• db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      10 hours ago

      I was considering mentioning that GenX stuff, but I felt it was too obscure and would only serve to posture my creds :)

      • unemployedclaquer@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        5 hours ago

        Your creds could be diminished based on which usenet forums you frequented. I had a little while in my 90s youth obsessed with researching marihuana, libertarian ideals, and discrediting Scientology in the alt.scientology groups. Not great, kind of normal for usenet, but there were much darker places to inhabit there. Worst of all was posting from my university account with my real name.

  • DeeDan06@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    8 hours ago

    Yeah. Federating forums seem like a useful feature to keep them going. The forum style has it benefits that the discord and reddit style lacks. Sadly a forum I used a lot for my community is now in its final days, even if it managed to last a lot longer than others

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      7 hours ago

      Maybe ask if they’re willing to switched over to lemmy? You can sort like a forum does. Long shot but hey…

      • DeeDan06@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 hours ago

        true. I didn’t consider that. That would could work. Lemmy is a lot more advanced in that regard. Currently the best ideas are Discord and give up, and the original owners are done with the idea, but I could try and create a spiritual successor on here. Lemmy suffers a bit from the same isues as Forums with lack of people, but I only need to convince the OGs. I need to think about that, and a forum from 2004 whose software is a decade out of date is easy to beat in that regard

        Also thanks for creating this awesome instance.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    15 hours ago

    Much easier access.

    You make a reddit account or a discors account and you have limited access to thousands of forums.

    Imagine giving your email address and making a password and solving a captcha hundreds of times instead. Who would choose to?

    And don’t even get me started on the ease of operating these subreddits and discord channels instead of building and hosting websites.

    • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      6 hours ago

      I’m on 3 active forums and 2 lemmies and 2 mastos and I just leave myself logged in. It’s nothing like that. Somehow that’s still a better user experience than discord

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        14 hours ago

        Until that API nonsense I was always using old.reddit because the redesign was ass.

        Discord is cool tho, better than skype gui for sure.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    42
    ·
    22 hours ago

    We trusted corporations.

    I’d like to think we’ve collectively learned our lessons, but watching people migrate from Reddit to fucking Discord makes me think that we really have not and probably never will.

  • shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    ·
    22 hours ago

    I don’t know, but every fucking group’s reliance on Discord pisses me off. I’m very much into modding my games, the problem is that every damn mod author wants to do support only on Discord, which means probably more than half of my 200 servers are just for that.

      • Flamekebab@piefed.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 hours ago

        I really don’t get how one is supposed to use more than one server. As in, how to spread one’s attention to feel like one is present in so many places. It’s a total non-starter for me.

      • shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        28
        ·
        21 hours ago

        Seriously. I don’t mind it as a platform for socialising, but it’s terrible as a support platform, and it goes against the idea of open and accessible information.

  • recklessengagement@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    1 day ago

    This is a fantastic read. I wasnt around for the prime days of forums but I did experience them a bit.

    I’m becoming extremely concerned about the number of topics and projects that are migrating to Discord. My main issue is that it is not and never will be publically indexed, and among other problems, is itself a corporate walled garden we consider to be “one of the good ones”.

    I really hope we find and establish a “low executive cost” solution before the next time Discord fumbles (which is inevitable) and we can claw some of that activity back.

    But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      14 hours ago

      But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.

      this is unironically such a big problem, there are great voice chatting solutions, mumble, and the handful of other ones that exist out there.

      There are basically 0 good usable video conferencing/sharing softwares out there. The same goes for desktop streaming. If we just focused like, a little bit more of our energy on these two things, i think the world would unironically get better. It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?

      The ones that do exist are likely to be web based, and thus, webRTC, the dreaded behemoth of both web support and also, generally poor implementation. I just want mumble but with support for video streaming, how hard is it >:(

      • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        14 hours ago

        It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?

        It’s not about the hardware. (Not like it’s that ubiquitous anyway; I’m daily driving a machine from 2017)

        I’m going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like “seamless screen sharing” or “video conference” doesnt really matter.

        And IMO, that’s good if we want to Recover the Web.

        The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.

