Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
(www-xataka-com.translate.goog)
from tfm@europe.pub to fediverse@lemmy.world on 23 Mar 14:19
https://europe.pub/post/38239
from tfm@europe.pub to fediverse@lemmy.world on 23 Mar 14:19
https://europe.pub/post/38239
What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: …kagi.com/…/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-p…
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I'm sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying "it's worrying."
Is it? When was the last time you googled something and the first website that came up didn’t spit out some SEO or garbage content?
Like every day? Yeah it’s worse now but Google is still useful for a lot of things.
That being said, I do have AdBlock so it’s a different internet for me.
Have you ever tried DuckDuckGo or Qwant? They have better results in my opinion, as long as you don’t care about the business snippets.
DuckDuckGo is so much better than Google. Barely any ads, and results that are actually useful 9 times out of 10.
It has been my experience that, yes, the user experience of DuckDuckGo is far superior to that of Google, but, DuckDuckGo doesn’t always provide the precise results. I’m looking for. I can still get the information, but it takes a little bit more work.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not shilling for Google. Their search engine has definitely gone to shit in the last 5 to 8 years. But DuckDuckGo simply doesn’t have the incredible precision that Google can if it’s properly used.
I use both
I forget the command but you can google search on ddg without ever going to google.
I’ve been using it for what seems like forever, but getting fewer and fewer relevant results over time for some reason. Switching to &udm=14 has been helpful, but I’m still uncertain about it: udm14.com
A couple dozen times yesterday.
Today. Among thousands of times.
I’m with OP. People have been screaming this for ages, and the collective societal reaction hasn’t even been apathy, but “We vote for Big Tech CEOs, full steam ahead.”
So… Yeah, I’m tired, too. Screw it all. Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
How about strengthening the Fediverse and Lemmy?
So basically, let the world burn? Because that’s what it looks like we’re heading toward right now because of big tech.
The big question is whether it will be us who do that.
That’s what’s gonna happen.
Maybe Europe and China will “isolate” themselves from much of the burning. I hope they do. But the rest of the world seems quite entrenched in Big Tech.
Maybe burning quickly is better, since more people will notice.
Better question would be “when the last time you googled something without prefixing it with ‘reddit’ to get good results” 🤭
Agreed, this article would have made sense in 2020 or earlier.
And now we have the fediverse, which is causing a resurgence of content that is independent of Reddit or Discord.
I'm tired of articles that just act like nothing else exists or has existed. It's just so dishonest and not very intellectual. Right, Reddit and Discord, that's all we have now right? Forget Facebook, Xanga, MySpace, Skype, the Messengers, IRC, ICQ, Twitter, WhatsApp, Kik, Telegram, Signal .etc it goes on and on.
But Reddit and Discord, that's all we have!
Perfectly said dude /cheers
indeed it is the clickbait, emotional guff
also lemmy is part of the problem
Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Fuck Discord
How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
Or Matrix?
According to history:
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
If it reaches a critical mass… You can’t. See: Facebook.
The Fediverse can adopt a few nice communities, but honestly bringing the larger population seems hopeless.
Discord is going public soon, so start the timer…
Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.
they already forced ads on discord.
RIP D&D campaign’s chat service 😬
Yeah, so many projects and companies using Discord for support seemed like such a bad idea.
Element is a Matrix client
But what is the barrier? We have a functioning infrastructure. We need to solve the last piece of the puzzle.
People need an easy way to join!
Mastodon has already shown that this works. Even if they aren’t as big as others yet, they still make up about two-thirds of the Fediverse. Now we need to replicate this for Lemmy, Pixelfed, and so on, and share our findings along the way.
You mean drag them from platforms that have a vested interest in keeping them locked in and squashing competitors like the Fediverse?
In platforms that spend billions on engagement optimization algorithms, with the sole purpose of keeping users addicted, basically with government and business landscape backing?
Look, I’m optimistic about the Fediverse, this is a great refuge in the hellscape that is the internet. But you can’t make people want to change. I’ve learned this IRL, but see it with (for example) persecuted people continuing to use Twitter even though its owner basically has a gun to their heads. There’s a big gulf between being a fantastic refuge and taking the internet from Facebook and Google. Even if every phone on the planet had an easy button to switch to Fediverse alternatives in one click… many would not take it, and that’s an utter fantasy.
This pretty much. At some point one has to accept that the people who want to be saved can be saved, and those who don’t, can’t. We shouldn’t (reasonably or not) waste ourselves for the latter in spite of the former.
Matrix/Element has shitty usability and reliability compared to Discord.
For lots of communities, they could use modern forum software like Discourse with better results.
Rant
I don’t think you can for most people that is what is so infuriating right? In my experience people who are entrenched in Discord are completely and utterly entrenched in it, to the point that I have lost contact with a lot of these people effectively since I don’t use Discord. The important choice was with all the community leaders who decided to make the move to Discord at crucial moments where they could have NOT done that. I think any shift off of Discord is also going to have to come from community leaders of organizations, projects, game development communities etc… deciding to move off the platform at crucial decision points. However, and this is something people who happily pushed their entire lives onto Discord would confidently tell me we could easily do if Discord got bad, everyone isn’t just going to straight up leave once they have built their entire digital communication around Discord… Now I frequently see game developers complain that they can’t accurately get a picture of their playerbase because large categories of players aren’t on their discord!! and I have to keep my palm from blowing a hole through my face when the two loudly meet. The brainworms are so bad that these developers will conclude the issue is with their playerbase not wanting to use Discord instead of it being an issue with DEVELOPERS DECIDING TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR PLAYERBASE WITH A SHITTY, EXCLUSIONARY TOOL THAT HAS AWFUL SEARCH. I can’t express how much this gets under my skin, it is like this assumption that if you are even slightly a gamer than you are on Discord all the damn time has become rheified and cemented into place so rigidly that developers are literally tossing away large swaths of their playerbase feedback because they refuse to use a different tool to get feedback and communicate with their community. No forum, no custom website, nothing, Discord or bust. I have seen the effects in games like Battlebit where it is clear that the developers were catering to only a small subsection of the playerbase that was very active and prominent on Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large portions of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers. I have watched this problem, stewing in my frustration, evolve from a minor personal annoyance to being a serious systematic issue causing community organization to become dysfunctional and broken because Discord is clearly a shitty tool for that community (that clearly a lot of people refuse to use or check regularly)… and YET everybody in those communities behaves like it was always a foregone conclusion that the community would have to move to Discord, that is just the way it is. screams into void Gamers are so confidently stupid. Also before anyone says “well it is a good tool for communicating with friends in a DnD group or something” … yes I know it is good for that, you know why I know that it is good for that? Because that is the easiest usecase for any communication and organizational tool to tackle, Discord isn’t good at this usecase, it is just a laughably easy usecase compared to how mindbendingly difficult it is to wrangle larger communities of… not necessarily friends.
Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.
I think your argument relates closely to something I’ve noticed happening over and over with more than just game developers. Far too often I see people expressing frustration that the Internet doesn’t give them more accurate information about the real world. Way too many people, apparently including many of the richest and most powerful people alive, have come to see the Internet as a magical machine that will do anything they want it to do… if only people would use it differently! Like, they legitimately seem to expect the entire population to post their entire lives online, unfiltered, so they can be used as automatons by people they’ve never even met.
This is so true! I always hated the Slack/Discord format and will always do. It’s just a mess.
Element needs to be better. Discord is awesome with the way it auto-plays looping videos/gifs and has animated emojis.
Seriously: That’s all they’d need to do. The element devs need to focus on fun.
Isn't that a client side issue though? Element is just one Matrix client. I haven't used it myself but heard from others that Fluffychat (another Matrix client) is more like Discord.
It is, but Element is still the “Gold standard” Matrix client and the most popular. And if you’re going to create a brand new chat protocol, you should make sure that your flagship client measures up to the competition.
Yeah it’s probably just a client side issue but the OP mentioned Element, specifically 🤷
I just wanted to point out that Element is no fun! No fun at all!
It works and it works great for what it does. Even voice and streaming are great with Element. It’s just got a terrible, no-fun interface and pointless limitations on things like looping videos. You can’t even configure it to make them play properly (as in, automatic and endlessly, the way they were meant to be played! 😤).
Looping videos and animated emojis are super fun ways to chat with people. Even in professional settings! It really breaks up the humdrum and can motivate people to chat and share more.
Element is all serious all the time and going into a chat channel there feels like a chore.
If I’m talking with people about the topical thing which is why I joined a room in the first place, the last thing I want is a looping autoloops fruityloops annoyance. Plus, not autoplaying and autolooping them saves battery.
I hate to break this to you but that means you’re not normal. If all you ever do in chat is talk about serious things that are of such earth-shattering importance that it would be incredibly rude and obnoxious for someone to post a silent looping video you’re not normal, and no fun at all.
The way Element currently works, it’s made for people like you… A strange minority that probably only thinks about “chat” in terms of communicating for an end goal and not for the pleasure of conversation.
Plus all this stuff can be disabled in discord too, if you want to be that serious. There are per-role and per-channel settings that let you disable images, link embedding, external emojis, etc.
It gives you choice. I have no choice in Element, it’s always unfun all the time.
Oh, do cry me a river while you’re at it. Pretty much every community everywhere has a
generalormemesroom, those are for the meme gifs (or wait, these are webp these days…).Fun is the least of my concerns. I don’t know why people compare the 2 when they have almost nothing in common. One is a chat app and the other is a voice/streaming/community app. Matrix is slow as hell and the way “spaces” are implemented is a joke.
Honestly outside of the incessant pop-ups and upsells and the whole selling everything to AI companies, it’s pretty great for private communities.
Your view of Matrix seems a bit weird. AFAIK I can do all the voice/streaming/community in Matrix as well as it's done in Discord.
Also, no, my server isn't slow. matrix.org might be, I don't know.
I have a Matrix server. I’ve also used a half a dozen others. Every one of them you have sit there and stare at it for 5-10 secs and watch the messages roll in every time you open the app.
Sorry but this sounds like a skill issue.
Loading times are a skill issue? You could at least try to make sense while you’re being a dick.
I’ve never had any problems with low speed. Maybe it’s hosting provider?
I can't speak to your server but I don't have that issue. It was solved with Sliding Sync quite some time ago.
Sliding sync did nothing.
I'm guessing your issue is in your installation.
You missed the part where I said I’ve also tried a half a dozen different servers. And if they all also screwed up then that is just a different type of problem that still exists.
Might be that I simply don't believe you as well. I also know a few people running Matrix servers besides myself (Synapse as well as Conduit) and ever since Sliding Sync and clients that support it (Element X, not Element etc) this issue simply doesn't exist.
Might be that I don’t believe you either.
Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.
I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.
I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.
I run a Matrix family instance. My elderly parents use it as their main way of communicating with us.
Sure, I set up their accounts - but all that difficult to use UX seems to have passed them by completely since they're very happy with it.
Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.
The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.
How large is large? A few hundreds? Not seeing any performance issues.
If we’re talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.
I’m not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don’t think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.
You might have a very different definition of "average Discord user" than the average Discord user.
Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.
People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.
Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.
Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I’m in have thousands.
Many channels are default for all users in the server.
Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can’t handle this is no alternative at all.
What would likely help a lot if it was easier to get set up, particularly on a VPS or something like that. Small businesses and or larger community projects would be more likely to jump on possibly.
Another thing is ability to easily join, a lot of the above just have an easy link to join their discord server, not sure how easy matrix on boarding is currently as I still haven’t gotten my instance functional yet (not even half done with synapse configuration seemingly)
I mean, there are quite a few such providers: https://etke.cc/
Fair enough, I do mean moreso for self host in a way, like I’ve seen some game hosting servers, they have a VPS they already paid for and use Pelican or Pterodactyl to host it all, being able to throw matrix into the mix easily would be great in those cases. Seems like this would be a separate situation, which is definitely fine, just not exactly what I meant.
Well if you have a VPS then installing the dockerized Synapse just takes a few minutes.
I’ll have to take a look, I have synapse running but I can’t actually connect to my server at all, need to set up the database and sign-ups and all that shit.
Are you using the dockerized version? If so it sets up (a) database etc.
https://hub.docker.com/r/matrixdotorg/synapse
I was being a bit lazy and tried this first community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=…
I do have a few docker stacks running so I should just bite the bullet and go that route instead probably.
(lol didn’t meant to make this chain about my situation)
Fun is always great to capture the masses!
thats why I want misskey the emoji reactions to anything are always more fun than just likes
Also, people forget that Discord’s streaming capability is, unfortunately, absolutely top-notch; no other community-screensharing platform has fewer issues, and my friends and I like to watch each other play games often.
Matrix sucks. It barely has usable apps and it lacks basic moderation tools
https://matrix.org/docs/communities/moderation/
XMPP / Jabber is better.
Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.
It’s a secure messenger
What are its pros and cons? What does it offer that telegram or similar don’t offer? Is it good for group chat? Is it available on multiple platforms?
Telegram is not a secure messenger.
Yes to multiple platforms, groups etc.
So, I’m going to say that I don’t use telegram and only know it as being presented as a secure messenger platform. As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable. And this is no different because I feel like this is exactly the problem lemmy and other platforms like it have. There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Matrix is a decentralized platform with the same level of security/encryption as Signal. Being decentralized you can run your own server, and chat with others on other servers.
It supports groups, voice, streams etc - similar to Discord/Slack/Teams etc.
Open source. Multiple different server and client implementations. Mobile platforms, "all" operating systems, and with bridges so you can have your IRC, Telegram, Slack, FB Messenger etc channels go to your Matrix account/server.
If you are against a change in the first place you won’t switch, anyway.
Please, ask.
Simple. It’s fully free and open source. The server as well as the apps. Therefore, you can trust it as a privacy friendly solution a heck of a lot more, than any other solution like WhatsApp.
Signal is secure as well, but the server is centralized.
And Telegram is not considered secure because of their implementation and shady practices.
I did ask. Why is it like pulling teeth to get answers? I don’t use WhatsApp. Never got on that bandwagon. Something being free and open source doesn’t mean it’s good. Something being trustworthy from your standpoint doesn’t explain why it’s trustworthy to a layman who doesn’t understand why you think FOSS = trustworthy or good. It’s FOSS and you’ve looked at the code and found it to live up to its claims of being secure?
I’m not sure where the hostility is coming from here but I’m more pointing out that I can use a search engine to find out about matrix to some extent, but people who use the platform and have a better understanding of its pros and cons have valuable information to pass on. But when you ask them about it they’re full of recommendations but those recommendations often don’t have much in the way of information about what’s good about the user experience or feature set or even the code. I’m trying to show that the particulars of why you like or prefer something matter.
True. But it’s verifiable.
Popular FOSS projects get audited all the time. Heck, there is even automated software to detect anomalies in code changes.
Auditability is the only reason why you can only really trust open source but not closed source. With proprietary software you’ll always have to trust the developers to not do something shady and are competent enough. With open source you can simply verify it.
Also being open source is what usually makes popular FOSS more stable and secure than most closed counterparts. A LOT of people donate their work and since it’s completely public, most want their contributions to be in good shape. If only a few or no other people see your code, you are tempted to write bad code a lot more. This of course is not always the case but more often than not.
Also in most developed countries it’s illegal to purposefully introduce manipulated code. And I don’t think most people would risk punishment for that if literally anybody could find it.
Sure. But most people don’t care about the details, unfortunately. In the case of messaging they just want to communicate. And if someone asks me, which platform I’d recommend I will always start with the most secure and private.
