How did we move from forums to Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord?
(dbzer0.com)
from db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com to fediverse@lemmy.world on 03 Oct 2024 10:31
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930200
from db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com to fediverse@lemmy.world on 03 Oct 2024 10:31
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930200
cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930199
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
threaded - newest
Seems like an interesting post, thanks for writing it!
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.
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.
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.
Insult acknowledged! Benned for life!
Uncle Benned, or Obi Wan Kenobi Benned? 🤔
Benned and Jerrys!
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.
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.
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.
What are your interests?
Back on reddit, I mostly interacted with communities relating to JRPGs. There are some communities over here, but at most they post some trailers every now and then. There are also some more focussd communities about Dragon Quest, Xenoblade or SMT - all of them practically dead. I don’t think there is an instance.
I could go over to a programming related one, the german instance or even one of the vegan instances for secondary ‘interests’, but those aren’t things I often find myself posting about online to be honest. They seem to be mostly about memes anyways.
lemmy.zip could be a good fit for you. It’s reliable, transparent (lemmy.zip/post/22004722?scrollToComments=true) and hosts communities about gaming and technology.
The main jrpg community is actually hosted there (!jrpg@lemmy.zip )
On the other hand, wherever the communities are, you can just subscribe to them whatever instance you are using, so it’s not that big of a deal.
Perhaps find like-minded folks and start one?
Great post!
I would be curious to know how many people on here have found memories from BBcode-style forums.
Personally I kinda skipped web 2.0 - I had some accounts, sure, but I hardly interacted with anything else than direct messaging. However I used to hang out on phpBB for probably hours every day before Facebook took over, having been lured in by needing help progressing in Pokémon on my GameBoy Advance.
I guess I'm a minority around here in never having used Reddit much. But I'm wondering if we're, in general, a bunch of ageing nerds who are nostalgic to web 1.0, or if we're a more diverse bunch than that. ;)
Edit:
Oh, and speaking of nostalgia, I'm sad LemmyBB is not maintained any more! It makes perfect sense that it isn't of course, but what a blast it would be.
I used to use them a lot before Reddit, but I never really liked them. Too many to list or even remember at this point.
I guess a large part why I liked them was that I was really only active on one or maximum two, and I was happy just embracing the community there. It was also in my native language rather than in English, which feels excotic in retrospect.
Great post, thanks for taking the time to write this.
I agree!
Because forums sucked? Still do.
Yes, but how did they suck? It’s what I go into detail explaining.
Sorry, text is too small to read.
I loved the old forums, and couldn’t quite see the point of Facebook when it came out. I thought it was just for self-obsessed ‘models’ and wannabe ‘celebs’ when I first heard about it! I joined it eventually of course, as all my friends did and I wanted to see what it was all about. Over the years I’ve had a love/hate thing with FB and only check in a couple of times a week now.
I liked Reddit, it reminded me of the old forums. I like Lemmy more though. It’s still got that feeling I remember back in the old forum days before everyone and his dog got online on their phones and things seemed to go downhill.
Lemmy reminds me of Reddit 10-15 years ago. Back when popular posts would be on the front-page for a few days, when a few hundred or thousand upvotes was a lot, when large communities had tens of thousands of subscribers, not hundreds or millions, when the chance of recognizing and running into the same users on various subreddits was still kind of common…
I used to participate in (what was then) the largest and most active automotive enthusiast forum for a specific brand. They had forums for each major model run, and classifieds, etc. I’d go there for how-to’s, detailed info, reviews, tips and tricks, and of course, to tall with like-minded people. Meet ups even spawned from these groups, and friendships were forged.
As it really picked up steam, though, the forum creators decided to monetize, as every large website grapples with how to sustain their growth. Unfortunately, they decided to implement ads, subscription/pay wall, and within a month, there were five competing websites. The majority of us left in the first two weeks.
