Some big changes are happening in a community I've helped to run for several years now.
Hearthfire House, a Discord server for Hellenic Polytheists (and those interested in the practice) that my friends and I launched together, has been around since late 2023. You know, back when I thought that running/modding as many metaphysical community spaces as possible was what qualified as being A Good Practitioner, when in fact I barely even had a practice of my own because I was spending way too much time online. Anyways, over the 2-ish years the server has been open so far, we've been decently active (at least enough to keep me on Discord every day, lol) and amassed a membership of a couple hundred people. It's been cool, and fun, and a very rewarding endeavor.
However, the current state of social media and the internet at large has been making it tougher than I initially expected to maintain this community in a way that feels mutually beneficial and rewarding.
I'm sure I don't need to regale you with how utterly shit social media has become, especially over the last few years. For those of you who don't use Discord much (or at all), rest assured that their bullshittery surrounding hot-button topics such as age verification and generative AI is going roughly the same as it's been going for the rest of the internet. On the whole, it has left me deeply disappointed but definitely not surprised. And within the last few months, things have ramped up to the extent where the Hearthfire House staff began taking into consideration whether we wanted to set up some sort of contingency plan for the server, in the event that Discord became so entirely enshittified that none of us really wanted to run it anymore.
Dear reader, we did decide to proceed with this plan, and I can't lie, it's been pretty fucking exciting.
We made a forum. A classic, old-internet, no-realtime-chat-features forum. It's also called Hearthfire House, and we finally opened it to our Discord server last weekend.
Not to betray my age too much here, but I'm a bit too young to remember the real heyday of forums. I absolutely used them, some of them till their very end (the sheer amount of Warrior Cats roleplay forums I engaged with as a kid should be studied), but I'd never set one up before. This has been an interesting learning experience, on par with when I set up this blog on Neocities and had to just kinda figure out how the fuck everything worked. Massive props and thank-yous are owed to our fabulous beta testing team who helped us work out some of the kinks before going public with the forum.
Obviously, it's still a bit sparse for now. We don't have many folks in there yet. Not all of the boards have threads in it yet. The progress of filling it out is absolutely slower than setting up a Discord server, which you can have up and running in minutes. And on the surface it looks incredibly basic, as I don't exactly have the coding skills (yet?) to make it look personalized and fancy. But I'm okay with all of that, and everyone else seems to be as well, since right now our priority is definitely function over form. And function it does!
As someone who is slowly but surely dialling back my social media presence, leaving spaces that are no longer rewarding to me, and generally trying to spend less time with my face glued to a screen of any kind (aside from the 40 hours a week where I do that for pay), this whole thing has been very exciting. I look forward to being able to chat about my spirituality in an environment that is better suited for sustained, thoughtful conversation, which does still happen on Discord, but far less than the abbreviated, cut-off, rapidly escalating discussions that tend to happen on there more. There are so many other things that I love about forums as well, from the customizability, to the ability to refer back to and revive old conversations in a continuous way, to the way that I don't have to pay a premium to write messages over a certain character limit. It is my hope, in the event that the Hearthfire House staff agrees that it is time to sunset the Discord server, that the forum will keep on chugging for many months and years more, in a space that is less actively hostile to its user base half the damn time.
Anyone reading this (so long as you are over the age of 18) is welcome to join us. We don't have any activity requirements, and you can come and go as you please. Our only goal is to continue fostering a welcoming space where folks can discuss their experiences, share research, and seek advice. I hope to see you there.