How’s fractal? It comes up as a recommendation for Linux matrix a lot and I was wondering.
matrix.org
Element is the name of the official Matrix client, but there are many others.
Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn’t a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.
Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.
Isn’t there any solution for that yet?
None of which I know…
You don’t…you go back to forums. They’re searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public, even if privacy is a illusion there.
We have to accept that and provide a solution for both.
You can lock down forums to were they’re un searchable unless you have a login. Tons of forums are like this.
This isn’t true at all. Most people do not care about privacy; those that do are an extreme minority. You (presumably) and I are part of that minority yet even we still comment here, in a public space. The issue with forums has never been about privacy because most are content with pseudonymity. It is a big mistake to think we need to cater to the extreme minority in the privacy space when tackling big issues that involve a majority who do not care.
Yeah, I don’t post private shit on forums, I discuss things publically so I can collectively have a conversation with countless other people.
If you want to have a private personal conversation sure use a private chat room, but I need that public space to discuss and learn, active publically accessible forums / lemmy / other equivalent communities are goldmines of information that benefits all.
That’s why I specifically wrote “completely public” not “private”.
I think most people know that a discord server with a few hundred or thousand members can hardly be considered private. But I can imagine that there are people who don’t want to put it directly online for everybody to find on Google. Not that I like that.
For forums: Yeah spaces are pretty great (have a look at Mozilla for example) and it can be an alternative IME.
For gaming which even if unasked about, is the majority of the users: When we can have push to talk option (client side, which can be done relatively easy) and proper 30+ FPS Screen share for gaming features, I think it’ll be much easier to convince people to try it. Everything else IMO is QOL features that I don’t mind about. We also tried to use mumble, but the lack of Screen share moved us straight back to discord eventually…
Companies putting their stuff into discord is like all the businesses that ditched a dedicated website and moved to facebook however many years ago. Yay, now it is on a format that doesn’t work well for presenting static information and will inevitably require account registration!
Newest iteration of “this meeting could have been an email” has become “this Discord could have been a wiki”.
And someone (on the Far-Right) is always trying to buy Wikipedia, monetise it, X-ify it, or take it down. I think Wikipedia is abusive - exploits volunteer unpaid labour - should have been created by an NGO like UN and kept safe for mankind like our Library of Alexandria. But it is what it is. Preppers download the whole site regularly in order to have that knowledge under their control in case is ever gets taken down or spoilt and they are rebuilding civilisation post-Armageddon. I keep meaning to download it myself (note to self: do that soon you lazy b. no more excuses!)
Take a look at Kiwix. Makes it super easy plus some ideas for a good Raspberry Pi project.
wiki + ai search = discord except ppl are the ai remembering stuff said in the chat lol, reddit + google was once good, nowadays I click on the other results since the reddit reply is its already been answered use google
Because there hasn’t been a single proper alternative until very recently, and even then they’re not as user friendly.
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.
Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…
What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.
Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.
Terrible how, though? That’s exactly what it gets right. You have easy-to-setup roles and channel accesses, onboarding experiences for people joining a larger server, a huge ecosystem of bots for various purposes, etc.
okay, it is bad for not being indexable, but it’s good at what it does and it’s popular for a reason.
It’s searchable but information doesn’t stay pinned and available. It’s meant to be a chatroom style place for gaming and as that it’s fine but when you want to build a community for something like a video game or a product, what ends up happening is you end up making a channel for every single announcement etc. Say you have a channel for FAQ? You either lock it so only moderators and admins can use it or you end up with a constantly ballooning channel where everyone can contribute. There’s no in-between and because each post isn’t really collated the way it would be here or on a forum the information is hard to navigate without search which often only gives a truncated section that you can’t even navigate to. There’s no context more often than not when you use the search function and it’s a very poor substitute for a forum as a result.
I don’t think discord is a good substitute for a website and I don’t think it’s a good substitute for a forum but it’s being used as both fairly frequently.
Excuse me, Jabber / XMPP is about as old as I am!
I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!
I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.
In that regard, fuck Discord.
Yeah anything ephemeral is fine like chats and what not. But this idea of using it as support platform is just dumb. You end up with people asking the same question over and over and it either doesn’t get answered because no one is around to answer it or likely because they’re annoyed at the same questions over and over. There is no organization and no institutional knowledge. It’s like it ends up being set up by people who think it’s what the cool kids want. And these giant communities just exacerbate this issue. Everything ends up being noise. It’s the reason I usually ended up turning off the world or general channels in WoW. It just ended up being annoying and distracting.
When I’m trying resolve a situation that I need some sort of support I wanna be able to search if others have had the same issue and see discussion around that topic. I don’t need synchronous communication for that. I don’t care if it was 3 months ago someone had the problem if they figured out how to fix it. The way to do that is forums, Reddit (well before the enshittification), or even Lemmy.
Ie. The equivalent of sending the output of your wiki to /dev/null
Yeah that’s a good analogy.
yep its horrible really should start suggesting discord servers move to lemmy, self host their own, a lot of them would be better off with a forum like structure, but lemmy isnt easily crawlable either, everyone hates being searchable
In my head Discord = toxicity. Not sure how it got that rep for me but it has gotten it. Thus, wont lose sleep if it dies out. Perhaps I am wrong. Reviewing rationality of this prejudice is on my ToDo List after a million other things…
No worries! The only reason to evaluate (or re-evaluate) a piece of software is if you have a need or desire the software might fulfill. And if you don’t have either, it literally doesn’t matter, lol.
I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
This is exactly what I was gonna say: I’m amazed that so many millions of people can tolerate its atrocious UI. Even now, the amount of notifications I get from the constant text channels across “servers” (which is such a misnomer for merely “communities”) is so ridiculous that I ignore 99.9% of it.
I think that naming was fully on purpose. People argumented with me that they had their own “servers” so that was good, right?
Grrr.
I once had my account banned because I was a member of a server that was banned in that hugely discouraged me from using it for that purpose. I might be in the half dozen servers at the moment none of which I’ve looked at save for two in the last year and I primarily use it for offsite DMs and even then I strongly prefer signal for people I know.
That can also be seen as “nature healing itself” in context of giant AI botnets scraping the whole internet every second. It’s only natural to go private nowadays.
No, it isn’t.
Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.
By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to people.
Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.
Discord may offer to sell chat histories in certain communities (after “anonymizing” the data, yeah right like they will do that effectively) directly to AI companies.
Discord is only private in the sense that you are advocating for only a private for-profit corporation being able to enjoy the benefit of scraping and collecting our conversations.
This is not healing, this is the vision of the internet as a truly open shared space that benefits all… dying because people like gamers were too foolish to see the coming catastrophe from putting EVERY community under the control of a single company struggling to make a profit.
I agree that Discord shouldn’t be trusted and might turn out to be a bad actor some day. Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing. So it’s best to do the same as with Discord but without Discord. In the upcoming era of AI hiding knowledge is a good thing to do, and I’m personally not used to this yet.
Let me emphatically say that NO it isn’t.
If you need to anonymize or disguise your identity because you feel threatened, I never want to make you feel like you shouldn’t take whatever steps of protecting your privacy that you feel you need to.
That being said, no, I fundamentally consider societal progress to be roughly equatable to how open the systems are in a society both in the material and ideological realm. Public forums/the fediverse are progress because they allow anybody with an internet connection to read through conversations, learn and eventually participate and add to a general collective benefit and community. This is the power of the internet.
I think your point of view would be more relatable before AI happened. I don’t see how it addresses AI problem anyhow. “Societal progress” isn’t something that has self-worth. I see that as a tool of improving QoL, but if it’s not only stopped improving QoL but actually started making it worse, than it’s not something to pursue, and actually something to actively sabotage.
Well let me state this explicitly then, I don’t consider AI to be some kind of existential threat in terms of becoming sentient, or stealing all of our information and hoarding it away.
LLMs are powerful and have lots of use cases, but right now we are going through a really tiresome scifi novel delusion where tons of smart people are mistaking the current wave of LLM innovations as being somehow able to transport us to the singularity or whatever boring tech bros are calling it these days… instead of being a boring, lame regression into fuedalism.
yawn
longish response, no pressure to read
What scares me is the massive energy use of AI, it also doesn’t make money. If some AI scrapes all my stuff on the fediverse, ok that sucks but honestly that LLM they train off my posts is going to be constantly complaining about corporations, going on off-topic rants about AI bullshit hype and centralization of corporate power… yeah you can sanitize the data, they can profile me… yeah I know. I feel like that is already a threat enough and there is a tsunami like power that comes from reaching a public consensus through discussing things in public forums and putting our beliefs out there as a form of vulnerability. The more of us that do this, the more that people who disagree or agree can learn, the more we can establish conensus of shared values, the more we can build trust. The metaphor for our current late stage capitalist society on the afterburners of surveillance capitalism/mass dragnet surveillane and censorhsip is clearly the panopitcon en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon <img alt="" src="https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/ad8861a2-5db5-429c-b8f6-db65590809f3.webp"> If you suspect you are in a panopticon, or in an environment that is threatening to collapse into an authoritarian panopticon type situation, than the best defense, because lets be honest if you are in this position you don’t have much power realistically do you? is to publically have conversations, share opinions, discuss honestly with people in a way that floods whatever commons that are left, whatever equivalent of yelling chants out of the prison bars to other prisoners… however you want to map the metaphor here… That is how we defend ourselves. The relevant question is whether you are in a situation where you can safely do that, if you can’t than take care of yourself, hide. Adopt good digital hygeine and help others out in an unjudgemental way how to do so themselves. If you feel at all that you can safely speak out, or honestly, if you feel like realistically you don’t have much to lose (because at the end of the day that is the position we are all existentially in, it is just a matter of who will suffer first and thus who has the right to want to delay that suffering the most) then the best defense here is to make as much as you can public through art, through any kind of discussion, because no matter how sophisticated and supercharged the methods of the oppressors are and no matter how overbearing the mazes of false-consensus become… …they still can’t ever really win in a moment to moment interaction with any half decent artist, any half decent person who knows their worth, any person willing to be vulnerable and say it how it is, and indeed really anyone that is willing to extend solidarity to strangers not because of some emotional need or ideological sense of superiority, but because it is something they try to do out of principle (and of course are imperfect at, so what, society shouldn’t be reliant on people being ethically perfect in the same way safety regulations in society shouldn’t assume people aren’t going to behave like idiots, as frustrating as that is ). The nice thing is, we are talking about snowball effects here. One of the best drugs in life is doing a small good thing that ripples into a slightly bigger good thing all by itself, that takes a little life of its own. I don’t claim to be any kind of altruist, or someone who constantly does selfless acts but that isn’t the point. Most people feel a basic pleasure when it is easy to help, to help so long as it is simple and direct how to do so. Some don’t, so what. The power of computers, of software and of social media is that it allows us to help, share, educate, illimunate and reinforce one another in small, tiny ways with barely any effort, barely any energy usage, and we can reach across basically ever barrier humans can be thrust behind by the cruelty of chance to reach them and bring them into the conversation. Hell yes, keep yelling out of those bars, keep telling it the way it is, keep being you if you can
While I agree with many of these takes, I believe there is more to this. For example, your point about defense from falling into panopticon by speaking publicly about things doesn’t actually require publicly speaking about anything other than politics. I mean, you can still hide all professional, creative or fun talk and still have the benefits you listed covered by only ever publicly talking about political issues. Another issue, is that publicity and interconnectedness of all discourses we have nowadays, increases a homogenuity of thinking patterns, in other words it hurts the diversity of the ways of thinking, that is also something that can be improved by more people going private and having closed interest groups in chats invisible to public web.
Where is your evidence of this?
It is a mistake to think pushing everybody to talk only in private will increase the diversity and quality of discourse. It will NOT, it will collapse conversations into simpler more reductive narratives.
Everywhere? Every decade humankind becomes more uniform worldwide, but especially last few decades.
I feel like over the last two decades everyone on the internet was pushed to talk only in public, even more so, on the few biggest platforms only.
What? Do you not listen to music? Or enjoy art? Do you not watch theater or tv? Do you not enjoy going to local craft shows and seeing local artists? No matter what happens in the 2000s, the 1900s will be remembered as one of the most artistically prolific, free and diverse periods of human expression and art. Yeah there is censorship, yes western culture is very conservative in ways it doesn’t want to admit sometimes, but in general the shear volume and variety of art created in the 1900s is immense.
Ugh, Discord is an information black hole. I despise how so many of my niches have fled there.
Reddit seems to be trying to destroy that “role” of theirs as hard as they can though. A few very niche subs I follow are drying from some kind of “bug” that deprioritizes their discoverability.
It’s not a bug. It’s absolutely a feature for making Reddit more generic, farmable garbage and noise.
They are both trash. How can we get more people to join Lemmy and the Fediverse?
Keep talking about it abroad
!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Users will search for new places. The fact that we are here is proof.
Build it, and they will come.
Yeah, well, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok are not the net, they are siloes. Discord too. Even Reddit is trying as hard as it can to be insular.
Much of my family doesn’t even know how to use a browser, at least not beyond the bare minimum for work. They probably never will.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
With all sincerity this is fine. Seriously, let’s leave it this way.
As someone who was already around when Eternal September happened the Internet was never for normies and inviting them into the space has destroyed it. Everything that attracts the attention of normies ends up ruined; MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Slashdot and so very many more…they are all trashed because when they attracted enough users the commercialization started.
So maybe lets just leave the Fediverse for those “in the know” as long as we can.
Thing is it’s kinda too late, and the, uh, “commercial net” has all but taken over society.
Whatever happens, it would be nice if that part burns down. And I think yanking the techies from the space with the Fediverse will help.
R.I.P the original Xbox Scene forums 💔
Then my so called “friend” calls me a manbaby for freaking out about this. They are going to be policing the entire internet soon!
That’s why we have to strengthen the fediverse!
To be fair, both you and your friend can be correct 🤷
Yeah, it’s why my new approach to problems is “Don’t tell anyone, find a quiet place to blow your head off instead”.
I meant it as: You can be a man baby and still be correct. The two are not mutually exclusive.
…but don’t let me stop you from overreacting to random, silly comments said in jest like a man baby 👍
Forums lifespans weren’t all that much anyways. Most sites that were hosted before 2010 are gone now.
The real downside to everything being on StackOverflow, Reddit, Discord, etc is that it has made it easier for big tech to run their shady data collection and analysis schemes including AI Training.
Couldn’t this be much different if “web 2.0” hadn’t taken over?
Many of them are still alive but don’t get the exposure they deserve because of centralized networks.
Right. But what can we do to get people to switch to the Fediverse and put an end to this?
Probably not, even if you have time to maintain your site by updating it occasionally then it still falls upon individuals to fund the hosting services and hold the domain name. Even Hexbear’s domain wound up for auction a little while back because they forgot to pay their bills.
Since Net Neutrality has been off and on enforced, it’s generally been considered illegal to block, hide, or throttle traffic, but I agree those small sites didn’t get as much search indexing unless they paid for ads.
To my knowledge net neutrality only covers internet providers and not search engines or other platforms.
Your precise wording was “centralized networks” which I interpreted as the ISP providing traffic between you and other services. Perhaps you meant monopoly?
No I mean the big social Networks with centralized management. Like Reddit, Facebook,…
I hosted a forum for guilds in several games I played over the years. I had mine up from 2005-2019 but my board’s php version got way behind the host‘a and it no longer works. Someday I will find someone to help me fix it, or start a new one.
yeah, because virtually all communities moved to Discord or Reddit.
The Reddit style voting/threading is superior of forums though.