Now that forum still exists, but the content is gone, deleted by users who didn’t appreciate their content being monetized (sound familiar, June 2023?). The replacements? Some struggle on, and one or two are vibrant, but mostly, it imploded. There was one glorious pair of years though, when I (and thousands of others) spent hours every day on the forum, and every topic was covered.
In hindsight, the downfall was more than just the advertisements and pay walling. It was a few non-admins that were treated as defacto mods, and they had bad attitudes. Flaming anyone who asked questions that were asked before (this was before Google made searching easier), and also holding their own practices as the only way to maintain their cars.
The reddit versions of the forums were not remotely the same, with people coming and going and not really sticking around. The best place for the info is still forums, though I think they struggle with server upkeep and costs. It’s sad to me, but all things change. I’m glad for archive.org.
Advrider still going strong!
I left Tacoma world for very similar reasons, if you searched and necro posted you got flamed, if you started a new but similar topic you got flamed.
While your post does mention notifications which really helps with engagement and was lacking from most forums, the main issue was IMHO lack of good mobile support of all the main forum platforms until as you said Discourse came along, but by then it was too late.
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.
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? lemmy.dbzer0.com/?dataType=Post&listingType=Subsc…
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.
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.
Everything you’ll ever want to know about a specific model of motorcycle, all in a single thread:
advrider.com/…/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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
My brother, this is that website
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.
Can’t someone make a client or a UI which does this?
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.
How so? I generally scroll to the bottom on here
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).
I see this comment two days in the future.
We probably could promote using “New comments” more.
You can use “New comments” to see, well, new comments.
Lemmy already has both of those sorting options built in
Only works if everyone is sorting the same way otherwise by replying to an old post you’re just screaming in the void.
They have !lemmybb@lemmy.ml
Lemmy is just a forum set to sort by new posts, not new comments.
Isn’t that exactly what “Active” sort does?
Only works if it’s the way everyone is sorting their feed.
Isn’t this just Discourse?
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?
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.
Why doesn’t discourse simply make their different topics into communities is the question
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.
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.
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.
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.
We need this for sure
Not gonna lie, I’d love for better integration between services, but I am fairly sure I saw lemmy devs adamantly insisting they’re following apub and mastodon is doing it wrong so 🤷
Its not that anyone is “doing it wrong” and Mastodon doesn’t really support Lemmys communities either. So Lemmy works in a bit of a funky way that doesn’t match most other fediverse services.
Its just a bit strange that Lemmy does not support the more common posts outside communities since that is how most of the fediverse works, so we’re kinda missing out on a lot of content that we can’t see on Lemmy.
This is the FEP Lemmy uses but most other fediverse services do not use it and Lemmy does not support anything that doesn’t use this FEP. So again, it’s not that Lemmy is doing something wrong, but Lemmy is not supporting how most of the rest of the fediverse functions.
OK, so is lemmy out of standard or not? Like I can understand why lemmy doesn’t support apub notes, as it’s out of scope, but why does mastodon support articles badly?
ActivityPub is an extensible protocol. It is not just one thing. Lemmy only supports posts that follow that extension I linked above. That extension has a definition and Lemmy follows it so in that way it is “standard”. But it is an extension, not part of the core protocol.
Mastodon and most other fediverse services do not support this extension.
Sounds like mastodon and other services ought to really support this extension though.
Sure. But lemmy would still not show Mastodon posts outside communities even if they supported that extension. Both parties need to move towards each other.
I don’t disagree.
There is one forum I still participate in:
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.
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.
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.
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
There are several forum software companies working on ActivityPub support, I know both Discourse and NodeBB have been working on it for a while
Indeed, hopefully they can complete compatibility at some point
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…
Last updates where in April 2023, priority not on their priority list
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).
My migration was primarily driven by threading, voting, and ads.
slashdot ha
ds voting though. In fact I wish we had the same sort of votes slashdot had. up/down votes are so limited :(I should’ve clarified.
It had post voting, but no comment voting.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/709b28a6-8c4f-47ec-96ff-cad5ad7baf2b.gif">
Doesn’t your screenshot show the opposite?