        In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can’t really “push to talk” three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won’t want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time. For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.

        In the end, something like a simple jabber-like chatroom is far easier and more productive to work on, even before we get to the coding part.

        Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on “debt”, which is what “Foo has to have ‘screen sharing’ because Discord has it” ultimately boils down to.

    • sep@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      21 hours ago

      Matrix+elements is very easy to selfhost in any homelab. works well enough for goverments. Federated and easy end to end encryption. And one can easily set up a web archive bridge forvarchiveable rooms.

      That beeing said i still think IRC is the best for pure text chat.

        • toastal@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          15 hours ago

          What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.

          Besides the expensive Matrix option the parent suggested, IRC covers text fine. Mumble handles low-latency, low-resource voice chat with positional audio for games. XMPP uses more resources that IRC (but can have encryption) but a ton less resources than Matrix which makes it suitable for self-hosting—my partner & I do voice/video calls over my home server fine & Movim is working on group calls with a Web UI (tho it should be noted both Zoom & Jitsi use XMPP under the hood).

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            14 hours ago

            What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.

            it’s convenient, also it’d be nice if it had the feature capability.

            Mumble is great, but if there was something like mumble, that implemented video sharing, that would be miles better, though a lot of people would probably still use mumble, as it’s fine.

            From what i’ve dug into, basically every video sharing capable setup is based on web technology, and i simply refuse to go near web technology unless i WANT to use a web browser. It’s just, worse, in so many ways.

            • toastal@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              13 hours ago

              Well Discord, Slack, & others are web tech too so it’s not like avoiding it is easy. If I have to use these services, I would prefer it be in the browser’s sandbox.

              Even still, almost all debug, troubleshoot, pairing session I have done in the last 4 years have been done over Upterm or Tmate, which is much, much lighter on bandwidth & not crushed by video compression.

  • Cyclohexane@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    People prefer centralization, and it makes sense. The Fediverse resolves most of the issues with decentralization, but so does centralization, which came way sooner, and arguably did it better.

    Also, people seem to forget that Facebook was pretty cool back then. It had superior features, and was not the buggy mess it is today.

  • LunchMoneyThief@links.hackliberty.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 day ago

    Millennials naively assumed that the following generations would just naturally be as computer literate as they are. We’re dealing with people now who think that wi-fi is internet service.

    The author of the article is specifically referring to bulletin board forums when describing forums. Link aggregators like reddit are not forums. They are comments sections.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 day ago

      I am the author. Heard you were talking shit…

      I kid, I kid :D

      I insist that in their current form, reddit (and lemmy) can serve as both forums and link aggregators with comment sections.

      • LunchMoneyThief@links.hackliberty.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        Well anyway I enjoyed the read.

        I am only here actually because proper forums have yet to figure out federation. As soon as Discourse or Flarum or whatever figure out full federation, I’m gone (over to them).

        Specifically, I prefer chronologically sorted posts and the absence of voting systems.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 day ago

          You can actually do that on lemmy already like so. Sorting by new doesn’t use the voting. Hell you can even sort them like a forum by sorting by “new comments”

          • LunchMoneyThief@links.hackliberty.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            16 hours ago

            I get it, and thanks for the advice. But I dislike what voting does to spaces like this as a matter of principle. It is a social consensus reinforcement mechanism, even if it is implemented with the best of intentions.

  • De_Narm@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    60
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    While I do agree with the problems identified, I can’t help but think they also made forums a lot better. Due to the lower discoverability and higher effort to actually join communities felt more personal. You interacted with smaller groups and came to know specific people. I still have friends from back then.

    On larger platforms, I never had that. Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      40
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 day ago

      That’s a double-edged knife. yes it feels closer and personal, but it also breeds inside groups and cliques. I’ve been turned away from multiple forums because I was too ASD to fit in with their culture but there was no other space to discuss it. And this can go much much worse than just a culture-fit. Not to mention that if that forum becomes too popular, that culture is anyway lost.

      However using lemmy there’s the best of both worlds. You can still keep your instance small enough so that you know your local users, but also be able to interact with the larger community without the extra effort I explained. For example there’s instances out there like beehaw and hexbear which through have managed to retain their own culture and standards even while federated.

      • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        19
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        24 hours ago

        Hard agree. I would also like to add that I think a lot of people remember forums a lot better than they were. Federation keeps admins and mods in check, these features act as checks and balances on instances

        *Nothing personal ofc db0 you run an awesome instance.

    • tiramichu@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 day ago

      I had so many good times on forums back in the day.

      The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.

      When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It’s like living in a small village versus living in a city.

      The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn’t as VPNs were barely a thing) you’d lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.

    • pseudo@jlai.lu
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 day ago

      Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.

      I have a different experience but I’m on a very smaller instance than .world. Your instance is big, generalist but their is lots of them that are location- or topic-oriented. Such instances are not only smaller with a more personnalised local thread but the people on it share already identified common points with you.

      • De_Narm@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 day ago

        Unfortunately, there is no instance matching my interests. There are a number of communities across different instances, but it seems like several people tried to make their own, didn’t interact with each other and all of them are long dead.

        Once I find such an instance, I’ll switch over. I’ve been meaning to leave .world anyways.

  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    39
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions I would be outta here in a moment.

    Ongoing discussions with bumps are so much better for knowledge accumulation (that’s the reason why they’re still used by specialized communities), the major issue with forums, as pointed out, is the hassle of having to go from one website to another to talk about various subjects and needing to sign up to each one of them.

    As for solving the “little Kings” issue, dumb backend, smart frontend. Remove admins from the equation, those hosting are only there to host. People moderate communities but communities can easily be replaced. People create a frontend to access the backend but from a user point of view it doesn’t make a difference what frontend they use, they will get access to the same content.

    The fact that I’ve written this comment a dozen times since last year proves a point, Reddit/Lemmy style websites just lead to content being repeated again and again. This comment will get lost to time just like all the other times I shared my opinion on the subject. On a forum it would be part of the ongoing discussion and anyone who wanted to go through the whole thread where all discussions on that subject to place would read it, no matter how long it had been since I posted.

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      14 hours ago

      the major issue with forums, as pointed out, is the hassle of having to go from one website to another to talk about various subjects and needing to sign up to each one of them.

      Honestly the “having to sign up” part would be trivial to solve if topical forums just globally adopted OpenID sign-in or similar. No need to have one account per community if you already have (or “are”) an account in the World.

      But even then, there’s a point to having to go through a sign-up process. At least some sort of vetting. We have seen how far have fallen all the communities that have ever relaxed sign-ups (as another comment in this thread shows, there was once a time when FB only allowed educated people in).

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      16 hours ago

      I don’t know, if there’s any hosted instances of it, or how mature it is, but one of the Lemmy devs has experimented with using the frontend of phpBB (basically the software for old-school forums) with a Lemmy backend: !lemmybb@lemmy.ml

      To my knowledge, they had some pretty quick successes with it and one might be able to just slap this onto a server right now…

    • MusketeerX@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      1 day ago

      I don’t disagree.

      There is one forum I still participate in:

      https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum/

      It’s mostly tech-focussed and Australia-centric, but it does have other topics like sport, TV etc…

      I wish there were more like this.

      I hate that the bulk of online discussion is now owned/monopolised by a couple of huge corporations.

      • PrimeMinisterKeyes@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 day ago

        There are many forums like that, especially if you’re not limited to one language. Most of the ones I frequent have been around for 10 or 20 years or more, but kind of fly under the radar. ilxor being a very good example. AFAIK, the latter also adds only one new user per day. I’d say that’s a good thing, even though I had to apply several times.

        • spookex@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          15 hours ago

          Specific forums for certain things are still the best.

          I have an Aprilia motorcycle from 1999, and the Aprilia forum has 20 years of info, discussion, and advice on that specific motorcycle.

          It is also a bit surreal seeing someone reply to my question and see that they joined the forum itself back when I was less that 1 years old.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      It seems to me the only thing you’re missing from the functionality you want on lemmy is a sorting system which just bumps any threads with new comments to the top. I don’t like that approach myself, but if that’s what you want I don’t see a reason not to have it. Why don’t you suggest it to the lemmy devs? It doesn’t seem like it would be difficult to add it.

