Yep, this is another "forum and chat stink nowadays" post. This time it has a more personal ring to it. I don't like what's happening with the state of things here at RinkWorks.

The forum has hit a real lull lately. That's not necessarily bad. The forum goes in spells, and I don't think the recent dearth of posts means very much, since the right post can still stir up conversation, the recent Summer Movies thread being a good example of breaking a week-long period of almost nothing. Still, it is a concern.

The decline of RinkChat concerns me more. When I go in there, I see the same twelve people, eight of which are idle. Contrast this with the amount of conversation that happens over AIM and in livejournals, and RinkChat is starting to feel like an off-shoot of the Rinkie community instead of its source. I don't like that, but not because RinkChat is part of my site: I'd be happy with an active, quality gathering in a chat room somewhere else. But I don't like AIM due to its inherent interruptive and non-communal nature, and I don't like livejournals for reasons I have stated in past threads here. (In summary, I believe they lead to the most impersonal friendships imaginable, where the intimacy of direct communication is reduced to the broadcasting of form letters.) Consequently, this shift away from RinkChat has meant that I've drifted away from several of my closest online friends, and even further from those newer people I've always wanted to be closer to but never got the chance. There are really two issues here, then -- the decline of RinkChat in general, and the decline of my own personal friendships specifically. The forum is not the place for me to address the latter, but I'm mentioning it because, after all, the two issues are interlocked.

I don't know that I'm necessarily seriously considering disbanding RinkChat altogether, but this is as serious as I've considered it since its inception. It is personally depressing to me to see the community drift away from me in a direction I am not comfortable following. I have no desire to watch RinkChat, whose community still means so much to me, stagnate and die. If that is its fate, I'd rather kill it now and spare myself the distress of watching it happen naturally.

I've had that thought in the past, never a serious consideration, and I've always stopped myself because of how critical it is to a community that I know is important to a great many people. A friend of mine told a story to me the other day, a true one, where a woman formed a friendship online, and when they met in person, he assaulted her. This happens with alarming frequency, but the strength of a community, rather than a one-on-one, is that there is a significant safeguard against this sort of thing: for a fake to dupe one of us, he has to dupe all of us. That's just one among many virtues of this community, one among many reasons I am loath to do something that would injure it. That's why disbanding RinkChat has never been a serious consideration before, and maybe it's still not. But let's face it: now, as opposed to before, much more of the community born here is sustained through mediums outside of RinkWorks. RinkChat is no longer its center, at least not for a great many if not most of you. It would hurt to lose RinkChat, sure, but how much?

In the past, people have left RinkWorks for various reasons, some by conscious decision, some by the demands of other life circumstances, and others merely by unintentionally drifting away. Sometimes people leave for good, and sometimes they just get some cabin fever and need a temporary break. Now, and in the times past where the idea of disbanding RinkChat has occurred, I think this is the way my own impulse to leave manifests itself: because the simple fact is, I *can't* leave. I run the place. I breathe it. If RinkChat were not hosted on my site, I would not even be here -- I'd be taking one of those breaks that might be temporary and might not, depending on how things looked when I checked in again. But I can't leave, and perhaps that's just as well: because ultimately I'd rather be posting something like this and seeing if I can help be part of a solution of some kind. I either want to see RinkChat thrive again, as a center for a community of my friends and other people I like, or see that same community in an equally accessible place. Neither AIM nor livejournals are that place, at least for me. As I said, one is too fragmented, and the other is too impersonal. Both have inherent structures that lend themselves to making people -- even within individual cliques sometimes -- feel left out. Neither are communal in nature.

So what's the answer? That's not something I can answer by myself, hence the open question. But I want to arrive at an answer somehow, and that answer depends pretty much entirely on what you folks, members of this community, intend to do. Honestly, if your intention is to retreat into livejournals and abandon RinkChat (not counting those who are just in a busy phase of life), as so many have already done implicitly, just say so. Then I can at least mentally write you off, and I won't have to continue to wonder why I never see so-and-so anymore. Maybe if we whittle down to the group of people who are still truly interested in the community, we can figure out if it's still going to be here and, regardless, how we can enliven it again.

The above paragraph, just to clarify, is with regard to the community only. Re-enlivening the personal friendships with those of you I feel more distant from now (basically all but one and a half of you, truth be told, though I fully accept half the blame) require more personal measures than a forum thread.