Maybe I’m missing something, but I thought you could only upvote / downvote posts. Comments were just a thread, and whoever commented first was at the top.
Hence why a lot of our early shitposting was just commenting “first” as soon as an interesting post when live.
Yes, it didn’t re-sort by default. You can, however, hide based on score. so kinda?
They also used to (maybe they still do) have meta-moderation where you could flag things as funny or insightful. I always considered that a nice touch but it didn’t allow sorting either. .
I’ve found slashdot, over the last 2 decades, has devolved into climate change denying, capitalist fellating, wildly off topic flame wars in the comments. As a news aggregator, I’ve never seen an article hit slashdot before it hits reddit or lemmy.
Article claims the forums were expensive and difficult to maintain. I thing it more likely that Facebook groups are epopular because people are already there.
Discord has done an amazing job at convenience. It’s free, they have a rather generous API. The communities have created fantastic bots. But it’s important to remember discord isn’t a forum it’s a live chat. Two people having a live discussion is a very different thing than two people carefully curating their responses in a forum.
Reddit and Lemmy are curated knowledge repository wrapped in discourse. Which brings an advantage over old forums.
More or less I would argue that the article is missing convenience as a driving factor.
Edit: I poorly skimmed this article and mistook some of its points. This comment deserves no upvotes and I’ll circle back later and give some credible feedback.
Discord has a bloody server limit which makes it impractical
They also make it incredibly difficult to even pay for their service. I needed to fund one for work a few years ago It was a pain in the arse. I had to buy $200 worth of boost packs. Just give me a single line item premium server and be done with it.
What do you do for work that Discord was the viable option, even though it didn’t have the features you needed unless you dropped $200 in microtransactions?
It was a discord for a game.
Yeah, 500,000 users. Are you in servers that are hitting that max?
No, 100 servers
Did you…uh…read the article?
Saying that I mentioned paragraphs from the actual article … yeah.
…how?
Not to mention that the article never even mentions “expensive”. Wait, you fed it to an LLM and asked for a summary, didn’t you?
I’m sitting here trying to figure out why you’re coming out on the attack so hard, it’s your own blog. That makes perfect sense.
LLM? no, I skimmed it because it’s extremely long and very fluffy. I mistook some of the fluff, my apologies. I’ll go back and thoroughly read it when I have time later today and give you credible feedback. Off the cuff, I’d recommend you try to tame the writing down a little, you’re obviously very excited and feel strongly about the topic, but that doesn’t always translate to a good read for others.
I’m not upset, mate. I’m just perplexed why you’re confidently making statements which directly contract the article and appear as if you didn’t read it. But you do you.
I usually wouldn’t take the time to dissect and explain the issues I have with someone’s writing, but since you’re posting this on multiple platforms and called it an “effort piece”, I assume you’re looking to gain readers and for positive feedback. I misread the article and got upvoted by others who also didn’t read it fully, so I feel obliged to offer some help and encouragement. Ironically, this will end up being long and boring, but it’s meant for you, not for general readers.
Starting with setting the stage is usually a good approach, but nine paragraphs is too long before getting to your point. You need an early hook to keep readers interested.
The first sentence of the second paragraph is missing a word. It reads as if the people are the rage. Also, “whoever” is used for a subject and “whomever” for non-subject usage. Consider starting with “For whomever” to clarify the subject has yet to come. It’s a minor grammatical error, but it makes readers re-read the sentence to understand it. This isn’t a big deal, but it’s early in the article, and the text is lengthy with no point or summary in sight. Many readers will just close it and upvote someone who half-read it (like me).
I skimmed down to the bullet points, assuming the earlier paragraphs were a detailed history I already knew, and the points would be concise. But terms like “executive costs” and “discoverability was too onerous” make readers think too much about their meanings. You should make your points clearly and use simple language, like early high school or late middle school dialects. After making your point clear, you can elaborate further, perhaps even get a little flowery. Remember, this is a non-technical post for the general public, so it should be easy to read if you want it to be popular.
