Yeah, forums were pretty cool!

The worst is Discord. It doesn’t show up in search engines and somehow you have to know that is where you are “supposed” to go for help. Privacy issues aside, I am fine with discord for playing games with friends or big conventions/LAN parties, but I don’t understand why anyone would use it as a forum.

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I’m getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.

First the centralized (I prefer to say “urbanized”) nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.

However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who’s hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by “last comment” which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it’s not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won’t bother.

I get to know people on traditional forums, even miss them if they leave, but on Reddit, comments are just disembodied thoughts manifesting in the ether. That may be due to the size of the community rather than the format, though.

You should be using Lemmy instead of Reddit. It’s defederated, and it’s spread out over 600 Instances in many different countries. This way, one rich egomaniac can’t ruin it for everyone else.

They’ve been dissapearing for a long time, if they were an animal, they’d be somewhere between Endangered, and Critically Endangered…

The eye-opener now has been that Reddit has turned into corpo/authortiarian boot licking trash, and Discord is planning on going publicly traded. (Read More Corpo bootlicking trash)

Funny thing…an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed

I’m so inspired by the Fediverse, the social options we have these days are just magical.

A decade ago, Diaspora got press because they were going to build an alternative to Facebook. But there was hype and then there was disappointment.

Now, everybody knows how terrible legacy social media is. Everybody knows. Sure, most people are still stuck there. But these vibrant alternative places exist! The options are exciting! It is so much better than it’s ever been!

Just keep building. This is great, and it’s only just started.

I hate Reddit, and I hate discord.

I am using discord for a discussion thread of one thing which follows a serial webnovel and it’s infuriating because when something new happens there’s always a constant influx of people asking the same questions because there is no way to pin or highlight pertinent information and no one is going to go scrolling through a million messages searching for the first time the question was asked and answered.

Discussion threads! Not chat messages!

There are tons of forums out there, the search engines just won’t show them to you. The search engines are the real problem.

It is a problem, but I think it downplays the reason those platforms got popular.

1. No admin required. No updating of software to make sure you’re not going to get compromised by a vuln.

2. No account management. You don’t have to make a new account, and manage another password for every community you use. Also, no worrying about 1 when somebody like me can’t be arsed to update that forum software. I don’t want an account for everything.

3. It’s all in one place. You look at your “feed” of things and your stuff with a new post every week is right there with the stuff with new posts every ten minutes.

If you’re running a big community you shouldn’t be building it somebody else’s garden, but you do need to manage the garden yourself and it’s not super trivial and maybe your little Final Fantasy XIV group can make do with a corner of Discord and abandon it when it goes real shitty. If you’ve got 50,000 people, it gets a little trickier.

The Fediverse goes a little way to fixing things, but it’s all a trade off. Not having corporations involved is a damn good start though.

“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.

I hate Discord.
The interface is clunky. They always try to sell you useless (at least for me) options. What with the users posting so many gifs?

Forums are still alive in ultra niche communities. My favorites: Badger and Blade for wet shaving, Snuffhouse for snuff tobacco, Quantnet for quantitative finance. All of these gather way better content and users than their Reddit counterpart, which usually devolves into memes and pic of the day stuff

Make Lemmy great again!