An unfederated Lemmy instance for example would actually be really good.
The benefit to a forum is that posts with new comments move to the top. If a Reddit/Lemmy post gets a single new comment it may or may not be seen again by anyone except the OP or of the comment was a reply then to the op of the replied comment.
Some forums do have up/down votes as well as nested comments.
You could force latest comment sort on the posts, but leave the comments sorting to the user.
Lemmy does have this actually
join-lemmy.org/docs/…/03-votes-and-ranking.html
<img alt="" src="https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/769d40c4-1af9-4ff4-8589-6255ee0adbce.png">
and then there’s the “Active” sort, which is kind of a compromise
Neat! Now if I could see which of my subscriptions has new posts/comments.
you might like mbin then. same content, more reddit-like plus includes microblog interaction that lemmy fails at<img alt=":" src="https://cdn.catsweat.com/bc/53/bc53868ce3d597ce06784182d50d16cccb5669fb9a3c57d773b49e2b3562330b.png">
ex: https://moist.catsweat.com
Possibly, is Mbin basically a single instance like kbin was?
no, its an open source platform just as kbin was a platform. kbin was never a 'single instance'. my instance started on kbin before migrating to mbin.
the dev for kbin had personal issues and abandoned it. kbin was forked to mbin with the goal of having a 'community' of developers instead of a single one.
https://joinmbin.org/
Why does it need to be unfederated?
If you are a company looking for a forum, you want to be able to control it. Unfederated means you can control account access and don’t have to worry about someone going to All and seeing porn etc.
Federated could work, but you need to make it clear that it’s just a community on a platform.
Discourse already exists (and most big companies use that).
Also you can see many other things on Reddit or Discord too (or the internet). Im not sure how that is a point against federation. If companies really want to control everything they can create their own instance (like KDE’s lemmy instance).
They can defederate everyone from their instance to get an “unfederated” instance but again it changes nothing imo.
In fact defederation is a negative since now you have to worry about new signups, moderation, etc. While in a federated instance, you can leave moderation to other instances and only allow team/company members on your instance. Users can sign up on other instances and still be able to interact with your instance for support, help and other stuff.
They are going to moderate their communities, if its unfederated, you don’t have to worry about moderating (or the lack of) on any other instances communities at all.
Thats going to be too confusing for a lot of users - they just want to sign up and complain about/discuss things.
It depends if they are saying, we have a community on lemmy (federation fine) or saying, here is our official forum thing (federation bad)
We’re talking about Reddit. It’s one of the biggest porn sites out there. If anything, it’s way easier to control what your employees see if they are on a company instance.
Also, which company uses Reddit as their forum? Most of the ones I have seen use Discourse, which is open source but unfortunately not federated.
We’re all a big community. I think people get this quickly.
…that was entirely my point.
lots of small apps, orgs, communities etc just have a subreddit and a discord server. Lots of bigger companies have official or semi-official subreddits.
Someone wanting to get support for their hoover or something may not. they create an account to discuss the pros and cons of certain hoover and see loads of random stuff about American politics and Linux. Their going to get real confused. Most people have heard of reddit now though (and to a lesser extent discord)
Why do we need companies running things?
Are you pretending that nothing has ever been tried? The Fediverse, that's what is being done about it. That's why most of us are here. Also, why narrow it down to Reddit and Discord? Articles like these are garbage because it's very tone deaf.
Likes and Upvotes have long, long existed before. They started on forums, it was just the dawning of MySpace and Facebook and Reddit are what popularized them and made it standard.
Fucking hell, Forums also still exist, they just aren't getting activity. I hate this fucking article now.
Articles like this are constantly like “if only there was something we can do about it” while omitting the thing people are doing about it because the writer is too lazy to research properly
Yes, we are here. But how do we get the rest of the population over? We are still more complicated to use in comparison to centralized networks. That’s why most people are hesitant to join. This and exposure, of course.
I have heard from many people, and also from many YouTube influencers, that they add “reddit” to the end of their search query. So basically, people use Reddit to search on the internet now because it’s real people, not shitty SEO content.
True. But forums don’t get the activity they deserve because of centralized networks that take it from them.
Let’s change that! What can we do to strengthen and grow the Fediverse?
Excuse me what? Since when since Jun 2024 does Reddit actually have real people?
I haven’t had that many problems with bots on Reddit.
FWIW it's very common now to see at least open source projects run their own Matrix channels instead of Discord/IRC/xxx.
(I see in other comments that there's some confusion regarding Element and Matrix. Element is a client, Matrix is the protocol. Yes, Element-the-company does their best to add to this confusion)
I’m just imagining a bunch of people in Honda Elements yelling at each other about video games.
Yeah but that isn’t the greater population, unfortunately. What can we do to make the Fediverse more interesting for people?
Matrix has the same issue. Its not indexed by search engines. Plus the apps and ux are terrible.
What Reddit did 2 years ago proves that most people aren’t going to switch to alternatives just because it’s “the right thing”. They only do that when they want or need something from the new platform. If we want people to come to Lemmy, Matrix, and whatnot else, we have to make them into appealing alternatives both in functionality and content.
Reddit (and Lemmy/Mbin) is just a kind of forum.
And still is Reddit by far the biggest. How can we change that?
Am I mistaken in saying that the new Reddit/Lemmy format of forum is to message boards, as message boards was to BBS?
I hope someone is archiving that data. Lots of great small communities with great info/help.
There’s a shared theme with like all of humanity’s woes: people don’t care that much.
From pollution to injustice to shitty websites, if people cared just a little more the problem would be dramatically reduced or even eliminated.
But so many people are just apathetic. Overwhelmed and checked out.
Are there good alternatives?
I feel like forums really fell behind the times, with shitty threading systems and awkward text formatting interfaces and the horror that is bbcode.
Meanwhile discord handles image embedding gracefully, with markdown formatting and previews.
What’s the next-gen forum system that’s keeping up with modern times? Is there a part of the fediverse that meets this?
Discourse seems the most modern, but not sure if it is open, let alone federated.
Lemmy almost fills it but tends to be too ephemeral and doesn’t handle multiple forums/channels for one broad topic.
It’s fully open source.
It’s still experimental but they are working on it.
meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794
Awesome. That seems like the way to go then!
Xenforo seems decent but it’s proprietary
I have been trying to build a forum recently, but found phpbb really ugly and difficult to customize (even changing the logo was oddly difficult). I know about discourse but I would prefer a PHP based solution I can host in one of my current servers.
Are there any better solutions?
What hosting do you use? You can easily host it using docker.
github.com/discourse/…/INSTALL-cloud.md
Especially considering reddit is publicly traded and discord is having an IPO soon, and reddit has gone full 1984 censorship.
First and foremost I’d like to point out that this alarm has been sounded before. In the early 2010’s, in the late 2010’s, during the pandemic etc. Part of that is because megaforums like reddit (slack, github, and I guess digg) swallowed them up. Which is more convenient for the average user (younger internet users especially) who only have to go to one or two places with apps that allow them to use their phone to format in a readable/engageable manner for them.
I would posit that the internet forum isn’t dying exactly so much as it has morphed into things like the above mentioned megaforums. Those megaforums have their own trials and tribulations but they are popular for multiple reasons.
Ease of use - One tap to open an app you’re already signed into on a phone or tablet from anywhere.
Ease of discoverability - An algorithm that helps you to find things to engage with. An algorithm that promotes content that lots of other people engage with so that new users who don’t have preferences known yet can still find things they like.
Ease of navigation and search - I’m still using udm14.com to search for things on lemmy because if I don’t save them the search function on the site isn’t good and doesn’t always provide me with results at all. Reddit’s search is pretty bad but it’s still more usable than lemmy’s in a lot of ways.
Easy to sign up - I think this speaks for itself. Lemmy has a higher bar to clear for vetting an instance and even understanding the difference between instances than any other corpo platform, and while this has gotten easier over time, it will never be as simple as, go to this website and fill out the form to make an account.
I say all that to say that 1. we got here by ignoring the warnings for years and years. 2. We can compete but are unlikely to be the number one choice of the general internet masses for a lot of reasons. 3. Smaller forums will continue to die and get swallowed up by megaforum websites or platforms like reddit or lemmy because of the benefit of convenience on the user side and I believe we have probably reached the point of no return in that respect.
As to what we do about it? We cultivate ours to be better, add features and users in an organic way that would make our platform the preferred one. But we can’t really focus on growth alone and part of the reason for that has to do with the user subset who don’t want to become like reddit or digg etc. Additionally, I think we might be able to win over the artists and creators if we added something to prevent AI from scraping their works.
The main thing for users who are already here might just be better decorum. Lemmy users are often mean (myself included in that statement) to people who we view as stupid or ill-informed and we often treat them like trolls. We also assume a certain amount of known information about any given situation and act as if everyone should know, which is problematic.
One last thing I’d like to point out. People on the internet more and more engage with content they don’t have to read. I think that’s an important part of why forums are dying. Illiteracy is rising. It’s hard to have a conversation in written or typed forums when you don’t have that skillset. Discord allows people to engage via voice in ways lemmy just does not (this is not advocacy for discord because it’s not a forum and treating it as one is problematic on just about every level).
Nothing. We do nothing about it. I’ve literally watched this happen over and over and over and over since the early 90s. $Place on the internet gets popular and is then ruined by the hordes of normies and the commercialization they attract. It’s even worse now with rise of influencers, troll farms, online advertising agencies, and power users.
The normie users add almost nothing to the online experience and they take so very much.
So the wisest move is to do nothing and let the flotsam and turds of the internet wash up in harbors like Reddit.
Was this article written 15 years ago? Because this is anything but a new occurrence.
And what can we do about it now? I mean we have the Fediverse. It’s 20 million users are not the most but it’s not nothing. We can build on that.
I think it’s crazy that an art sub is more popular than an art forum.
For news and other more “consumables” I understand, but when posts don’t lose value because they age, forums are better IMO :-/
I suppose it’s the low barrier. People are already on Reddit and thus join the subreddits.
We have a great opportunity with the Fediverse here to replace them.
Something I was hopeful for but seems to have died is lemmyBB. A phpBB-style front-end to Lemmy. I'd like the accessibility of being able to use an existing account that federation brings but the forum-style approach that phpBB has.
Mostly though I've been disappointed in the teens and twenty-somethings. They seem to have, in distressingly large numbers, just opted to go along with whatever they're encouraged to use by large platform holders. There doesn't seem to be an appetite to create communities and define spaces that they control. Perhaps that's just me getting old though...
NodeBB implements ActivityPub !nodebb-development@community.nodebb.org
What do you think Lemmy is missing that phpBB had aside from strong user communities built over years where many of the users knew each other IRL?
Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).
Hmmm, you’re probably on to something there. I think Lemmy could do that but no one cares to set it up.
I’m honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I’m in a hurry to get back to that!
One of my favorite forums has been around since 1999 and is currently running on XenoForo which is very phpBB-esque. Anytime I get a nostalgia hankering I drop in for a few minutes. It’s not always as good as you may remember. :)
Honestly, no, none of the forums I ever used allowed that sort of things for, well, for obvious reasons!
Anyway, my reasoning for this is to help make it easier to mentally anchor a given interaction to a user. On things like Lemmy and Reddit I feel like it's a constant sea of random usernames - there's no persistence or community. I could well have spoken to the same person multiple times but I don't notice because they're so anonymous.
That’s it right there, that’s what you are missing. The older forum communities were small enough that you could keep track of whose who, something that isn’t possible when the user counts are in the tens of thousands to tens of millions. I think a lot of us olds would like to go back to that but its impossible; our monkey brains can’t handle communities of that size.
I feel a fundamental problem is the ephemeral post model. If one isn't actively contributing frequently it's effectively the same as not being part of the community at all.
Seeing lots of familiar faces in threads, even if they didn't post today, helped.
With regards to your point though, I think it's one of the reasons I'm not fussed about getting "everyone" onto a single platform. It's too many people!
Just looked it up. $60/mo is the “starter” price!? Are forums normally so expensive to run?
XenoForo is a bit spendy but they’re providing the software, hosting and data storage. IIRC the forum I’m talking about is on the “Business” plan due to how busy it is.
I think a lot of them have never known that it was possible, and things up until recently where at least tolerable. But as interest rates stay up of zero and things continue to degrade eventually more and more people will leave. The people with the most technical skills are going first and the cool people will follow and then they average people follow the cool people
Agree. It’s easy to feel disheartened by the lack of action. It’s easy to say get out and do ABC, however since smartphones and apps it’s been so easy to just hop on and scroll/consume. Plus the monetisation of content creation has captured a whole generation looking to build a career (fuelled by more apps to help them). Sharing and creating is big money now. It’s not just about saying hey look I did this just incase anyone else wanted to try it, and share there thoughts on the matter. I have concerns that even if forums popped up in a new shape they would just get scalped by those looking to repackage and sell the info.
it’s worrying because all that knowledge will be lost instead of living somewhere in a forum indexed by a search engine.
But in the same time, I see more people fleeing from traditional search engines to AI … I don’t know where we’re heading at
What do you think is the reason why not a lot more people are joining the fediverse?
I think there are more reasons, but the most prominent ones are
For sure.
They also know the difference between Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. Why shouldn’t they get it here?
No idea, but I tried inviting some my friends which are not tech-aficionados — they couldn’t understand it.
I’d love to see more money thrown on Ads for promoting the fediverse on YouTube, Twitch and all other platforms and get this shit more viral, but I don’t understand why it’s not happening.
Because there is not much money to make in the process. I think we need to lobby politicians to step in.
Little awareness
Subreddits were not a problem before since they were accessible on the web without needing an account. But now reddit is gradually locking them down behind authwalls and things like not letting search engines index (other than Google).
Lemmy communities dont have this problem and because lemmy is federated, its resistant to such enshittification (plus you can easily create your own lemmy instance for only your team). So imo they are a good alternative to forums (and reddit) and a good solution to this problem.
What can we do to get more people to switch over to Lemmy from Reddit?
I guess once more and more content is posted here, naturally more people will come. And also any further steps of reddit enthitiffication will move people over.
Can we actively do something to help this process?
yes. do what i’ve been doing. tell your irl acquaintances about the fediverse. tell them about the lack of algorithm and the lack of ads. tell them about the lack of billionaires farming you and yours for data.
Already on it! ✊
But I think we need a simple elevator pitch to win them over. No ads is definitely a great start.
It’s reddit with better/real people. Most people probably can feel reddit going to shit. Quality of comments is way down.
That’s true. Quantity over quality.
but that was my elevator pitch.
You are right. 😅 Basically all important information in there.
The main thing is post more. Lack of content is the main reason people don’t use Lemmy more, and the only way to fix this is to share/produce more.
Its a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think even (transparent, community-relevant) bots are a good idea at this point, given that 99% of interests have little to no activity currently. For example, if we had bots that post game update changelogs to their relevant communities, it would at least provide a baseline amount of content and make it easier to discuss for fans of those games.
post, comment, I keep seeing nonfedrrated options pop up because they know ppl are tired of stuff like reddit and are trying to grab ppl
Which ones? Haven’t seen any others yet.
Start copying as many of the top searches that bring people to Reddit. Have them answered here, possibly in more detail, or maybe copy paste.
That’s a great idea!
Some forum software is starting to support activitypub with plugins. If they add the plugin then you can follow and interact with the forum from Lemmy. The best option for everyone is to start pestering forum admins to add those plugins so they get users and Lemmy gets more content.