In the first set of bullet points, in #2, you start a subset with (1) but never follow up with (2). This makes readers feel like they missed something and adds to the difficulty of reading.
After your first set of bullet points, you returned to your chronological account, then broke into another set of bullet points. It’s not clear that you’re setting up a contrast here. Including a line like “in contrast” would help readers follow your thought process and transition more smoothly.
At the end of your second set of bullet points, you reference the 4th item from the first set, which makes readers think they missed #4 from the second set. It would be better and more readable to add a #4 to the second set and include the concepts in that paragraph.
I agree with the ideas you present, but it’s hard to grasp them with so many snags in the article. Proofreading it out loud might help. If English isn’t your first language, it might not help as much. I ran it through Grammarly, but it can’t fix the context issues I’m mentioning here. It catches a lot of the easier errors, but most of its recommendations don’t improve the thoughts you’re trying to convey.
Running your opening paragraphs through a readability calculator, your average score is “very difficult” to “extremely difficult.” This isn’t ideal for a weblog opinion piece. If you were writing a technical document or research paper, it would be fine, but for general consumption (which IMO is where this piece belongs), you should simplify it. Think of a New York Times article. The piece i’m writing here to you will gauge as very difficult as well, but that’s to be expected on an instructional piece.
As much as you might hate this suggestion, please try it: Run your drafts through an LLM like GPT-4/Copilot with the prompt “make this simpler [your text here].” Don’t just copy and paste what it says, but look at the changes in wording and see where the changes are significant. This can help make your writing more approachable.
Here’s an example
Yours:
“Whoever didn’t like the real-time nature of the IRC livechat, forums were all the rage and I admit they had a wonderful charm for the upcoming teenager who wanted to express themselves with fancy signatures and some name recognition for their antics. Each forum was a wonderful microcosm, a little community of people with a similar hobby and/or mind-frame.”
Theirs:
“For those who didn’t like the real-time nature of IRC live chat, forums were very popular. They had a special charm for teenagers who wanted to express themselves with fancy signatures and gain some recognition. Each forum was a small community of people with similar hobbies and mindsets.”
I’d take the advice up to the first comma, take out upcoming it’s not pertinent, add in gain, for the sake of readability, I’d take out microcosm, it’s a proper term, but it’s just duplicating the same thought and really doesn’t add to the comprehension or visuals while making it harder to read.
I actually don’t care to grow my readership, I’ve been blogging for 20 years now but it’s more of a personal space to write some opinions. Nevertheless thanks for the long analysis. I think some things go against the my style, but will seem what I can retain.
Discord has forums built in. I know everyone hates it when I mention it, but there is continuity on Discord and has been for several years now.
That’s because it’s not exactly a great point. Look, we’re all glad they caught up to 1980’s bbs tech, but it’s behind a login screen. YOU HAVE TO GIVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER TO ACCESS IT.
Discord had always been a square peg beaten with a hammer to fit in a round hole. Eventually gaining basic features for the things it was never meant to be used for. Forcing people to sell themselves out just to read some documentation on an open source project.
They’re not search engine indexable though.
You can’t view it without logging in.
discord forums are terrible though. it’s hardly an upgrade from a threads only channel
Thank you for this constructive approach
I am very biased in this stuff, I'll say that up front. I was in the "in-crowd" for multiple forums over the years, ran my own for many years (essentially a personality cult, as per your article), and so of course I have a warm and fuzzy view of the medium. Importantly, I found my time on forums to be socially stimulating. By that I mean that the interactions were strong enough that I didn't feel lonely, despite being stuck in various isolated places. I have never felt that way about the interactions I've had any other platforms, with the exception of direct IM clients.
With that preamble out of the way, something that's come up in the comments below but I don't feel has been explored sufficiently is permanence. Modern profit-driven platforms focus on transience. They are built around the endless-feed model and keeping users engaged as long as possible. This is built into their very bones - it's always about new content and discussion isn't designed to last more than a day. Old content is actively buried.