      EDIT: Actually, nevermind, this already exists with the “New Comments” feature. Why don’t you just use that? https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/?dataType=Post&listingType=Subscribed&sort=NewComments

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 day ago

        Only works if everyone’s experience is the same and discussions are centralized in threads. I added to my comment but on a forum that discussion would be part of a thread where all similar articles/discussions would be centralized instead of having a new thread being opened on the same subject every few weeks and people having to rewrite the same opinion every time (or just not sharing their opinion anymore because they’re tired of repeating themselves every time someone wants to talk about that subject).

        There’s no knowledge accumulation with the way things work on Reddit/Lemmy, just repetition and things being forgotten.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          11
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          1 day ago

          I can’t disagree enough. There was little knowledge accumulation in oldschool forums either. There were constant arguments about thread necromancy and people not searching before asking. It sounds like you’re describing a parallel idyllic universe.

          This kind of knowledge repository is why were have megathreads and/or attached wikis.

          Regardless of that, if you really wanted to run a lemmy instance like that, you can do that right now. You can set up a lemmy instance where you default to sorting everything by “New Comments” and discussions as “Chat” and you get an identical model to old school forums. Hell, as long as you find a good amount of like-minded folks and you all agree to sort the same way, you can build up your “knowledge accumulation” inside the existing lemmy instances and communities.

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 day ago

            Everything you’ll ever want to know about a specific model of motorcycle, all in a single thread:

            https://advrider.com/f/threads/yamaha-wr250r-threadfest.936588/

            Ask a question and people will tell you what page to look at if you can’t find it, post something that has already been talked about and they’ll refer you to the page where people talked about it.

            On here? You could repost the exact same text tomorrow in a different community and the same discussion would happen again. Post it again in this community in a month and the same discussion will happen again without anyone noticing that you’re reposting.

            Necroing in order to continue talking about something and build on the base already established is much better than the constant repost and knowledge reset we see on here where the same questions are asked again and again and again and people need to explain the same things again and again and again.

            • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              7
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              1 day ago

              Ask a question and people will tell you what page to look at if you can’t find it, post something that has already been talked about and they’ll refer you to the page where people talked about it.

              You are relying on some random people being around to serve as your search engine. Cmon. You can do the same thing here with megathreads and wikis. Hell you can also ask around on megathreads and people will link you. Nothing you describe here is unique to forums.

              Necroing in order to continue talking about something and build on the base already established is much better than the constant repost and knowledge reset we see on here where the same questions are asked again and again and again and people need to explain the same things again and again and again.

              The same happened in forums. Even in forums with megathreads like these, people asked the same question again and again. This is a matter of culture, not of software. You just happened to find a forum with a good culture and assumed it’s the result of the software.

              Just build that community here and you have the same results AND federation with other topics if needed.

              Also I lowkey find the expectation that you rely on people with thousands of bookmarks to be around to point you to a page in one gigathread to be quite disturbing.

              • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                5
                ·
                edit-2
                1 day ago

                Let’s say you find a month old discussion with a reply to a question you’ve got but you have further questions, here’s the major difference.

                On Reddit/Lemmy you have two options, you reply to that same discussion and only the person you replied to knows you replied, no one comes to help OR you create a new discussion leading to the knowledge on that subject being split up between two discussions, meaning that the next person who has the same issue will probably find that first thread and repeat the same process.

                On an old school forum you just reply to the original discussion, it gets bumped up, everyone sees that you have further questions, no need for a new discussion, all knowledge is in the same place, next person who needs an answer to that question now finds all the info they need in the same place, no need to ask further questions of the issue is resolved, if it isn’t they just bump that thread and more knowledge is added.

                Megathreads are locked at the top and people see new replies only if they bother looking. Nested comments mean that you need to go through all branches to check what’s new (hell, nested comments leads to people repeating the same thing as others,in the same thread, at the same time without realizing it because the same discussion is happening simultaneously in multiple branches!). Wikis are just a third party solution without any discussion happening and where only the people who bother editing the Wiki (or that are allowed to) add to it (which isn’t as easy as just writing a message on a forum).