Long term creating migration scripts for popular forum software like phpBB, so content, users, etc, can be moved to a custom Lemmy instance would be an option.
That sounds like an awesome idea! I’m sure that many forum owners don’t even know that they can federate.
I found Lenny because someone posted about it on reddit
Awesome! What was the post and what convinced you?
I honestly don’t remember exactly but I think people were complaining about Reddit’s trajectory and someone mentioned lemmy voyager so I download it immediately.
Cool. And are you still using Reddit or are you using Lemmy exclusively?
More Lemmy posts in search results
Awesome. Let’s do that! :)
!fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
The pinned posts have ways to present Lemmy in a clear way to new joiners
Some good stuff there. Thanks!
Happy to help.
There’s also !fedigrow@lemm.ee about community growing (so more internal than external growth). Happy to discuss there as well.
Would love to! I’m already subscribed.
Just FYI, you’ll see that the consensus over there is that consolidation is beneficial to a lot of topics, as you can see on the latest topics there
I keep an eye for engaging content on reddit and just rip it here. Mastodon and I think even BlueSky ran on repost bots in the early days. People have to find stuff here first.
I think, though, I stuck a Leminal Space link in my bio or upvoted a Luigi and got banned. So, not sure if you can directly link to Leminal over there or not.
I have thought about creating a bot to crosspost content from reddit here but I suppose they will quickly block access. RSS could work to a degree, but it doesn’t include the full content and media.
If you or somebody else has ideas, I’m listening.
I have a link to my instance in the bio and regularly post about it and haven’t had problems with exposure until now.
lemmit.online ?
That’s cool! Definitely have to check it out.
FYI, the general consensus is that people disliked it as it was just a systematic repost bot from Reddit.
Reposting from Reddit is fine, but you need to filter the good content from the bad one
I thought about only crossposting uprising content and only a few a day. Simply crossposting everything would be definitely a bad idea.
I’d like to see fedi software evolve past just cloning twitter and reddit into more diverse offerings, like forums
…and Facebook Groups.
A lot of people simply don’t realize that a lot of traditional community, especially more niche are moving to Facebook. There’s no even Reddit alternative for them.
From fried chicken cooking, big tree photography, McDonalds toys collector, to local history archiver.
It’s harder to convince them here, unless there are Facebook Group alternative for fediverse.
Isn’t there anything in friendica or diaspora like that?
The Friendica UI is terrible, unfortunately. Way too complex.
What should be changed in your opinion to make it easier to use?
Not as comprehensive as Facebook Groups.
Facebook strength is having big community from Asia and Africa. While fediverse is mostly Westerner (and isolated Japanese). Unless people from those continents move here in huge wave, I don’t think Facebook will get replaced.
Mastodon is not valid recommendation for them, as these people doesn’t even use Twitter or even hates them.
yuck facebook, ive seen people who cant handle criticism move there, because they can delete or have control of thier discussion at will, without getting reported themselves.
Any social media technically host the same variation of people. It can be good or bad depends of your social circle and what kind of people you follow. Even fediverse has its own bubble of hostile people.
I proudly still use a super specialised old school online forum and it works great for those purposes.
during the first big migration to lemmy a lot of folks were splitting between discord and here, and a really common refrain was “anything but old school forums” and i absolutely did not and do not get this attitude. old school forums were great! the discussions were always super relevant because everyone was there to discuss whatever specific thing everyone had signed up for, and the people posting were always super reliable, knowledge wise, because, again, it was a dedicated place for discussing something specific, and the frequently asked questions would always end up in a really good wiki. sometimes i wonder if people had bad experiences on those forums because they’re much more focused. like on reddit everyone would complain about the arch forums on r/arch, but none of what they said matched the actual tone of the arch forums. it made me think they posted short one liner questions as thread starters instead of giving a full breakdown of the error they were seeing, what they did to troubleshoot the problem, and what errors had come about during that process.
overall, i think we’ve had a shift in the architecture of the internet thanks to general purpose discussion sites like twitter and reddit. before, the internet was cathedrals filled with texts related to their specific topic. everything on a sportster related forum was going to be about the maintenance and modification of sportsters. maybe there was a subsection where people could talk about their other motorcycles, but that was more of a social lounge than anything, like the equivalent of the fellowship hall in my cathedral analogy.
after reddit and twitter took over those scenes, the internet became a mall. unfocused, impersonal, and only meant to pipeline you into purchasing products. none of the people up front are very knowledgeable because you don’t need to be knowledgeable to make sales, you need to be attention getting. especially when what’s for sale is disposable
At risk of rambling… It feels like attention spans have shortened, too.
www.axios.com/2024/…/gen-z-kids-reading-tv-songs
People don’t want to dig through long discussions and documentation, they want a quick fix in a YouTube Short, or for it to be fed to them shooting the breeze in Discord.
And this sorta works short term, until the “old” information well those shorter systems rely on dries up.
It’s already a serious problem in newer topics. I’m part of the “localllama” community, for instance, and it feels like any central organization of knowledge has completely collapsed, and there is no old info to fall back on because everything is so new.
My problem with forums is that they spiral out of control. Forum lovers see this as a huge plus but I’m not reading 1700 pages (not posts) of bullshit across three posts just to get to the current info.
Any time I see
At the bottom of a post I just click off the website and go somewhere else.
You don’t have to read everything posted over the entire history of the forum. Old threads are kept so that when you need information they contain, you can find them with search, not with the expectation that new people are going to read all of them before posting.
i do, especially with a forum i am on after i was banned from reddit, its was discussing how people were recently banne dand how to evade it.
The one thing I don’t like about oldschool forums is that I have to make an account for each one. With each account comes a new place where your email address is registered, and a new password, with each password comes a new avenue for attack if you’re shitty about web security and use the same password (or a variation thereof) for everything. If you use a password manager you’re fine, but I don’t want my email being put everywhere.
There needs to be some kind of SSO that’s open source (like Google but not Google), so I can log into any forum that implements it, but with that comes the cost of running an identity provider and I don’t think forums are going to want to pay for that in addition to their own costs. Maybe some sort of distributed system or something where each forum donates a little bit of compute power to running the IDP, I dunno…
Mozilla’s Persona protocol/service could have been this, but it failed to get traction and they abandoned it. Maybe it was an idea that was just too early. Decentralized auth is a really hard problem.
We have to fight back since the commercialization of the Internet by refusing to use corporate systems. Old school forms are great although I will say the friction of having to sign up for a new account just to post is a pretty big deterrent, being able to just subscribe to a new subreddit makes it easier to explore very wide range of topics all at once, and to have all the newest post brought to you in one place you can check on your work break.
Maybe a hack with RSS or something could have worked but we all use those platforms for a reason, back when they were objectively much better
It seems so innocent at the time we didn’t know it was going to get this bad. At least there’s broad consensus nothing’s going to fundamentally change. We’re already taking first step. I’d like to see old school style forums, and also a focus on atemporality. Being able to have conversations with people over different time zones or even different months is extremely useful and something basically you need no internet conversations that we should really lean into the ability to do that. We need to get rid of the culture of shaming people for responding to old posts
and maybe bring back some of the old personal touches like forms signatures but with Federation so you can just make one account and do everything through it if you so choose. Reddit was kind of sort of system that worked like this and let me is now but the feature set was Bare Bones in comparison. We can do better we just need to develop the software
Fuck discord and fuck reddit.
Let’s do that and get more people to join the Fediverse!
@tfm I use perplexity ai instead of any forums or other platforms. AI killed them all. I don’t see why I have to sift through endless flame wars instead of finding a straightforward answer to my question.
That’s a good argument. But shouldn’t we then promote FOSS solutions like Perplexica?
I have never once used discord and it makes me wonder how much information I haven’t been able to find, but I’ve managed to get what I need so I don’t know if it was important anyway.
To me, Discord feels like someone shoehorned a bunch of features into an old '90s instant messenger. Like if the only way you could access Wikipedia was by searching through your MSN Messenger chat history or something.
@ivanafterall @ramble81 IRC with emoticons
Nothing. People move to reddit and discord for a reason. If forums were worth saving, this problem wouldn’t have existed.
Lol. Worth saving.
Reddit is shadow banning people in droves for bad upvotes
Yeah they are shit now. What can we do to move them over to Lemmy?
Pornography was a very popular draw for Reddit, but posting in general helps too.
did you just seriously say posting is the cure to one of the world’s ills?
I’m not even sure you’re wrong. fuck. I may have to retire that bit.
Good content here will keep people off of Instagram, or shitter.
Honestly if reddit kills porn it’s over for them.
like I said; I’m not even sure you’re wrong.
and didn’t they kill all the queer porn? so don’t we just need to, like, do more queer porn on lemmy?
Let’s get more queer porn on Lemmy!
Go ahead, create some content! ^^
I’m not that kind of professional 😂
As a gay man I agree, to get more people seeing good content no other reason, nope.
Dicks out for Lemmy!
i think there still alot of porn on reddit, all kinds, its just reddit have purging many bots/users who have hundreds or thousands of accounts for no good reason since they dont make it to front page anyways.
they already try to force porn users on mobile to use thier crappy app if you dont want to login, or use thier app. thier app makes it easier to mine your data and recognize your device for easier banning.
High resolution pictures on lemmy is a bit slow still. Worse for video. That’s the second most important issue left to fix on lemmy
Isn’t that just a bandwidth issue?
still is, since many accounts are there to just spam thier OF profile.
I see this sentiment a lot but I don’t see the spam on pretty much any NSFW subreddit.
Which subreddit and user?
Lemmy is just reddit under different management.
Lemmy is decentralized. So very different.
Ita lot of reddit under different management. It looks and feels like reddit not like a forum.
There is no central management on Lemmy. Every instance is managed by someone else. Nobody can decide something for all of Lemmy.
Reddit with different management.
Obvious b8. <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ce0c1eb9-90ad-4aba-aaa3-f51b6910f656.webp">
I mean sure, do not use the two eyes you have and take a look at lemmy ux vs reddit and vs a forum. lemmy is literally the reddit we have at home. The fact its tons of different reddits we have at home connected is the only difference. Not even bait, this is what everyone normal sees.
What are you talking about?
This is clearly a Digg.
In some ways yes in other ways no. The urge to hivemind and purity test everything is definitely the same however the ability to move to another instance and get away from a group of power tripping mods is different.
Lemmy is essentially a collection of 2000s era forums that have agreed to share user accounts.
Lemmy is a lot of different Reddits under a lot of different managements.
Lemmy is not a forum.
Forums are structured around activity bumping, not recency and voting. A years old thread can end up back on the front page if someone posts in it. It’s just a different medium.
And it’s a medium that we need to preserve.
I only heard about lemmy a few weeks ago I bet there’s more like me. I think it’s just a question of promoting it
Cool how was the switch for you? Do you like or miss something in particular?
I love it! Reddit has slowly been going to shit for years, so many posters are nasty and there’s so much hysteria. There’s ads and political manipulation everywhere. I miss some of the subs, and would prefer a bit more activity but at the same time posts are far higher quality. Overall I’m really really happy and it’s been smooth and welcoming
Nice to hear! Yeah activity is still way lower than on Reddit but it’s slowly increasing. :)
100% and the good thing is they seem to be really nice people joining
What’s a bad upvote?
Upvoting what they deem as bad or violent content.
Anything anti billionaire, to sum it up.
I am one of those people and I wonder. Is it because I upvoted a news article about war or a nazi getting punched?
How do you find out about it? Try to view the threads while logged out and not seeing your comments, I suppose?
This is why I’m making more effort to move to Lemmy permanently. The thing is that they’re also refusing to say what exactly will get you banned, and that they can and probably will change the criteria pretty much when they feel like it. This is the kind of shit abusive partners do. They cannot expect anyone to be able to follow a rule that they refuse to define. Personally, I don’t think that’s an accident. It feels more like they’re laying the groundwork to be able to censor whoever they like, most likely at the behest of the current US administration.
Forums are where I learned literally everything about technology I know now. Every hack, jailbreak, method of bypassing something, building, literally anything I’ve done around my tech hobbies. Pi hole, emulation in the late 90s, how to use Photoshop, how to run Linux from a USB, everything I’ve learned from forums. I’m sad to think that me joining certain discords help deliver the death knell to the concept of forums.
proudly not a part of the problem. and I fucking told everyone so at the time.
I swear my real name is cassandra, and my parents just misspelled it badly.
I’m not convinced at least half of those communities trust Reddit and Discord enough to leave forums, but then again I stopped using them mostly because I haven’t had time for those hobbies. My emulation groups are still active on forums, at least.
a lot of them died because they never bring in new people and people leave for a variety of reasons.
How about crossposting forum post links on Lemmy? This would help to get them exposure.
XDA forum was that for me. Great place to start and then follow links or do more research using the keywords used in the discussions. Just helpful for things like learning if a kernel is potentially fixable or not before buying a second-hand device for a custom rom project. The new look / reorganisation of stuff annoys me though as I find it harder to find stuff than it used to be but that’s because I am using it on autopilot. I guess new users might find it attractive / easy to navigate?
That not all, search engine too are killing internet. They become worst ad time pass. You can’t even found again some piece of info which is still here on a forum or something. Google prefer to send you to a reddit which doesn’t answer you question than on a forum which has the specific answer and that you found some years ago. It fell like search engine are purposely killing old plateforme even if they are still up.
I’m using DuckDuckGo and Qwant and get way better results than on Google now. I don’t know what’s going on there at Google but I hope they make it even shittier so they loose more users.
Yeah I am using duckduck go and starpage too. But you have to admit result still Los quality. Even if it is not as bbad as google.
thier obssession with using AI to do all the searches is also excluding the actual sites you want to see.
I honestly don’t think Internet forum will ever loose itself. You will always always have small amount of people who will migrate to smaller forums for whatever topic or subject that they are interested in. Yes it might seem like discord and Reddit might appear to be the major forums of today’s modern age of communication under the title of forums.
People will always migrate and do whatever means to obtain freedom of speech. If Reddit and discord, well Reddit that I actually know of continue to perm ban or ban because of a word that our overlords aka moderators ban, because they are drunk with power and micromanage their sub Reddit then it’ll die. It will take time but forums like Lemmy and IRC (I know this ages me.) which still exist today, will never die. People just are not aware that other forums exist. They just have to do a little research or stumble upon it by accident which is how I found Lemmy. I was familiar with the term fediverse, but just never really looked into it.
So there’s hope. Humans are peculiar and interesting. We are highly intelligent, and I will always lean on the fact that we are tenacious and we never lack in ingenuity. They can never control our creativity and imagination. If something tries to monopolizes and put us in a box, there’s always a rebel creating a door for some of us to escape.
Forums were micromanaged far more than modern social platforms. Reddit is one of the “free speech absolutist” sites like its sibling 4chan. These were opposing paradigms to forums.
I’ve long contended that modern social media users would absolutely hate the old style forums. If people think subreddit mods and reddit content mods suck. They haven’t met the admin of Joe Bobs phpbb forum hosted from his garage. Joe Bob doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
I don’t think it’s a free speech problem. I think people have not only been conditioned to be content junkies. They’ve become addicted to being Greater Fuckwads.
Maybe nobody cares what you think and whatever your words are they aren’t that important. Social media has devoured peoples egos turning them into the Greatest Fuckwads. With social media everyone has a podium and everyone has very important words with billions of doomscrollers as an audience. Don’t you dare steppy my freedoms!!1!
Anyways I think the real test is whether people can handle a small forum with strict moderation and focused discussion. That will reveal who has half a brain apart from the fuckwads. I’ve seen people come to what are now basically private forums acting like a garden variety social media user only to get smacked down real quick. A sobering dose of reality for them.