That's antithetical to the traditional forum model. Topics on a subject would persist for as long as there was interest (sometimes too long, of course) and users' contributions would form a corpus of work, so to speak. I found that forums that allowed for avatars and signatures were particularly good in this respect as they served as "familiar faces", allowing users to become visibly established community members.
I've used Reddit for 14 years (although lately I've given up on it) and not once in that time have I felt a sense of community. The low barrier of entry and the minimal opportunity cost of leaving a community makes the place a revolving door of (effectively) anonymous users. It's my opinion that a small barrier to entry is a good thing, coupled with persistence of content. It's not enough to have much of a chilling effect, but it provides a small amount of consequence to users' actions and that's arguably good for community formation and cohesion. A gentle counter to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory ( https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies ).
I run a Facebook group and we have an entrance question - the answer to the question is basic knowledge for the target audience, however the question itself also includes directions for where to find the answer (the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article OR the group's rules). Most people just give the answer (and some overthink it and put a load of extra info in, because the question is suspiciously easy) but a subset of people either can't be bothered or *don't even finish reading the question*. In my opinion, the community we've built is better without those people.
This ties into the concept of profit-driven vs. community-driven platforms. A profit-driven platform wants as many eyeballs as possible, regardless of what the owner of those eyeballs can contribute to the community. The community exists purely to facilitate profit, something which feels to me like a terrible basis for a community.
Something I do feel OP is correct about is discoverability - that's particularly an issue in the modern era of garbage search engines. I don't have any particular thoughts on the subject, I just wanted to say "Yep! Agreed!", haha.
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.
Whilst I don't disagree with your points, don't they primarily apply to specifically a support forum?
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.
I’m still trying to figure out why I left FidoNet.
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.
Mostly FB wasn’t a trove of far right shit and it was before a lot of the scandals pointing out to what extent our data is sold.
Sure, when only the educated could join it.
Maybe because I’m not from an English speaking culture that I don’t see the far right stuff
Anything big enough becomes a public restroom. Cooperation and syncronization between groups small enough not to devolve in that way seems to be an especially promising path forward.
Power law
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
Because we prefer to sign up to one thing that combines all our interests to signing up to dozens of different forums
This is why we have SSO (why on Earth are these always the proprietary ones by default) & decentralized identities such as those on ActivityPub
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.
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.
But neither have seamless voice chat/screen sharing, which is a staple of Discord that users are very used to.
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).
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.
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.
yeah, and discord slack and basically everything based on electron is a fresh hell.
I love having three separate instances of chrome running the background while just using my computer, such that they all consume an entire gigabyte of ram for no particular reason.
TBF i wouldn’t do much if any troubleshooting over RDP or anything similar, i use SSH for all that stuff lol. I’m just confused that nobody has put together a “relatively” functional version of this yet, it seems like it would be prime realestate.
That is why upterm & tmate exist… ephemeral shared SSH sessions. Biggest missing feature would be some sort of scoping since someone could raw dog your system—catting SSH keys, deleting config, force pushing a repo if unlocked keys are in memory.
if i wanted to share my terminal it’s pretty trivial to do that. Unfortunately i use my computer outside of the terminal environment semi regularly, for most applications really.
The folks I collaborate have a policy now that if it doesn’t have a TUI or CLI version, it doesn’t exist 😂
based, i like those people. Unfortunately i can’t exactly share a minecraft window over terminal, so…
Oh you could if so inclined run a Notcurses renderer for Minetest. l-m.dev/cs/hijacking-opengl-with-notcurses/
They already have a render for NEStopia + RetroArch lol
that would be rather funny, although i play technical minecraft primarily, so minetest isn’t exactly a substitute here lol.
The VoxeLibre mod is a substitute
kind of, like i said i play technical minecraft so the kind of stuff i’m accustomed to are the fact that repeaters schedule power events on a priority system changing based on what it’s powering or not.
I will probably end up playing mineclone2/voxelibre at some point though, it’s just not really a substitute here unfortunately.
In what way are matrix expencive? You do not have to self host it. You can just make an account on any public matrix server.