                Edit: Just want to say that I agree with you on something though, having to rely on other users can be a pain on forums but that’s mostly a forum internal search engine issue that has always been an issue…

                • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  arrow-down
                  3
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 day ago

                  Let’s say you find a year old discussion, you don’t bother to read 120 pages, so you just ask your question at the end. If you’re lucky enough not to be in a forum that won’t flame you for necroing and not searching, you’re given a link to a page. You visit that page but don’t find the answer. Then ask again. Maybe this time you get a correct link, or maybe you get flamed this time.

                  See how it’s easy to make hypotheticals? Not to disrespect your preferences, but this approach is downright inane. What you’e describing is working despite the software, not because of it. As others mentioned in this thread, you get the exact opposite reactions to another forum about automobiles.

                  You know what is superior to this? Having a lemmy community about this one motorcycle model, with an FAQ or wiki on the side. People can ask a question as a new thread, and guess what, people can link them to a previously answered thread, just like they would link them to a specific page in your gigathread. Nothing functionally changes here. The lack of threading or sorting by new comments doesn’t change the experience. It’s the willingness to be nice to newbies that matters.

                  What you’re describing is simply changing a lemmy community into a single thread in a bbforum. It is an objectively worse scenario.

                  In lemmy you start with a generic topic. Say, automobiles. If it starts getting too busy, you start two new communities, cars and motorcycles, if those get too busy, you expand to brands and models. Each of them nicely organized and easily searchable by titles.

                  What I see here is a community that coalesced around an old forum software and did the best it could. Unlike most others, it happened to have the right people to make the best of it and find a working system with what they got. But again, it’s not the software, it’s the people, which is proven by so many similar communities in similar software just failing miserable instead.

                  I would argue that this community would work much better with a software much better suited for it.

    • yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 day ago

      There are several forum software companies working on ActivityPub support, I know both Discourse and NodeBB have been working on it for a while

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 day ago

      If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions

      Isn’t this just Discourse?

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 day ago

        I’ll go take a look, but isn’t it just the software behind the various forums and you need separate credentials for each one?

        • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 day ago

          It has ActivityPub support so it is connected to the fediverse in some ways. Lemmy doesn’t work with it though AFAIK because Lemmy doesn’t support posts made outside communities.

          • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            1 day ago

            Why doesn’t discourse simply make their different topics into communities is the question

            • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              1 day ago

              I mean you could equally ask why does Lemmy not support posts outside communities? It’s on both parties to interoperate I think. Lemmy also uses a specific extension to ActivityPub while Discourse’s posts and Mastodon’s posts and such are pretty standard, but still not picked up by Lemmy.

              • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                4
                ·
                edit-2
                1 day ago

                I think Mastodon is very far from standard. Way I hear it from the developers, it’s lemmy that is following the Apub standard. But I will disclaim that I’m not an expert to judge either way.

                As for the posts outside communities? That makes sense lemmy-wise I think. Where would those posts be? But it doesn’t make sense for Discourse, since they are indeed separated into topics.

                • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 day ago

                  I think Mastodon is very far from standard

                  I think it’s much closer to standard than Lemmy and I’ve looked into it quite a bit recently. ActivityPub is unfortunately quite focused on microblogging. Honestly lemmys way of doing it is a little hacky.

                  As for the posts outside communities? That makes sense lemmy-wise I think. Where would those posts be?

                  I actually think it’s quite straightforward, they’d just be on a users page. This is actually how Reddit has also done it ever since they introduced the feature (much before they enshittified everything else).

                  You can think of it like every users profile being a community of its own but only the user itself can post to it. Just conceptually speaking.

                  That would also let you follow users just as you can follow communities.

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 day ago

      Once a thread gets large enough, no one is going back to read the first page. Maybe for communities on Lemmy, “Active” is the sort method that would work the best as you’d describe, but sorting the comments/replies by votes seems the best method to make sure the most important knowledge is visible

    • Flax@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions I would be outta here in a moment.

