by writing this post, and I am continuing it by writing this post. The threads are sorted into categories relative to what’s they’re about.
More generally, this kind of forum is designed to be less fast-paced than a proper chat. Threads are limited to a circumscribed topic (at least in theory), so it’s easier to find information in the archive than with a chat-based platform like discord, where several different conversations get intermingled.
This might be my age showing, but I do prefer the page with the categories.
The posts on the right hand make it less web 1.0.
It feels a bit closer to what I know from discord as a starting page (channels on the left, content on the right).
I think this overview kind of style is more inviting to new people, as it shows some structure and not just a stream of posts/questions (which is more in the style of stuff like mastodon feeds) - but then, if you want a mastodon feed, you should go to mastodon.