Matrix servers chew up an order of magnitude more CPU/RAM which limits the places you can deploy it. The eventual consistency model makes storage balloon as every message, attachment, metadata must be copied to all nodes in a conversation which is resilient, but wasteful in duplicated content in practices which has historically caused many medium & larger servers to shut down due to the explosive just of storage (similar issues with Mastodon). That same model is why it takes on the order of minutes to just join a room or come back to a client that hasn’t been opened recently. Element X & new servers have to work so damn hard to work around asynchronously than fundamental decision to attempt to hide it from the sluggish UX but behind the scenes still too expensive. & since it is expensive to run in many vectors this causes folks to then move to the biggest servers that can handle the load which means the Matrix network is in actuality a small number of massive servers (most of which managed by Matrix.org) & a small number of tiny hobbyists running nodes of <10 users is practice. With so many users on Matrix.org-controlled instances (& again with eventual consistency), almost all data gets synced to their nodes make subpoenas a breeze.
A healthier network would have many fewer massive centralized nodes, medium-sized nodes, & the resource requirements would be low enough that more folks would be encouraged more often to run their own nodes they control so they aren’t required to trust an unknown serves operator. Meaning “just making an account on any public server” isn’t a great mode of operation for privacy—especially as with Matrix joining a medium-sized server will put them under a lot of strain causing them to throw in the tower & joining the few massive servers further exacerbating the centralization issue.
Copying the UX of Slack/Telegram/Discord in a decentralized manner is a fool’s errand. Keeping the chat history for eternity is already a questionable call over using forums, but trying to distribute that out like a blockchain is so wasteful.
lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/ www.freie-messenger.de/en/…/xmpp-matrix/ process-one.net/…/matrix-and-xmpp-thoughts-on-imp…
Thank you for a detailed answer. We probably do not notice much of this problem yet, since we are in the low user count of 30-40 with mostly local channels.
It’s once you start federating do the prices start to soar, & most things can hold local channels fine… but that’s kind of the point if you are hitching your cart to say something is decentralized as a bullet point for privacy. But if it’s mostly local channels, wouldn’t IRCv3 cut it?
I do not know the in’s and out of ircv3. But we use matrix/elements for videocalls. Groupcalls. Screen and videosharing etc as well; Not just text chats. Beeing able to quickly search all of your chat history across all your channels and dm’s are very nice. Not requiering a irc bouncer to recieve messages is essential.
Atleast for us having another vm among the thousands we host in our dc is not a huge cost, but i understand that is not the same for everyone.
V3 has
chathistory+ away status so the bouncer isn’t needed. Voice & video would be out of scope if trying to use a single tool, but the way these protocol operate is just to handshake & negotion for another protocol. My mates & I use Mumble (looking for alternative but everything kinda sucks & uses too many resources) for audio & share terminal sessions for other tasks where video is a massive liability for bandwidth & accessibility with video artifacts making text illegible.Even still none of this requires perpetual data replication—what it leads to is Alice joining Bob’s server instead of setting up her own server & joining that way since the cost of hosting all that data + CPU/RAM prohibit her sovereignty in the space. Our society has enough of that where you can’t own your own land or other resources, reliant solely on those in power. With tech we can give that power back to folks so they can run their own stuff if they want, but we can’t have that if the cost of running everything is too high due to bloated design.
Also this was hard ta read: Is your space bar broken? ’Cause a lot of words are stuck together… ins & outs*, DMs* …apostrophes don’t make words plural.
Terribly sorry. This is probably my norwegian shining thru. Where concatination of words are very common.
I do not know what you talk about. I use screen sharing and voice chat daily on elements with our own hosted matrix server.
Edit: i felt wrong saying “voice chat” what even is that. I make regular calls and video calls with screen sharing in elements ;)
That is interesting, the last time i tried Element/matrix it did not have these features. Can I ask, is your screen sharing of a quality that you can stream videos and games at equivilant frame rates?
