Tenses in roleplaying

This. I'd find it weird to write a story in present tense (although I've done it, as a stylistic choice), but writing PbP is not writing a story. In fact, I'm deliberately trying to distance myself from the idea that I'm writing a story, that way I'm removing the (quite unfair) expectation that all players should be matching styles, tenses, post length, etc.

As for the POV - third person, mostly. In the current game I'm running I'm trying to do second person for the PCs and I'm not yet sure how I feel about it. And I find myself often reverting to third person when there's more than one PC in a scene, because it's not often clear who the "you" is in a given situation.

I'm new to PbP so my writing instinct was to write in the past tense since that's how I'm used to. But I can see the benefit of using present tense for PbP.

I tend to use first person, present tense when writing as long as my character is labeled well by the platform I'm using (to make the writing flow conversational I guess), otherwise, I use third-person, past tense to make my writing more like a narrative fron a book.

That's very neatly summed up. That's how I write as well. I'm swiping your wording, for when I explain this to a new player. :D

I strongly prefer present tense; in roleplay it feels jarring and awkward to describe something that's happening currently as something that happened already. I understand the impulse to do it that way because everyone is used to most written storytelling taking that approach, but it feels off to me.

I think it might come from my reading a lot of comic books, where active narration, when it's present at all, typically refers to what a character is doing instead of what they've done.My preference is strong enough that I've come to prefer it when reading (or writing) prose too, though it's rare to actually encounter that. But nowadays there's always a tiny part of my brain constantly fighting against the past-tense nature of most storytelling -- especially if it's a sci-fi story set in the future or something. If these events won't occur for five hundred years, why are we talking about them as if they already did? Is this a "time is a flat circle" thing?