I see what you mean. It will be interesting to see who is a brain dead NPC influenced by social media in the mass monopolization sector of it. Who is really into the niche topics and genre of commentary in the essence of forums. I will always hold out in hope when it comes to social media that is built by the people for the people. But you are exactly correct in being a test.
depends on the forums, some entrenched mods like in the main military forum(joining) are very anal. and some dislike you mentioning any kind of race, when its relevant to a medical issue.
Yeah, bring back Usenet! (rabble, rabble, rabble) /s
It’s still there - but, I do wish it was more active (other than the piracy and porn, that never die I suppose)
They already disappeared around 2017 when Steve Bannon’s racist troll armies flooded every single social media site or app. The auto-immune reaction killed the host, which I suspect was the point.
Sow how are we getting people to join the Fediverse?
Hire Steve Bannon as a marketer?
He is currently busy destroying the democracy in the US
Kagi could be a good alternative to Google Translate: …kagi.com/…/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-p…
Try DeepL. It’s the superior translation app, as far as I’m concerned. Based in the EU, I believe.
Haven’t found a website translation service from them, unfortunately.
There’s a DeepL browser extension for that.
But I cannot share this here, unfortunately.
Ah. I follow now. Sorry I didn’t realise you had linked to google translate in the post.
That looks good!
Its been driving me crazy, I am so close to abandoning the internet and going back to old reading just out of spite. yesterday I went looking on how to fix something simple a small electric item and all i got was adverts for a replacement, I use DDG and i closed the screen at three pages. I miss when you could simply search a question and the answer was there. Excited to see the resistance starting to emerge.
Me too! What do you think we can do to get more people to join the Fediverse?
One of the things for me is over the last few years i have suppressed my inner geek, censored my voice and gone along with the common group areas. I have tended to read rather than be part of something. I am kinda techie always have been however I have slept walked into a hole that I need to get out of, and instead start contributing to real communities of interest. Spaces i love, spaces where people share my passion.
I think the benefits of diversity the fediverse and infact the world we live in needs communicating. Convenience (or what i believed to be) has been a hell of a drug that I am waking up to and walking away from. And that means me getting involved in healthy internet spaces. Spaces that work me not me not the other way round. As a real life analogy, Supermarkets are great, but as i get older i am going back to farmers markets and boot sales, i like the experience, i find things i didn’t know i wanted.
I found reddit was easy to scroll, easy to read, it is like being in a corridor full of people all heading the same way, you feel like part of something, it fills time and you are never lonely. It was however not true communities like the old days of the internet.
You should definitely start creating content and communities! It’s a lot of fun.
I’m currently establishing a new Lemmy instance and it’s fun as hell. Especially since it’s a lot easier to build communities in this Reddit like format than in any other. I simply post content I see and want to share into the appropriate communities and discussions will naturally follow. This can also be original content of course.
I have been considering it. Not sure what on. I love to craft, make reuse, there are a few here but i guess there could be space for more.
Just start with something. The more that participate with good content, the better :)
Try Ifixit next time. If it runs on electricity, there’s a good chance that they have taken it apart and documented how to repair it.
Its finding it in the first place. It wasn’t even a tough question it was actually about changing a plug on something, i just wanted to double check it was suited, but the effort of finding out the info outweighed the effort to just do it. Something like iFixit is a good idea but you have to find it in the first place. These places are so buried now. Thanks for the answer by the way.
Yeah, the modern internet is sadly pretty cooked. We are well and truly past the golden age.
This is precisely the reason I’ve been using LLM so often. Finding what I want on Google or DDM has become too time consuming. I’m sure the answer is on there but I’m not willing to take the time to scroll through all of the BS ads, spam content, AI written garbage. Why should I?
what is LLM?
ai
large language model. a type of ai that generates believable text
Using an AI search engine is ok. But you definitely have to check the sources.
not trying to make fun of the idea and I share big part of your sentiment, but I just got the mental image of a person leaving the internet, opening a book angrily and saying to the air: “ha! it serves you right! I don’t need you anymore!”
and I chuckled a little xD
The big problem with web forums was dealing with spam.
Also, one thing this article overlooked is that X is no longer indexed by Google, because you’re required to log in to read most things.
xcancel.com to the rescue! Simply replace x.com with xcancel.com and see everything and don’t give them a single piece of data.
Original link (in Spanish): xataka.com/…/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-…
Is talking on Lemmy ok?
What do you mean?
Kindly refrain.
I STRONGLY recommend just going out looking for whatever forums you can find that are still active.
I’ve actually been going out of my way to look up new forums to use since the Reddit API controversy. Finding them can sometimes be a pain in the ass because search engines suck nowadays, but I’ve found a few I hang around on. I spend way more time on them than I do Lemmy.
They do still exist, I have a specific but popular vehicle, and there’s a dedicated forum style site directly from 2011.
In a perfect world, that would be folded into the “fediverse” protocols, but like they’re already paying their own hosting etc. In the end that’s all reddit did: absorb some nominal hosting and IT for exposure. It made sense for hype niche communities, which is how reddit grew, but now that they’re killing control of the communities… Well… It turns out people were willing to pay for those servers back when they were expensive…
Why not creating a community around this topic on Lemmy and crosspost forum posts there?
Someone should compile a directory of every forum out there, and share a widely and updated every 3 months. Having some creation to say that this one is a good car for him that one’s good for this Etc it help people if the process. Go sift through the net and find the best stuff and Elevate it for people
This is unironically on reddit right now. People lamenting a place like Lemmy doesn’t exist.
I’m less worried about Discord, honestly.
IRC is literally right there.
The protocol itself could use a little modernizing (namely around privacy concerns), but it’s still very relevant.
Discord was talking about going public, probably changing their profit incentives. My group and I were talking about setting up a Rocket Chat if that happened. But it has to have IRC compatibility, right? Can IRC provide real-time audio communications? Discord is a failover when in-game communication isn’t working for some reason.
Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a “community tool”.
I think it’s because it’s great for group messages too. SMS/MMS is kinda shit, especially when somebody has an iPhone and their iMessage interferes (seriously, enough of the ‘loved an image’ spam). IRC gets blocked on a lot of public networks because of its association with piracy, so that makes it less than reliable.
Discord is pretty full featured too, like IRC doesn’t do group calls, and getting a group phone call going is a pain. Being able to have different channels is also super nice, because you can have a channel for, idk, birthday party planning to keep it from vanishing in the general daily chitchat. I’ve used it with roommates to get everybody on board with a grocery list before, because we all had Discord accounts anyways.
It’s just useful enough as a community tool.
This is the answer.
For whatever complaints one might have about Discord (and they are legion), it does a really good job of packing a bunch of different functionality in one place and with a UI that’s super easy to grasp and understand what does what and how that requires very little foreknowledge of what the thing is or its underlying mechanisms.
If I am completely new and pretty blank of what it is, Discord’s pretty good at me being able to catch up quickly; it’s got a good UI and, following that, functionality for a bunch of things related to communication. And, if I need a quick solution that just gets me going…that’s gonna be pretty painless.
Exactly. Whats funny is facebook could have done this in like… 2010. Like I’m fairly certain I had “group pages” back then that were a very small number of people. But you’re right, the channel thing is crazy useful. Like my one group has 3 people, but we’ve got like 50 topics. It’s gotten to the point there are archives, ie: the “thanksgiving” channel moves from the “archive” group to “general” group around mid sept.
I’ve also been lucky enough to avoid having it be work related. Like I have slack for work, that notification noise is the devil, where as the discord notification noise means my buddy is posting pictures of his kid.
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/1429d8a7-57ff-406a-aef1-98216e26d71c.png">
It’s because of this bullshit.
Take a guess how many members this server/example community serves:
500? 2000? 10,000+?
Surely, a group of 50,000 needs a ticket system, age verification, moderation, and rules/TOS+registration?
There are twelve users in that chat/server. Three of the 12 are moderators. One is the “owner”.
Discord became a “community tool” because Discord moderators/“creators” are a special class of human being who realized their dream model train set could be upgraded with Internet connectivity.
Medium-to-large-scale-enterprise tooling is available to spin up for anyone, without having to pay for anything. In fact, Discord incentivizes donations through “boosts” where the users of a community pay for server costs rather than the hosts/maintainers themselves.
As a result, people go ham and never invest in proper training, role division or infrastructure. They cosplay at running a pseudo-corporation and Discord adds their requested features, at a price/donation premium.
P.S: I run a Discord channel of 223 users with no moderation, we have one text channel and two voice channels. We use the service like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak for a Steam Clan. I’ve literally had these busybodies from disparate communities join just to tell me I was “doing it wrong”.
P.S.S: I also hate HOAs.
Ah, the dream of having control over others alive even in a space as pathetic as a video game chat room. You definitely aren’t doing it wrong your way.
a server I was a part of a while ago had maybe 30 people, but with a ton of topic based channels. the ‘owner’ would CONSTANTLY bitch about conversations being too specific for general and reprimand people.
even in one server I’m currently in, which has ~2500 members, there’s really only 50 people active on it. one of the mods still does this all the time (“tAkE iT tO #PoLiTiCs”) and it inevitably only ends the conversation every time. nice “community”.
Whenever anyone tells me a discussion should be moved I am done. The spell is broken and the social interaction concluded because I'm no longer interested. Discord channels are fucking social poison.
I'm reminded of forums that would have a million subforums and as a result never build up any critical mass. Have one big bucket, maybe two, and if something comes up often enough organically then, and only then, consider a separate subforum for it.
Yeah, but it shouldn’t replace forums.
1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There’s <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I’m on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it’s great. It’s direct out of 2010, it wouldn’t suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that’s really what lemmy seems like to me: “what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?”
I don’t mind using it for larger teams, it can be great for organised communication such as dev teams!
But it shouldn’t replace documentation.
(Also, Discord itself is a proprietary, censoring telemetry wasp nest, your FOSS dev team shouldn’t be organised in it but Matrix, XMPP, IRC channels or something else open.)
Last I checked you can only thread a conversation one level down from the channel and that’s it (when I last used it like 5 years ago).
To me that’s practically unusable for what it’s supposed to be. Slack even does a better job, in my opinion.
Discord is far worse in this context, though. Much of reddit is still publicly visible and is still indexed by some search engines, even if it could be better. Discussions from years ago are still visible and provide useful information to many (this is part of the reason “search term + reddit” became such a popular query template). When communities move to Discord, many of their conversations become completely private to anyone who isn’t a member. The conversations move quickly and there is no easy way for people to reference past information. I get that people on Lemmy hate reddit and it’s popular to circlejerk about it, but forums being replaced by things like Discord and Telegram that aren’t equivalents at all has been much more damaging.
Discord was never ‘user-friendly’. It always gave me nerd, incel, neurodiverse, or weirdo vibes so not something I would miss much although I probably qualify as nerd, neurodiverse, and weirdo (but not incel, never that).
Recently I’ve created a private forum and so far I’m very happy with it. It’s nice that our discussions are private, keeping data gobblers, programmatic advertisers, grifters and other schmucks like this out in the cold.
tad-lispy.com/club/
To be clear, I’m advertising the idea, not membership.
That’s cool! Was it hard to set it up?
Technically? Not very much, but I’m handy with NixOS. The hardest part was the configuration of a mail server. I should probably blog about the setup process. But of course the real work is attracting people and keeping them engaged.
Push Lemmy out there. Help Lemmy grow. Lemmy has a few issues that need addressed;
The Name needs changed, you see who shows up when you search Lemmy. The easiest thing to do is switch it to “Lemme” (Sounds like “Let Me”, like just lemme post this) or Lemy.
Lemmy needs an app that is just as easy as Reddit to sign up for. It needs to drop on the person’s computer desktop and sign them into a default federation that auto accepts everyone. The initial signup process is confusing to people, with the website listing different federation and having to apply and wait. Some auto accept, people need to be pointed to those.
Good ideas for new names, however, I think this is seen very controversial in the community.
Some sort of rotation system would be cool that distributes the users across multiple instances. That way no single instance gets too big.
Personally, I would be irritated to be signed up for an instance I didn’t choose and may not be what I like, especially if the app hid the fact that I had a choice.
Maybe instead of asking which instance, we could do some sort of categorization and ask in which topics someone is interested and the instance chosen based on that?
I think many people quickly get lost on the term instance and what it means.
You just need to segment the choice. First you choose between just sign me up or advanced choose you instance, then you switch to either the traditional setup or the hold your hand setup depending on that choice.
And to which instance(s) would you redirect the user in easy mode?
I agree with this. Have like 50 or 20 and have the mod screen be part of the experiment, and once they hit a certain threshold number of users they are removed to help encourage diversity
Oh yes, that is an amazing idea. That or a welcome “pad” style federation that boots you out of it after 30 days. That way people don’t “zerg” one federation.
Agree with these points so much. It feels like I have to learn how to sign up, then learn to use it, rather than just use it.
If communities get big enough people will sign up because a particular instance is a community where they want to be and then they can discover federation on their own time.the problem is that we’re still small enough that there’s only barely enough to see in the first place and instances are thus far mostly interchangeable.
I hate that Discord is being used as a forum replacement because it’s fucking terrible for it. There’s pretty much no way to collate and archive information in a way that is actually useful.
That’s by design for sure.
Discord, Reddit and Lemmy are bad choices for forums. If you want ANY useful information to stick, put it on forums you know are gonna get indexed and archived reliably. Reddit is indexable but there’s no guarantee the page will still be there when you search for it through Google.
Discord is completely unindexable so any information that exists on a server that gets deleted is lost forever.
Lemmy is a half-way house. As far as I know it’s kinda indexable but not really.
Looks like Lemmy has great indexabiliy: www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aeurope.pub
europe.pub is only about two weeks old and hundreds of pages have already been indexed. Currently setting up the Google Search Console to get more details.
Not only that, the ongoing discussion format means all knowledge is in the same place and people don’t need to keep asking the same question over and over by creating new posts and you don’t end up with the same conversation happening in three different branches of the same post like on Reddit/Lemmy.
Lemmy is as indexable as Reddit, if not more so.
Discord is bad because its forums are not world-readable, therefore not indexable. It’s very useful to the rest of the world to have conversations be public. The youngest users here may not even remember but searching Google in the 2000s before Facebook went huge and when forums were all world-readable, it was a different experience altogether. You could find somebody who was talking about your niche issue/product - no matter what it was. It was kind of magical. No matter what thing happened to you, you could be pretty sure it had happened to someone else and they were talking about it somewhere and Google would see it and point it out to you.
Not anymore. Everything’s on Facebook now and Google can’t see it, nor can anyone else - except Facebook. All that legacy knowledge just tucked away in Facebook’s data vault and essentially useless to anybody but Facebook, which makes it less than useless.
Met my wife on a little internet forum called 9chat. Right before it disappeared.
These little spaces on the internet were quite nice to be. Always seeing the same people. It has a different feeling.
Decentralising social media will have its positives. When one tries to control public opinion, people can flee to another one for example.
That’s why we have to make sure the Fediverse is the future!
It’s been 1 week since I found out about Lemmy, liking it quite a bit.
I wonder, is there an area on this social media that are extremist pro free speech?
Such as, okay you’re being a total shithead, I still won’t ban you.
I’m just curious if spaces such as that even exist, and if they do, what they lead to.
I don’t know about lemmy since I’m old enough to not care to go looking for that, but I can speak in generalities from a few decades back.