I have never tried that. We use it to share powerpoints in meetings or do troubleshooting together. Or I use it to do family video calls with the kids. Fps are never an issue. There are times where there are compression artifacts tho. Especially if someone have a bad or variable connection. On a buss or a train or similar.
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 >:(
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.
this definitely makes sense in the OSS community, but i feel like someone should’ve already done it as a semi pet project already. I know i would’ve done it.
that’s an interesting take, but personally i think the web should stick to pretty much static web pages, the browser is turning into a secondary operating system, which is being run on an operating system, which is just, stupid.
Personally i don’t think any of this stuff should be done over the web, period.
yeah, my main complaint though is that we do have things like jabber, this is already incredibly accessible, there is almost no need for expanding the current landscape because it’s been around for like 30 years now.
no but that’s not the immediate use case either, something like mumble is really nice if you’re playing games with other people and just want to VOIP so you don’t have to use a text chat, you can talk and play video games at the same time pretty easily. It’s also nice if you just want to casually hang around other people without having to be physically near them, or at a keyboard typing on it constantly.
i mean, you don’t need a camera, maybe in a professional setting, but in a casual setting, screensharing something to show someone else for example, you don’t even need a camera.
this is fair, and tbh i don’t even really want a discord clone, you could very easily just adapt one of the many existing text chat protocols IRC being the most obvious, and VOIP is basically a solved problem, that’s not hard either. Mumble has a pretty good low latency implementation of it, but you don’t always need low latency. Video sharing/video conferencing is harder, but we have things like youtube and netflix, so the actual video streaming part isn’t the hard thing. We have entire video manipulation libraries like FFMPEG as well, which will do everything you need it to do.
Mumble i think is the perfect example of a “minimalist” application, it does VOIP and it does it really well. I pretty much just want mumble but for video sharing and i’d be happy.
Pet project, yes; production-ready, that’s a whole 'nother story.
Ultimately some things are too complex to deliver out on tem “just because”. Such as web browsers, hence ATM there only exist about 2.
to be fair, linux was also a pet project, until it wasn’t. I’m not expecting people to drop zoom2 electric boogaloo over this or anything.
web browsers i could see, because they fucking suck, though there are a few alt browser projects currently going on, so there is that.
but something like VOIP and video sharing i would imagine is probably going to be magnitudes easier than something like a web browser.
VC backed user experience
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.
Corpos are spending countless resources to infiltrate anything with as much as a iota of traction so that they can bleed the cow cash dry and sell its carcass for money.
Even if you distrust the corpos and want them to die, the majority of the population has so much trouble just surviving that its hard to raise up against that bullshit
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.
yep. it’s free and easy, and becoming the default. :|
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.
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.
Man you said it. I despise discord. My gaming group will post things in the chat, and if you ever want to look at something again it’s a pain in the ass to find it
Discord is a terrible platform for communities and for support, because it’s one giant group chat and the messages scroll by. You really need a forum type environment for these types of things and while discord does have a forum format option, it’s still really sucks and also gets little use on the count of how the rest of Discord is structured.
Preach brother!
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.
Discord and Reddit also had uniquely improved their UIs over the existing options.
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.
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
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.
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
eventually people are going to have to wisen up to the VC funding strategy. It’s not going to last forever, i hope.
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.
obviously but VC funding is predicated on very slimy concepts and it’s pretty easy for the broad market forces to adapt away from it, as we see with current VC projects. We just need to somehow deal with that problem. That’s the hard part though.
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.
this is true, but for some reason i am rather optimistic about the future of this particular venture, idk why.
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.
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.
it’s IRC but if it had all the features, and was monetized. It has a lot more features from what i understand, but aside from that it’s basically just a VOIP communication platform with video sharing. IDK why there aren’t any significant alternatives like we have with mumble tho.
Forums still exist, there only for extremely niche things though…Like high powered flashlights
Out of all the things, Reddit is probably still the best for flashlight purchasing advice.
Somethingawful is still going strong, even after Lowtax died.