      My brother, this is that website

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 day ago

        No, it’s not. Unless they only allow the sorting of threads based on which discussions has the newest comment (bumping) and remove comment nesting (so discussions are ongoing instead of branching off which makes it difficult to keep up with what’s new in the different threads), it’s not that website.

            • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 day ago

              Only works if everyone is sorting the same way otherwise by replying to an old post you’re just screaming in the void.

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            Again, unless it works the same way for everyone then people are just replying to old discussions and no one knows about it except for the person they’re replying to.

              • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                edit-2
                23 hours ago

                Look at this conversation, it’s old enough that it doesn’t show in my feed anymore (sorted by top 6h), if I wasn’t taking part in it no matter how many people replied to it I would never know it took place.

                That’s what I’m talking about, if sorting is up to the user then most people only see “fresh” content, not ongoing conversations that they might want to take part in if they realized they’re happening. Same for the comments sections, threaded makes it harder to check what’s new (have to go down each branch to get the context).

  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    14 hours ago

    ah yes, the age old tale of “the internet sucks and people are stupid”

    If you’ve ever tried hosting a web based solution you’ll know exactly what i mean. The entirety of web hosting is a disaster. The entire mountain of web code is a nightmare, and the collection of website based frameworks do nothing more than burn electricity and man hours to create a fucking button on a screen.

    as for discord, i haven’t puzzled that one out yet, i don’t understand. Probably lazy developers and the community aspect, it’s a forum, but free, and worse. And now you can shitpost with random people you don’t even know!

    Personally, i believe that enshittifcation is an inevitability. You put somebody in a room with something, and when you take them out, that thing will somehow have gotten more complex, and thus probably worse.

    • throbbing_banjo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      8 hours ago

      Isn’t discord just shittier, proprietary IRC? I’m only on it because my Linux distro’s dev uses it for communication for some reason, but from what I can tell, it’s just a locked-down IRC client you can buy emojis and shit on.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        7 hours ago

        It’s also got great VOIP functionality. And it’s been a hot minute since I’ve used IRC, but you can automate tons of things in Discord around things like user roles. I play an old fighting game that has no ranked system, and all of that functionality, including running weekly tournaments, is handled by a Discord bot that runs on a Raspberri Pi.

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      14 hours ago

      Discord, at one point, was better than a lot of other app on the market, and they were one of the first where you could just create an account and join any group, for free.

      It became the standard, and now we’re stuck with that shit

        • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 hours ago

          In an ideal world yes, but we’ve learned nothing from the Dotcom bubble, or the 2008 housing bubble.

          If there is money to be made, history will repeat itself.

        • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 hours ago

          Don’t hold your breath on the whole “wisening up to the VC funding” thing. People today still believe the moon landing was somehow faked to own the libs or something silly like that.

  • celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 day ago

    Fewer barriers to entry and faster responses from people using Reddit/Facebook/Discord. Forums are great for indexing and posterity, but they’re absolute dogshit for meaningful information exchange. Unless you know exactly what your problem is, to the point of barely needing help, you probably won’t be able to word your question in a way that experts can understand, and the assistance they provide generally comes with a lot of assumptions that you’re familiar with X, Y, and Z. I can’t tell you how many forum posts I’ve read over the decades that just sort of end without any resolution of the original problem. It’s all too easy to lose pertinent information in multi page threads (esp if the pages extend into the 10s and 100s), and new users, the ones most in need of assistance, are overwhelmed by experts overestimating the new user’s abilities. Discord on the other hand lets you instantly get feedback from experts and allows you to refine your question in real time.

    • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 day ago

      Fewer barriers to entry? A forum is just a simple registration, usually with email confirmation and maybe a captcha once. Facebook wants real life personal information, blocks VPNs and nowadays I think you have to even provide phone numbers or a custom video of yourself. Discord, ON EVERY LOGIN, wants me to solve a 2 level captcha that loves to repeat itself multiple times and to do a two factor authentication while being just a bloated confusing mess of a chat. Reddit also now blocks VPNs like crazy and loves to shadowban you if you’re inactive for a while (or whatever random reason they went with that I cannot think of).

      They’re the absolute worst possible choices and exclude countless of people.