So, I ran an old-school forum in the late 1990s/early 2000s. I found that a complete lack of moderation leads to bad actors essentially ruining the vibe. Basically, there are human beings (and bots plied by state actors in this day and age) that will happily exploit a fully-unmoderated forum and fill it full of awful stuff.
Now, bad mods are awful, power-tripping and all, and lots of regular people who have never run a community of any sort have had run-ins with mods that have the HOA Karen mentality and come to the not-entirely-correct conclusion that ALL moderation is bad, but having no mods can ALSO kill a community if it gets big or noticed enough to draw in outsiders, because you end up with the bullies running roughshod over everyone else, and changing the vibe. And if the vibe gets too gross, you lose the decent, cool members because they’ll fuck off elsewhere and do their thing elsewhere because your community is too full of bullshit and crap.
Corpo social media has the no mod feeling. They only really moderate to avoid lawsuits and things like harassment are rampant
I can imagine that spamming/constant harassment/advertising/etc can ruin a space. Especially when it can be automated.
Perhaps it would be better with temp bans and that moderation is automated in order to prevent bias.
You could simply start your own instance. Nobody can delete your content or ban you there. But get ready to get defederated from other instances.
but it can help against that if you disable registrations after you got your account
How would this help against defederation?
if you are the only person, you cannot be defederated because of instance hopper ban evaders
Well there's the disaster that was hexbear...
Every forum I used before Reddit even existed is still active (hell, PHPBB was updated as recently as November!) and new platforms, like Lemmy, pop up all the time . IDK what the fuck these articles are talking about. Maybe they just don’t know how to actually find anything on the web? 🤷🏻♂️
I think it’s more about the scale. 80% or more of the content gets created on Reddit or alike, probably.
Barely any content is created on Reddit. It’s an aggregate site where 90% of the posts are links to other sites, just like Lemmy. Even most of the memes/image macros are unoriginal and taken from somewhere else.
I have to disagree. I have seen a lot of helpful question/answer Style content there which was only there.
well maybe on certain (mainstream?) subs, but tech subs like those that do something with selfhosting have a lot of discussions. including in the comments of posts that point to external content!
its a shame that there’s no lemmy instance thats basically a mirror of a few reddit subs (or is there?)
I’m not sure if it’s a Lemmy feature or voyager feature. But under the settings, there’s a migrate subreddits. It pulls across the subreddits you are subscribed to and matches them to ones on Lemmy.
afaik that just auto-subscribes you to a popular lemmy-alternatives of your communities
Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they’ve showed up starting in the early 90s. They don’t want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.
If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there’s enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.
The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don’t fit into a box. It’s that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can’t hold the castle once it’s being assaulted by the normies.
So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It’s for the best.
oh this is a good take
I disagree. Email is still perfectly usable and helpful because we simply filter out the commercial stuff. The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad. Luigi Luigi Luigi. I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.
Many people, including a large chunk of Lemmy, are perfectly fine with censored discussions. They honestly want it that way…as long as the discussion is censored such that it agrees with their opinion.
It’s extremely difficult to free people from things that they want.
It’s frustrating but true.
To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed. The rhetoric makes the space becomes completely unserious; just not a good environment.
The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.
I am not going to argue in terms of right/wrong because I’m just not equipped to. But in terms of platform result, I do not want to participate on a 4Chan clone - because it always leads to unserious discussion, bad faith, and death.
In the forum days those users would get attacked and / or blocked by other users. If they caused enough havoc for long enough then the mods / admins would step in. The expectation NOW is that the mods / admins will actively monitor every post and comment in order to remove disagreeable content before it can be seen. That’s quite the change over the last 20 years!
“Mirror” is probably more apt than you realize. IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave. I’m not blaming you or saying that you’re wrong, I’m just pointing out the difference.
I agree that all forums require some level of moderation in order to keep from turning into total troll-fests however there’s a wide chasm between moderating someone because they won’t stop posting racial slurs and moderating someone because they’re going against the grain / hivemind.
There’s a lot of nuance to be had here, but it’s a conversation for another time.
You bring up something interesting though
I wonder if this is because people view these spaces as a home or a “third place”. Like if someone did something offensive in your home, you would indeed ask (or force) them to leave.
People also find it insanely difficult to “leave” because all of their friends are on the platform. Since it’s almost never open-protocol, that means being locked to said space - so you can only get people you don’t like to leave.
We generally agree the moderation has become overbearing. I would argue most of it is straight up ineffective and performative. We need actual data and science backing moderation policies, not just “this feels good”.
Email is a poor analogy because that’s direct communication.
As an aside, I work as a consultant and clients are getting scammed via email all the time. Email is responsible for a lot of heart ache and heavy losses.
Regardless, you might be able to filter newsletters from bills in your email inbox but how do you filter out Russian disinformation farms from reddit?
I think the idea that the internet might usher in a new information age is dead. Long dead. The internet solved the problem of access to information but now we just produce lots of bad information.
I have been questioning in the last few month what can i do, i agree, the old internet is not the way, but for me tech and the internet has become a dirty word and somewhere i no longer want to be.
I have become quite conscious of my where my money goes, i also probs need to be more conscious of where my internet traffic goes and where i can support grassroots (online) communities.
100% agreed.
Every time I bring this up I get accused for gatekeeping or something.
I’m not averse to new users coming to lemmy, that’s great, no problem.
I am resistant however to the idea that lemmy needs more users and that those users should come from reddit.
Lemmy could do with more content, but a huge influx of users probably wouldn’t be great.
Yup. I loved Mastodon when it was niche. Then people wanted out of Twitter when Musk bought it. A lot turned up on my Mastodon and it turned to shit fast - they did not know how to communicate normally. It was all junk postings for likes, as if they could game algorithms to be popular and then monetise it. They did not know how to just share stuff for its own sake instead of as a product. I still have my Mastodon account but I never use it. Now Bluesky is drawing these people, maybe Mastodon is pleasant again - it is like living in a tourism hotspot, during tourist season life is shit but its great in the off-season.
Capitalism is the problem, not social media per se. And when capitalism infects stuff, I move on. That is not a new problem. Every innovation in modernity gets appropriated by capitalism (capitalists even claim that capitalism invented it but often they do not invent, they only commercially exploit something and conflate ‘marketing a product’ with ‘inventing a technology’). To stop this appropriation, you need laws and regulations, and enforcement to see the rules are kept. That means governments pushing back on predatory capitalism. EU is starting to do this. UK is not. Not sure about other countries around globe. It feels like governments are decades overdue in defending society from these parasites but better late than never?
It’s called Usenet.
Ironically posted on lemmy
Which is indexable by search engines, fortunately.
Isn’t this just a bunch of little forums that interoperate nicely?
But I feel like lemmy is going to get a huge boost because of the corporate bullshit behind reddit and discord
I think this is an XY problem.
People keep trying to bring back the old internet ; This is an broken and outdated solution.
The root problem (in my opinion) is that we need to share critical information to the masses, but the masses introduce “tyranny of the majority”. It’s a really tricky problem to figure out, and I really really really want mathematicians working on this.
If you live in the states, the Electoral College exists because they were looking for a practical solution to this problem. Considering the outcomes, it did not work - but there is no shame in this, as I think this is actually a really hard problem to solve.
The only known solution is to not share information to the masses (a.k.a keeping the normies out). In essence, this is what the old internet was - and a large part of what made it great. But this is not correct as it does not meet the criteria of the problem. Nor does it translate well, since your neighbors are apart of the masses.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share. If you do math for a living, please gather your friends and make an open-thesis about this.
EDIT
After some discussion in the comments, I have a general hypothesis:
People must be able to distinguish the resource they are accessing - highly recommended this process be easy. This provides consistent “edges”.
Looking at “tyranny of the majority” from a different perspective, one answer is to standardize how people communicate. This means no closed ecosystems nor convoluted protocols. This provides “standard weight” while preventing “infinite weight”.
This eliminates every platform I know of. Servers should not be given any tools to prevent incoming nor outgoing data. People should handle moderation individually - sane UI can of course be made available (BlueSky block filters could be inspiration?). Blocking should only be handled by the “nodes”, this also prevents “infinite weight”.
I find it really funny that this conclusion kind of alludes to the early internet in a lot of ways. Maybe it wasn’t the internet-forums, but the internet itself that has changed.
I think that we need to provide actual alternatives based on constructive discussion and learning instead of based on corporate profits. Institutions like the EU could develop and run something like that, especially with all the federated platforms.
I agree that we need solid alternatives, but this doesn’t really tackle the tyranny of the majority problem. We need people to use the platforms for communication, otherwise it has not solved the problem.
For example, if you use Signal but every single one of your friends use WhatsApp and refuses to switch (which is common), then you are forced to use WhatsApp. This is why it is tyranny.
EU can facilitate thousands of platforms, but if the masses don’t use them it’s pointless.
Federated-platforms are kind of a step in the right direction, but they’re extremely weak to internal bad actors. If lemmy.world gets one million normie users, then cuts off the entire federation - then Lemmy has effectively been hijacked and set back 10 years.
I would have thought this is already a solved problem.
If you model social networks like a graph, then you can measure certain properties. One property that’s very important for social networks is the “small world index”. The small world index is a ratio of (how many of your friends know about each other(clustering coefficient))/(how many people on average to connect with anyone in the world (average path length)). Basically, in tribal communities, it used to be that everyone knew one another, AND if you really needed to send a message to another community then it would take only a few intermediate people. The former gives you a sense of safety, and the latter gives you the sense of being able to change the world.
With the advent of social media and other things, the small world index has gone way down. The amount of your friends that your friends know on average is gone down, aka, everyone is very fragmented and the clustering index has gone down. This number has gone down faster than the average path length, because the average path length was surprisingly low to begin with. The net effect is that people feel less like they are part of a community.
Social networks always try to tune their algorithms to encourage interactions to raise the small world index in this direction, but it’s very hard. For one, only few percent of users actually generate any content, the rest are lurkers. You can’t have a high clustering if your “potential friends” never talk to each other, if you can call them that.
Another reason is that enabling small worlds inside social networks is sometimes at odds with revenue generation. In general, consuming content/having para-social interactions online is much easier than before the modern social networks. Thus, people have gotten much more picky with their time and interactions, and now the type of content that people expect to see online now must be of the highest quality. High quality content is easier to monetize, but it’s also harder to create. So this puts an artificial floor on who creates content (only people who are in it for the money), and thus we have fewer people who spread/share ideas. This decreases the clustering coefficient. Thus, paid social networks are against small worlds.
Follow me for more crazy ramblings.
This is interesting perspective.
If I’m interpreting what your saying correctly, this becomes an alternation of the “Traveling Salesman Problem” - where people are the nodes, sending information is the destination, and medium of communication is the weight. The goal being finding the shortest path for two-way communication (go to destination and return).
If this is the case, “tyranny of majority” is indeed a very difficult problem to solve. This phenomena causes the weights of the graph to become change based on the number of surrounding nodes. Higher when less nodes (i.e Lemmy) and lower when more nodes (i.e Reddit).
To go even further, companies are manipulating their weights (creating closed ecosystems, etc) to make is so two-way communication is only viable within their bubble (think an edge of infinite weight). And it would also mean that it truly is unreasonable to expect laymen to “memorize the graph” (know a forum for everything) - it indeed would be just easier to know a subsection (i.e Reddit, Facebook, etc)
I’m just spitballing here, but a lot to interpret if true.
Interesting response!
Yes, the node, edges, travelling salesman, those are my definitions as well.
The only difference is that I’ve always thought about this is with an undirected graph. That models conventional friendships pretty well, but now that I’m thinking about it, it’s probably not a good way to model modern “relationships”. Either way, with two nodes it’s no longer a travelling salesman, as it becomes a much easier problem to solve.
I would argue that the tyranny of the majority unlikely to not be solved with the current form of social networks. I’m not sure if I have time to write out my argument, but it stems from the fact that the most popular people in the world have very uni-directional relationships with most people; everyone knows of Mr. Beast, very few know Mr. Beast.
Yeah the uni-directional relationships are also significant. It also happens to translate well; if Mr.Beast goes to randomcorp.com he is almost guaranteed to pull more people over than if SchmoeJoe went. Those people in turn would cause the website to be a more attractive option (less weight on the edge).
That would mean that there even is nuance within tyranny, which is funny to think about.
There’s also the possibility of cycles! What a fun rabbit-hole. Definitely worth a thesis paper or large-scale open discussion.
P.S. Also agreed that with a “limit” it is not TSP, and is much simpler. It evolves into TSP only when you think about a message originating from a source and making it to everyone - with the same effect for responses.
Reddit was a decent solution, till it enshitified to make money. Before then, it was already flooded by the masses. Clearly their method worked fine. Not perfect, but at least fine. So I don’t see why the masses are the problem. I personaly put all the blame on the need to make money of a vital piece of digital infrastructure.
The tricky part, is that we also cannot put it in the hands of a government, since it can become a tool for propaganda. So the EU hosting something like reddit, would also create a conflict of interrests. I’m curious if we can find a good solution to this problem.
But isn’t the government hosting something like reddit better than the current state? The government is elected after all, while reddit isn’t. At the same time, nothing ensures, reddit isn’t used for propaganda.
Reddit was is a peculiar position, flooded by the masses isn’t really what I would call old reddit. Known by them yes (for answers), used by them no.
I think that development is fairly recent, maybe from 2019? And around that time, Reddit started to go to shit.
I agree with the government portion. I’m not really sure what the solution would be, which is why I want math folk working on it - but discussion is always helpful.
That’s why I think having a decentralized network where one of the instances belongs to the government is a good idea. If the government is only another player and not the only ruler it’s safer for the network. But it’s the same for every big company. I don’t want another Meta or Google.
it was great before trumps first term, then everything became to sensitive and you started to get banned for the slightest misconstrued statement. my first ban was in his first term, never before.
remember the purging of SUbreddits the GOP was whining about becoming illegal? shoplifting,etc.
Reddit was great back in 2012 when I first joined, and it slowly got worse over the years as my patients gradually dwindled down the third time I was banned I didn’t go back. I’m glad that Lemmy is busy enough I can come daily now and not run out of new posts to see.
Only from the perspective of being able to monetize and control communications among large numbers of people.
For more than just angry X type reactions, the standard forum format is really a solved problem and has worked well for a long time. It’s only when these companies want to control what you see and sell the ability to do that do we get the news feeds. Even Reddit limits your direct message counts until you pay money for it.
The old internet was so much better
The problem is engagement - which in turn means building a community.
If someone goes to your forum, hijacks your posts, and them puts them on Reddit; there is no incentive to use your platform, which stifles and dies since no one is communicating on it. This is also part of the tyranny, as people can figuratively walk into your house, eat all your food, and then expect you to restock.
On the old internet, this was not really an issue since there was a better culture. But if all your friends use Reddit, and all the content is reposted there, why use the internet forum?
So let’s repost all of the popular Reddit content here ;D
I don’t think this is a maths problem. It’s a social problem. Monkey brain combined with internet communications is still not a solved problem.
I think part of this is figuring out the values you want to express in the format of any given service (Marshal McLuhan style). You need to figure out what it is you’re trying to build for, and then build systems and tools that optimise towards that. (Corporate social media is failing because it’s only optimised towards profit, and that approach eats itself in the long run).
I posted an issue for mastodon on this recently. I think Lemmy should be asking the same questions.
First off, agreed that monkey brain + internet = unsolved.
Second, I think that this overall is a math problem and what you’re describing is metadata. Before I continue, there are many ways to solve and interpret problems - this is just how I see it.
