I had not made the connection in quite this way before now, but I think this is also part of what I have always found vaguely off-putting about the widespread move to Discord, even though a) I know a lot of Discord servers are very inclusive, and b) I understand why things moved to Discord. But the part where you have to know how to find out the secret handshake and then, at least in many cases, be approved by people who are very actively curating the space feels like it can easily feed this kind of attitude. And obviously there are spaces on Tumblr and AO3 and who knows what other platforms that are not exclusive, but it does feel a bit like this Discord shift has with it enabled more over-curation of the cool kids' potlucks than was mainstream years ago?

I mean, I'm very outside looking in, so I don't really have a sense of how widespread this is. But from that vantage I also find Discord fandom slightly daunting for lots of reasons. This adds another one!