The grossest franchise of all time (Pokémon) still has like 20 forums going on.
I wish retro gaming was niche enough for nintendoage and assemblergames to still be around…
Here in Germany the forum culture is still somewhat alive, social media did take a big cut though.
Plenty of console Homebrew and general gaming forums are still around. Like GBAtemp and ResetEra. I think all forms have really been about niche things for the most part. There were some general purpose forms but most of them focused around some Central subject that is core to their identity.
Truly general purpose platforms that attempt to be about everything weren’t really a thing until social media, with digg and Reddit.
Usenet and bbs erasure.
I was considering mentioning that GenX stuff, but I felt it was too obscure and would only serve to posture my creds :)
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.
Usenet is where I discovered slack.
carrier pigeon erasue.
Usenet is still useful for… other things 🏴☠️
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
Maybe ask if they’re willing to switched over to lemmy? You can sort like a forum does. Long shot but hey…
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.
Also tools like Lemmy Federate can help broaden the reach and allow more people on Lemmy to discover your communities, since communities and their content doesn’t get federated until someone is subscribed to them.
I was going to bring up this post, but it’s actually yours
lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28227815?scrollToComments=t…
Yeah it seems not a lot of people are aware of this tool anymore. I guess since it’s no longer advertised on lemy.lol’s sidebar people just sort of forgot about it.
The same way you moved from reddit to here. Dissatisfaction and momentum.
I still post on Wil Wheaton’s old phpBB forum from time to time. Nobody else does, though. :(
Does he post on there? Lol
No. He’s on Tumblr.
Share the link, I’ll post on it!
boomers figured out the other mediums.
No, boomers invented forums (and the internet itself). Millenials invented Web 2.0 (as they called it), the corporate takeover of the internet.
.
Hosting a forum costs money, and we ain’t got that
There were plenty of free forum hosts back in the day. (edit: just did a search and there are still free forum hosts)
But then social media came out, and everyone got addicted to the gamified dopamine mechanics like upvotes and shit. So now everything has to have upvotes, or likes, or whatever other stupid bullshit shit that has absolutely ruined human interaction and discourse and is single handedly to blame for the extremity in modern discourse, because the need to drive clicks and upvotes leads to extreme polarization where no common sense, honest discussion can be held.
because you either 100% agree with me (upvote) or you are a baby killing bastard who disagrees with me (downvote), and there can be no middle ground! /s
Great post!
Even with a free forum host, it’s difficult to keep things running for a long time.
Awhile back I was unsatisfied with how quickly my (new) furniture was degrading, and found a furniture forum run by a guy in the biz. So much knowledge on there about different furniture and how to actually find quality stuff that will last decades.
The owner retired this week, and he had been paying for an IT contract to do basic maintenance / upgrades on the forum (I think he started on a free host, but as it got bigger he eventually had to move it). He needed IT help basically to apply security patches and do upgrades. He’s stated that he no longer plans to pay for the maintenance contract. I’m guessing the forum will disappear soon.
Have you suggested them to move to Lemmy?
<img alt="" src="https://a.l3n.co/i/n4upKq.jpg">
Good material for !fedimemes@feddit.uk
How did we move from usenet to forums?
Browsers and the internet protocols were pretty sweet, man
Didn’t usenet also have a lot of spam problems associated with it?
Everything had spam problems 😅
Good point, spam always has been and always will be an issue.
Yes. Still does. Though blocking Google groups cuts down on most of it
Yeah I’ve heard the spam problems have gotten worse these days but I always knew people complained about that because many of the services just didn’t moderate spam.
the other users forced me to do it by moving
tl;dr the internet didn’t used to be about making money, it was a place where people created all kinds of content, for almost no reason at all, and almost nobody was making any money, except AOL which blew all their money on CDs probably
Well written, interesting article.
Really getting momentum from Reddit will be tough though. Our main advantage is that we have the rest of the Fediverse as a potential user base, and existing forum apps that also activate apub; reducing network effects. If the Fediverse has momentum, so has the threadiverse.