If you think about this as a graph, it makes a lot more sense as a math problem. People want to communicate and the message has to reach each of them once through the shortest route. In essence, this becomes the “Traveling Salesman Problem”.
Next, imagine the distance between points on the graph become longer (when people group together) and shorter (when people split apart) - we now have described tyranny of the majority.
What you are describing (from my perspective) is the cost of going from one part of the graph to the other. This indeed is a very important part of the problem and directly relates to the tyranny, but does not solve it. Instead to solve this problem, we would have to find a way to standardize the distance between any two points in the graph (i.e it cannot take more than 30 feet to reach any given destination).
I cannot begin to describe how difficult this would be, but my brain is telling me it’s solvable.
The comments (and your github post) helped me think about this a bit deeper. This is why discussion is helpful.
I have a maths major, and think in networks, same as you. I agree that that’s a good start to thinking about the problem. It’s basically similar approach to Jay Forrester’s World model, that used system dynamics to model the global economy.
But what you’re doing is building a model, and then proposing using it to make decisions about how to run the world. This would be sensible, except that any model is necessarily a simplification of the real world, and that simplification process is subjective. What you value and care about and think is important defines what you put in the model, and also what you optimise for, and how you interpret the outputs. So your decisions ultimately end up being subjective too.
There are other issues too, such as the fact that any dynamic model like this exhibits complexity, which makes it analytically unsolveable; and chaos, which means numerical predictions will suffer from unpredictability due to the Butterfly effect, and the Hawkmoth effect.
If you want to get a deeper understanding of this stuff, systems thinking is where you need to head. I would recommend this paper as an excellent introduction to the field as a whole: www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.54120%… (Open access, about 50 pages)
For the first wave/system dynamics approach, this article is worth a read too (IMO it presents far to simple a picture though): donellameadows.org/…/leverage-points-places-to-in…
You make great points, and I will not necessarily refute any of them. This is why I said prior that I wanted a bunch of mathematicians to work towards a solution to this. There are many small and careful considerations that have to be made.
I think a heuristic (simplified model) may work better than trying to flat out solve it. As I said, this is not to refute, just a thought.
First, the problem is fundamentally chaotic (as you’ve said) there is no point in trying to accurately predict (solve) the outcome. Choosing “properties” that tend to be consistent, and then basing “success” off of those may be the more practical option. What these “properties” are would depend on consensus - models have elements you deem important, which may not actually be (as you’ve said). This is just something that needs RFC - hence needing a group of mathies.
Secondly, whatever the solution turns out to be needs to actually be do-able for the average joe. If there is a straight up solution, and it turns out to complex, I think it would be less valuable than a simple-to-do heuristic. If people don’t follow up it’s just worthless - and seeing how long it takes people to do very simple things, we’ll be waiting hundreds of years.
I’ll read the two articles you linked (I’ve read the abstracts) but it’ll be a slow burn.
Awesome! Ping me when you’re done, if you like. Happy to chat more.
I agree heuristics are a good approach, but I’m not conviced maths people are the ones to do it - at least not alone. There is too much messy sociology at the edges of the problem to ensure good problem specification. Some interdisciplinary approach could kill it though. If you get through that intro article, there’s a short article in the same journal that gives a neat intro the Critical Systems Heuristics, which seems like an excellent wrapper around this kind of approach.
The electoral college was an 18th century compromise to slave states. The US constitution is showing it’s age and the whole system is broken now
Within the I2P anonymous mix network there was an attempt, at some point around 2015, to build a system named Syndie where everyone would have to be their own censor, and servers would host content without the server operator really knowing or caring about what they host.
It failed to take off, but I’m not convinced if the reason was architecture or the main developer leaving.
Just guessing, it likely failed due to:
These are killshots to this type of service as people need to develop/extend/use it - for it to be viable. It is in the right direction, but (similar to many cornerstoning attempts in FOSS) is not handled gracefully.
I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I’m very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.
Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I’m not arguing with them, I’ll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.
(It’s a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)
Never played the game and probably never will, but I wanted to say this anyways: stay awesome!
It’s people like you, who do stuff out of passion and not monetary gain, that made the internet so great.
Thank you! :) It’s definitely a passion project for me, because I love the game so much.
That’s cool!
Why? I mean if it can be destroyed on a whimp again should be reason enough to not use it again.
I’d say its mostly convenience. Discord is easier to use on mobile devices and provides voice chat.
I don’t mind Discord for smaller groups of friends I know in real life, but larger groups end up with so many notifications that I end up ignoring the app. A forum would feel a lot nicer, like it’s not a chore to keep up with things.
Yeah it’s really not fit for purpose, I have every server I’m in muted
Agreed. In general people seem to like centralised platforms. They don’t want to sign up on another site for a specific purpose. They stick to what they know unless there’s good reason to change (mostly peer/ad/social media pressure I feel like).
In a way Lemmy is similar in that it’s a single platform to access all types of content. Given most people don’t care about the technical “how”, I can see why they like Discord and Reddit.
I played the shit out of I-War 2 decades back now… Cracking game that was :D
I appreciate the people who run the forum for the Emergency! Game series. It’s where I found the info on now to run multiplayer on Emergency! 3
i still play RA2, apperently there isnt a primary forum for it, but people still play the modded version.
Similar. I had a community from 2001 onward where I was variously an admin and a mod over the decades. A lot of us drifted apart from being kids exploring the internet to adults with families and careers.
But mainly the guy that took over the code maintenance became the sole admin in 2018 and he just chased everyone off the site debatebroing with increasingly racist and misogynistic rants. Dude I played games with and talked with online for 20 years started calling me a genocidal enslaver for trying to explain CRT and want solar power in America.
I kind of don’t ever want a family or a career because it seems like you lose out on the ability to do anything fun
I did a lot of the fun in my teens and twenties, and then realized I wanted a family and was lucky to find a career that fit.
It’s definitely a challenge to find a balance though so it can often feel like a trade-in. But if you’re honest with yourself it doesn’t have to be nor an unwanted change.
I feel like the way Society is built makes it impossible to have a family and have fun in your life, and careers are basically dead. We have to figure out how to make it work because I’m certainly in no hurry to make raising kids the only thing I do with the rest of my life
I get you. For me after my grandparents passed I realized I wanted to be a grandparent. So I gotta play by some of society’s stupid rules to see if I can see that through.
Careerwise: biggest thing for me was jumping into public service and working in local government–in America, no less. Now I work remotely and have a well-compensated union-represented government job with a pension that doesn’t require me to do management or have a medical or law degree.
I knew to steer clear of the Fed too, and that’s paid off in spades.
All in all though as a former kid and current parent: kids need their cool aunts and uncles, related or not, out there having fun not making them cousins. So there’s zero shame in having no rush or desire for trying to strike that balance.
I solute you for your “stubborness”
Reddit is literally unusable now. I use old.reddit to browse certain subs but there’s no point commenting or interacting cause pretty much everything gets you banned
Do you have ideas to get more people to move over from Reddit to Lemmy?
Make 1 to 1 copies of existing subreddits and maybe some kind of automation tool to take the subreddits someone is currently part of and subscribe the Lemmy versions of them automatically. That plus for now some people could repost content from these subreddits to Lemmy, so the feed isn’t so empty and also I don’t know how Google crawlers work exactly but searching for Reddit posts through Google is a big benefit of Reddit for me, if Lemmy could also show up in Google results or if Lemmy builds it’s own internal search to a level that’s equal to or better than Google that would also help
I’m currently plan something like this. But I don’t think just posting everything would be a good idea. I thought about a few uprising posts a day at most per community.
Lemmy already gets indexed by search engines.
I’ve started Europe Pub about 10 days ago and Google has already indexed hundreds of pages: www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aeurope.pub
I think mapping existing subreddits to Fediverse equivalents is a great idea and would be very helpful to have as a resource. Sub.Rehab did something to that nature, although I don’t think it’s being maintained anymore sadly.
A lot of people use reddit in Google searches because it has high quality information. Ie solving technical problems etc. This sort of information needs to be hosted here. If Lemmy wants to be the new reddit, it needs to host this sort of helpful, high quality information that other users upvote
whatisthisthing, and whatisthisplant were very interesting niche subs. it will be hard for people to come here, as there are also adjacent subs. also medical conditions too they are found on a ton of forums.
Good idea!
abandon fediverse and all federation bs. Oh wait.
Wish I did. I love discussing wrestling, I love very old wrestling from the 60s to 90s, and some new stuff here and there. But Lemmy has no wrestling communities that are even a little active, the ones I’ve seen have 2 months old posts as their “new”
How about crossposting stuff from reddit there to get the engagement up?
Couldn’t reply to comments on my post a few days ago. “Server error”. Deleted my account.
Reddit removed a picture of 3 people standing around a cybertruck from the front page today because it “went against community guidelines”
What was the picture?
Maybe we need a shitRedditBans community here to repost all the stuff that get banned for bad reasons there? Could be risky, I guess, but could be great with some good moderation.
I’d follow that
Me too
Me too, but I’m not paying enough attention to reddit to make me a useful moderator…
Interesting you mention this. I guess it’s more common than I realized.
The literal reason I looked around and came here a few days ago is because of exactly this.
Someone posted a picture of a blue hat that said “Is he dead yet” with the caption that is crazy the whole planet knows who is referring to.
I commented that the planet will be a better place when it happens.
Instant ban for a week.
The bot banning me stated “Threats and violence” as the rule.
So ya…I’m not going back to that.
I had my 7+ year old account for saying the word Guillotine which I think is on auto ban. I’ve opened new accounts that get banned for ban evasion or for yet another “wrong word” I used in some sub or another
How does Reddit know? I mean I try with a new email via a secure browser using a vpn and somehow they ban that account immediately after I post something…do they just ban accounts that appear to be using a vpn from their pov?
I have no idea but I find the same thing, vpn or not i get banned
Holy hyperbole, Batman! If you’re not posting like an edgy teenager then reddit is decently usable.
The insane reactionary takes against reddit on Lemmy are getting really tiring. Come on, guys.
I guess you haven’t heard of people getting warned/banned for simply upvoting content the overlords don’t like? Or saying Luigi…
I got banned from a bunch of subreddits because I had the nerve to leave a single comment in a conspiracy sub (I was calling one of them out). It was done by automods, no humans taking context into account. All of a sudden I got a stream of messages telling me I was banned.
Anything that is beyond an eco chamber will surely upset someone who will report you and an auto mod will ban you. You can literally say “i disagree” and get banned. It’s not hyperbole when it’s happened to me and hundreds of others on here. That’s just a straight up fact now. Are you new to Reddit? Cause if you’ve been around for the last few years, the enshitififation of Reddit is well documented fact
I use the Stealth app downloaded from f-droid. You log in to read Reddit but without a Reddit account so you cannot post (not that I ever want to). I like Reddit for community answers e.g. how to fix stuff like a broken household appliance, advice about a glitch in software, useful things like that. I prefer it to YouTube (which I access via Clipious or similar apps, also on f-droid) unless I need to see a job done to understand the repair method. I enjoy some of the jokes and memes and nonsense posts so its cheap entertainment. And, to be honest, I learn a lot about relationship skills by the AITA or TwoXChromosomes reddits - on the whole, I am impressed by the lucidity and maturity of the reddit ‘agony aunt’ stuff although there is also a lot of crap which I think of as part of the entertainment - ‘my wife had sex with my dad, now I am not sure my kid is mine, would I be over-reacting if I asked for a paternity test?’ or ‘I came out as a horse and now my kids refuse to visit me, should I cut them out of my will?’ sort of written version of the Jeremy Kyle Show (British tabloid t.v. nonsense). What is missing on Reddit or anywhere else is ‘positive masculinity’ stuff so that is a ‘gap in the market’ for anyone looking for a project. Not sure I could name a living male role model I respect so maybe that is the reason Reddit feels unhelpful at times - you cannot promote what is not there? Men step up, is the take away message on this. Women cannot carry men’s social media activities for them so maybe quite a lot of stuff is dying because men do not make enough effort to keep it going.
I agree with the previous comments: forums are hard to manage because of trolls, hackers and lack of dedicated resources … The main responsible being, before reddit and discord, the ugly social networks mainly facebook. I hope this company will crumble …
forums tend to be more restrictive in certain subject. i was in a health type forum, where i was not allow to mention the word black people, or african american, because they its racist trolling, when its really not.
What can we do? What can we do about Meta and Xitter and Reddit? Just try to show people that there’s another side where the grass actually is greener and invite them to join.
Always a great idea!
Have your friends on your own website
I’ve asked them several times and they have declined.
Yeah, except most people suck.
Last time I mentioned lemmy I was almost banned.
Me when I’m fucking banned from some Linux .org forum for no reason (did not read or make a post or even login)
ermmmmm contact the web admins 🤓 how about no?
Forums are extremely unfriendly and need a complete redesign if they hope people will use them
That’s unfortunate
Indeed, forums are almost gone. In particular, I miss one forum about science fiction, one about aeromodelism, one about electric vehicles (another still exists) and one about anarchism. An interesting hold-out in the country where I live, is a military forum, where rules say that respectful discussion is the only kind of discussion accepted - ironically, the military forum has a peaceful atmosphere. But it could come crashing down much easier than a social media company.
As for why forums disappeared - I think that people became too convenient. They wanted zero expense (hosting a forum incurs some expenses and needs a bit of time and attention), and wanted all their discussion in one place. Advertisers wanted a place where masses could be manipulated. Social media companies wanted people to interact more (read: pick more heated arguments) and see more ads - and built their environments accordingly. Not for the public good.
I think the most urgent job is getting rid of algorithmically steered social media - sites where one can’t know why something appears on one’s feed.
we have official forums for joining the military in the USa(if one is thinking about joining , its best to ask questions there instead of reddit). just dont go to main forum site for the military. the mods will give you attitude if they dont like what you said after they gave you a piece of thier mind on why you can or cannot join a specific service.
theres one catered to the other services for(if you specific conditions, or legal issues) they tell if your condition is DQ or not, or your chances. i was actually surprised how many people with past record of serious illnesses trying to join.
medical question forums are out there, and spread out.
“Algorithmic steering” is okay as long as the algorithm is relatively straightforward, public, and well-understood.
The problem is when the corpos tweak it to suit their mass-market advertisers.
Firefox can translate websites locally now.
Not all languages
It has spanish to english though, at least on my machine.
I was just commenting as an asterisk
Sadly it’s not possible to provide links using Firefox Translate. People would have to translate it themselves (i.e. opening in a browser and clicking translate). Depending on the device they likely wouldn’t bother.
Yes.
But you could also leave a link to the original source. :-)
Yes. I like to leave the original link in the post body for that reason.
most of them, but alot of them for niche subjects are still there. theres one i go to where people were banned from reddit (tons of accounts used for linking, OF and advert) basiclaly they are reporting thier experiences the same way here as right there. medical forums is still alive though, as are "joining the military"ones.
DSLReports is gone NotebookReview is gone, and more are disappearing each year. It’s sad to see.
im in a forum that specifically for social media , how to get around bans or how to “make money” using those ban evasion methods.
Indeed, especially since both (Reddit more than Discord admittedly) give out blanket bans on a whim and that means being blocked off from the modern internet, the stakes are too damn high.
Though what do they mean “Disappearing”, isn’t this like pulling the alarm because you just learned “There’s not that many dinosaurs left”
The funny thing about dinosaurs is, some of them evolved into something what that could withstand the climate. It’s just a matter of time before more alternatives come about. Some will be better, but my bet is the majority that people will flock to will have just as much censorship and they’ll just accept it. If you give people the illusion of freedom but restrict them they’ll have no idea.
