Introduction

So to start, when I define a platform, I refer to any place which is exists for the hosting of discussion, publishing, blogging, or getting together of people within the TTRPG hobby.

I think it's important to note regarding this guide to building your own TTRPG platform, that every member of this site has enjoyed the fruits of labor which alt/new tech has offered.

RPGpundit wisely has become ungovernable in his own hobby, creating for him a space he cannot be canceled in, and which promotes his hobby and values there in. some of my most insightful RPG discussion have resulted from this forum.

Freedom of speech having the unique advantage of being a moderation tool, it prevents bad actors from flourishing as is always opposition to their stupidity said opposition is not impeded by TOS and busybody jannies.

So the aim of this guide is to try and convince some of you in this hobby to pursue creating your own platforms, both for the resilience of the hobby and to prevent bad actors from centralizing more of our interests and discussion in places they control and moderate.

Who are these Bad Actors?

It's important to understand why build our own platforms, and what it is designed to thwart.

To simply put, Radicals and politically motivated people, infiltrators whho's goal is not TTRPGs in and of itself, but the subversion of our games and interests to further their own outer aims.

Those who want to enter the hobby not to partake, but simply to change it.

Many of you, like me, have likely experienced the overbearing Discord or Reddit janny who decided to shut down a certain discussion because it involved games or things which were made by persons who had certain political beliefs not aligned with the server or subreddit in question.

Despite said game or creation having very little to do with the personal politics of said creator.

Some of you have likely been banned on such accusations as supporting the political beliefs of a creator.  people who enter into the hobbies, befriend pre-existing moderation, slowly working towards becoming mods themselves, and then subverting the whole thing from within.

This is what we aught to defend against at all costs.

Creating your own Site

Many of these bad actors I mentioned abuse the TOS of sites which are friendly t there extremeist mindsets. much like RPGpundit has done, having your own site, even if it's a small personal blog can be a big boon as it prevents you from simply being scrubbed off the internet.

My personal recommendation is using a simple open source framework called Hugo

The advantage of Hugo is it's an open source, highly extensible yet very simple framework for building static websites.

while not as feature rich as dynamic sites, static sites come with a security advantage and speed advantage. my total personal blog takes up only 20 mb total, including all images and embedded code and assets.

Likewise Hugo can be used to do blogs, news letters, forums, and storefronts.

here  is a whole list of free themes and designs for personal sites.

Likewise visit https://landchad.net/ which is an entire website for how to make your wn open source platforms and sites. it took me 45 minutes to make my website, and if I had to do it over from scratch I can probably do it in 15 minutes.

Your own Social media

Beyond personal sites, we as well should consider social media sites as fronts worth creating.

There are one major route I see into this landscape, Forums such as this one, and the Fediverse, the Fediverse being a loosely connected set of sites which share an underlying protocol that makes them compatible, while each instances of the fediverse can block others, generally it's quite hard to organize a full on boycott of a fediverse instance.

examples of Fediverse sites one can make are Mastadon (which is a Twitter alternative) and Lemmy (a reddit alternative) both of which you can host your own personal instances.

for chat/server stuff you have Matrix (discord alternative) which while not as feature rich, is extensible and has plugins to fill in needs as required.

I don't have much experience regarding the fediverse or hosting your own instance as I do with Hugo

There is also good old XMPP, for making your own IRC type chats, this is a much more old school approuch some of you might already employ, while nowhere near as mainstream, bringing back IRC would be kind of funny.

Closing thoughts

Informal as this is I wanted to really express how easy it is to start, or even seek participation in making our own digital institutions, it is apparent that for new RPG players or Gamemasters everywhere they will look to is controlled in some way by radical individuals who are mainly interested in subverting play, from twitter to discord and reddit, all of them are pretty much utterly compromised in this regard.

They joke that we should just "build your own site if you don't like it" well we really should take them up on that offer because they seethe and get bent out of shape when we do, theRPGsite we all love is living proof of this effectiveness, we should expand further.

conservative and libertarian often prefer to be left alone, we don't seek to make our own instituions or places very often, or to a very limited scope and thus we are often put on the back foot by far rightoids and far leftoids who want to drag politics into this.

we need to break this habit and create our own space and gatekeep it firmly from attack.