This is the exact circumstance that I saw driving people away from public social media more and more to becoming active only on private discords.
"It's nice to have a closed server because the loud minority that fill his tags with hate aren't in it. We can talk, share writing, art, headcanons etc without having assholes sending us death threats.
Fandom exists everywhere, it's just that discord is becoming a safer place to talk with like-minded folks."
Yup. This is the reason. I don't think the majority of people in these discords necessarily wanted to gatekeep fandom activity behind a wall where mods vet newcomers, but they're vetted in order to screen for behavior such as sending death threats, doxxing, blackmail and harassment attempts, ect... That's simply the unpleasant and toxic reality of public fandom right now. This environment has organically driven large sections and sometimes the lion's share of fandoms activity into these kinds of private community spaces.
Re: OT Thread (Other fandom salt)
This is the exact circumstance that I saw driving people away from public social media more and more to becoming active only on private discords.
"It's nice to have a closed server because the loud minority that fill his tags with hate aren't in it. We can talk, share writing, art, headcanons etc without having assholes sending us death threats.
Fandom exists everywhere, it's just that discord is becoming a safer place to talk with like-minded folks."
Yup. This is the reason. I don't think the majority of people in these discords necessarily wanted to gatekeep fandom activity behind a wall where mods vet newcomers, but they're vetted in order to screen for behavior such as sending death threats, doxxing, blackmail and harassment attempts, ect... That's simply the unpleasant and toxic reality of public fandom right now. This environment has organically driven large sections and sometimes the lion's share of fandoms activity into these kinds of private community spaces.