Yep…As someone who got banned from reddit, reddit and discord absorbing the entire internet like a tumor is really not helping my will to live.
When I was banned from Reddit I was devestated, thankfully I’ve come to see it as a blessing in disguise since I’m on lemmy now.
I didn’t have friends on Reddit, I do on Discord though, so if Discord became ban happy I doubt I’d reach the same conclusion
Would your friends stay exclusively on Discord if they would ban you?
I’d imagine they would be ready to join another platform to stay in touch with you. And I don’t mean that they’ll immediately stop using Discord completely but use both simultaneously.
It’s not being abandoned by my friends, it’s not having a way to explain the situation. That’s why I’ve made sure most of them add me on Telegram and Steam
Discord 🤣🤣 is that even end to end encrypted?
Which end to which end?
Ass to ass
None. Don’t get caught in oligarchy because they can intercept.
Yeah especially when Teddit or discord flip the script but Reddit’s semi implosion could have led to a resurgence if their Admins hadn’t calmed down
My first real social experience on the internet was on php forums. There are still such forums around and I am still part of a few.
Not everything.
Doesn’t that depend on the forums, though? For many organizations, those sites fit the needs perfectly fine. If you don’t care about archiving and you would not be totally screwed if the forum disappeared tomorrow, you’re going to opt for something simple like that.
Yea that’s my issue in this argument too. Saying forums are replacing everything, or even that that’s a big problem is like saying “Swords are disappearing from warfare and that’s a problem” in the late 15th century. We don’t need forums for everything because the format isn’t the only tool we have anymore.
I for one would want a more open source system where a single guy running a server doesn’t have all the power in the forum. It would be awesome if a fedi form of forums took over and one could replicate all the info as relays.
So you basically mean something like Lemmy but for forums?
Yup. But also note that Lemmy is not redundant. You can bring back this channel but without our conversation. We need redundancy and replication.
Isn’t NodeBB compatible with the Fediverse by now?
Haven’t heard about NodeBB yet but it looks awesome! Also, yes it looks like it’s supporting federation.
But isn’t Lemmy already a forum-like (i guess) platform? Like there are boards (or whatever they are called here, i don’t remember, “subreddits”) about discussing some topic and you can make threads discussing said topic. Bam, a forum, right?
Or do forums have something that Lemmy (or at this point Reddit) don’t?
I’d also call it a forum format. Btw subreddits are simply called communities here :)
Content aggregators are not forums. Just having categories doesn’t really cover it. CAs are designed so that old posts fall away quickly, so that people will keep posting new top level content and keep people emgaged in the constant scroll, much like Twitter or Facebook. They are largely unstructured, with different “categories” behaving quasi-independently from one another.
Forums are structured spaces where the same people post stuff to the same categories, that are mostly offshoots of the forum’s core theme.
People interact with and behave rather differently in these different contexts.
I see this going further underground as fascism takes over. The corporate influence was bad enough before but with the Nazis in coming to power again, many of us are going to have to dive underground.
Imagine such absurdity. The Internet. The land of “forbidden knowledge.”
Message Boards are fundamentally different and I don’t see a lot of value in federating them considering the big message board platform (phpBB) has 25 years of development and is GPL.
Message Boards are more elaborate versions of subreddits/communities. In all of those instances there is still a single entity that has “all the power in the forum”. You can join another lemmy server, but the admin of that community is still the admin, and the entity controlling the server that community is on likewise, controls the community.
I guess you could have a universal account that could be used across different message boards, but Personally I’d hate that.
It sounds good in principle but would be hard to do in practice because everyone would have to do a lot of work negotiating ‘standards’ (technical stuff and editorial principles like how to handle NSFW content etc) that would apply universally across the federation of forums and as this is all voluntary work it is asking a lot of people.
Like lemmy?
Anyway, there’s nodebb.
oh damn, why am i just now hearing about this
If anyone is looking for a pretty good list of forums-
aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today?…
That is really helpful. Thank you for posting!
Dunno why he didn’t link sex forums. I am sure there are some nice ones out there!
There’s other places with lists for those.
Excellent list.
You’ve just positively changed my life and that of my friends by posting this link. Thank you so much!!
I believe this is what they call “preaching to the choir”.
For real I’m here to sing songs.
Don’t worry, the enshittification of both is proceeding well.
Replacements are inevitable in time. This one is growing.
It is, though the numbers are depressing.
A site like Reddit grows in its daily active users more than 15x (!!!) entire MAU base of Lemmy. “Reddit migrations” are barely a margin of error for them.
This is excluding, liberal, assumption of bot counts.
Exponential growth starts slowly…
Reddit didn’t grow in it’s early days like it does today. To use an analogy for what you’re saying: think of a snowball rolling down a mountain and turning into an avalanche. It’s easy to forget that the snowball started it.
You dont want 90% of the shitheads on reddit.
We don’t really have a choice, unfortunately.
This platform has the downside of day 1 bots, unlike reddit of yore.
Back in mid 00s I created a forum for fellow classmates to share notes, info on exams and whatever. It was active for a year or a bit more, then someone set up a Facebook page for our group and the forum died in about a month. I could not understand why people migrated so quickly, Facebook group was atrocious when it comes to search functions, any files, notes or anything you didn’t download immediatelly were lost to time never to be seen again. If the forum is still up I’m sure I’d still be able to easily download exam schedules and all notes from all the classes there, with Facebook it was a pain even a week after someone posted. There is something fundamentally wrong with society if an inferior product can sweep the board so easily. People do not care about quality or usefulness of anything, all that matters is marketing and trends.
People are lazy. Getting people to sign up for a forum has a much MUCH higher inertia than just clicking join in a group on a platform they already have an account for.
People will subsequently evidently just “deal” with it’s inadequacies.
Reddit has the same advantage, you have one account and subsequently have access to a billion and then some communities. Ditto for Discord versus self hosted solutions like Teamspeak.
Lemmy kind of adresses all of this, but actual forum software I think is still mostly the same as it was in the early to mid 2000’s when I used it. It’s demise is a shame but not a surprise.
The people who made phpBB didn’t, so far as I know, have teams of behavioural psychologists gaming out how best to sell us ads and waste infinite amounts of our time.
I was a ‘early adopter’ for technology most of my life. I tried Facebook when it was new. As soon as I signed up for an account, I saw how it was abusive - taking away my choices, treating me like a farmed animal being milked for data. I signed up. And immediately started the process to cancel my account. They tried every trick to stop me closing my account. I do not know if it ever was closed! I did the same with everything else that was new and closed all of it very quickly as it was almost always abusive or time-wasting in some way.
The only stuff I stick with is stuff I consider ethical - which is why I am using Mastodon and Lemmy not commercialised social media. And I tend to use that episodically and then get frustrated and stop using it for months before another flurry of use. Why do I use social media? I guess I use it when I am scared and need reassurance from others. Why do I stop? When I do not get the community care I need. We talk about ‘loneliness epidemic’ in contemporary society. I am not sure its ‘loneliness’ - I live alone and like it. What I feel is fear. Maybe we are ashamed to admit it. I am not ashamed to say it - the prospect of fascism, WW3, loss of a ‘safety net’ does frighten me. It is rational to be afraid! When afraid, you look for others who also feel threatened and you test to see ‘do they have my back?’ If there’s a sense of safety, mutual support, you stay. If there is not, you move on.
Social media ‘works’ if it solves real life problems, if it does not help you stop using it. Sure, kids with no real worries because they are protected by adults can post rubbish online for ‘shits and giggles’ but anyone aged 14 or older quickly loses that privilege as they move into adult life and then they use social media differently - for fun, yes, but also it must help you survive by giving you ideas, comfort, information, encouragement, escape for a bit etc. If it only adds abuse to a hard life, who has the energy for it?
Great comment, I don’t have anything to add just wanted to say so.
omg totally, I hate that people do that. I don’t see a way out without introducing digital literacy classes at schools
You are right, but as I sit here and use Lemmy, I can’t help but think while being a perfectly functional forum, it lacks aesthetics. What I’m looking at is Windows 1997 High contrast text editor. It tickles my nostalgia, but I can see why Reddit has a broader appeal. People like gimmicks, as much as they like aesthetics and simplicity.
Yeah, while aesthetics is typically considered a side-effect of your choice of client, i think Lemmy should offer prettier aesthetics to choose from. In the menu:
<img alt="" src="https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/ff57be37-3b2a-41e5-9eb2-1f813ef52dfa.png">
<img alt="" src="https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/c2566637-18d7-4e61-9901-9b0bdfd53ea7.png">
You always gotta think about use lazy users too. Settings are great but you actually need to draw people into a level they want to customize. I’m almost there thanks for the heads up! I’m coming from the lemmy.world url. It’s not bad it’s just not good. It’s great for us older folks but I can see where it would create an age gap. The trend of people who enjoy windows 97 UI is declining.
check alexandrite.app and phtn.app
There’s also vger.app for mobile.
.
Welcome to 2015 I guess?
For real. My preferred forum was closed I’m 2015 after 13 years active. Facebook killed it. I will never understand why people chose Facebook over that forum. You could blog and post pictures and chat with people in peace and quiet without having to deal with the entire world looking in on your cringe teenage angst.
Generally, I just remember how all these forums and blogsites that used to make up the internet were pretty much dead and gone by 2017. The art community went from having good platforms like Tumblr and deviantart to having to deal with the nightmare that is Instagram and Twitter. There still hasn’t been a good alternative to artists posting their artwork since Instagram took over. It was a shittification then and it has only gotten worse since. But people now have grown up with this bullshit and therefore they don’t question or demand better. They don’t know what it used to be like to be an artist online. It was fun and inspiring. AI slob hasn’t helped the matter either.
I just closed my The Guardian UK version account. I used to comment on the news stories. I can no longer be arsed because of the stress it causes - 99% of comments are so damn stupid and adrift from reality. Most of the comments are from people who (1) voted Labour in order to get change despite being warned by Labour itself, as well as everyone on the Left, that it was not offering change and (2) are now belly-aching because Labour is too Rightwing for them and no better than Tories. Starmer says he ‘likes and respects Trump’ - what the fuck!?! Leopards are eating Labour voters’ faces and they are lacting shocked? If you say so, your comment gets deleted by the moderators because we are not allowed to be truthful or challenge MSM’s imaginary version of the world which is carefully curated to be cosy and profitable. Fuck 'em all.
I only want to hear from people willing to face reality. I need to find a community that is living in the real world not in some self-indulgent fantasy in their head like most British voters seem to be. I reckon that the age of social media is dead because the age of comfort is over. It was fine wasting time on posting nonsense when you were not watching a coup or seeing WW3 developing in real time or could still believe that whatever happened online, offline life was ticking over normally and you could still feed yourself, access housing, get healthcare, rely on benefits if you were sick or old. All of that safety in real life is gone - so to survive this shock we bunker-down and that means finding your village to shelter with because who wants to bunk with Nazis or cultists?
There will still be social media going forward but it will be fragmented because in times of war, you take a side and you do not fraternise with the enemy. Anyone lamenting this is pretending we still live in the past when you could get along with others and ‘two side’ debates because actually you agreed on 90% of stuff and were disputing details. Now we dispute the nature of reality and fundamental morality and there is no two sides to such existential matters. I mean it has been brewing for almost a decade (i.e. in the west, started much longer ago in places like Russia and ‘untruth no reality stop-think’ probably infected the west from those places) - ever since the rise of 4chan and bizarre conspiracy theorists started undermining reason, was turbo-charged by the pandemic, and started to infect reality via stuff like brexit and MAGA. There is no excuse to be surprised that we are here, it was clearly signposted for years.
I know it is the Far-Right who brought us to this crisis but as a radical Leftist I say ‘bring it on!’ You started this conflict, I am determined people like me will win it. I just need to find my comrades and unite in push-back. I get my inspiration from democracy protests like those currently happening in Serbia, Greece, Turkiye. Why is there nothing like that scale of reaction in USA or UK? Because most people in those places are still feeling comfortable and do not grasp the reality of the crisis they are in. They will not react until it is too late. They frustrate me past expression!
I needed to vent.
It feels inevitable. You stay sane and protect your inner peace. I am in the camp this is not left/right old/young this is rich playing with the poor. There are far more of us and we have a lot of common language.
Everytime I want to look for modern solutions to newer projects online it’s always in the damn discord. I have like 20 discords in folders just because I feel like I’ll need them to troubleshoot eventually.
That’s really unfortunate
I’m not the best “tech writeup” person, but I might start posting my random issues on Lemmy just so it can be found later just in case Discord goes away too.
On the “up-side” now Console gamers can all be in the voice chat together regardless of platforms
That would be really great!
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!
Some other perspective here…
I think that this information would be possible to highlight, you could, for example, have an announcement channel that is read only for the regular users.
However, that doesn’t mean that this will reduce the number of questions though.
Even discord has a search function, granted it is not great but still, if you are willing to search for something you would be able to find it.
But this is the problem. For your regular users, it is much easier to simply ask that redundant question again and again instead of doing the least amount of searching yourself.
Heck, I had questions in some communities in which I copied the question in the title and searched on Google for it and got an answer in the first result.
What I want to say with this is that those redundant questions will be asked regardless of the platform.
What I think is worse about discord, especially as a help or support platform, is that it is a walled garden. All the knowledge accumulated there is locked away and cannot be found unless you are on discord and search for it. At least on reddit or Lemmy, you can still find the answer for something if you are looking for it.
I think that discord can work as a platform but only to a number of users. I have such a thing for a plugin that I am maintaining but there are not even 30 people on there. But I also give direct support and figure out issues that are either because the user did something wrong or it is an issue with the plugin. If it is a reaccuring problem I put that in the wiki or the FAQ otherwise, it is a bug report as a new issue so that the information are something you could find.
chat is important for real-time messages (like talking to each other irl), but there should be a wiki/faq that answers frequent questions IMO.
I don’t really like Discord, but it supports message pinning, threaded conversation, as well as a full blown discussion forum option for community channels. Your complaints seem to be more about the moderation of that specific community than Discord itself.
I don’t only hate discord I don’t understand it. I don’t get why a chat server needs threads and most of the functions are useless in general.
heck even in the few servers I am, most of the channels I have them silenced.
I don’t only hate discord I don’t understand it. I don’t get why a chat server needs threads and most of the functions are useless in general.
heck even in the few servers I am, most of the channels I have them silenced.
Use Lemmy, Signal, the rest. What is the problem? Delete Reddit and Discord accounts. Done.
Good idea. Now we just have to convince the rest of the people ;)
No need to. It is fine the way it is :)
The point of social platforms is to be social.
You have to find your crowd. Reddit it is just too big.
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.
Lemmy (and Matrix to a lesser extent) gives me the vibes that Nintendo Super Mario Bros gave me around 2008 - just magical, wonder what can be done.
Honestly reddit’s (and Lemmy’s) comment formatting structure is so much better than other forums that it’s been part of the reason why I don’t want to use the other ones.
Agree. And there are cultural issues in forums that make them really annoying. Some forums like to consolidate topics into mega threads like “if you have questions about xyz go to the xyz mega thread”. Then you go there and its a 300 page chronology starting in 2008 of completely disorganized conversation. 20 posts per page with no way to read it more easily.
You could do that on reddit with a pinned post but usually mega threads were at least limited to daily/weekly/monthly instead of indefinite.
I agree with you. It can become frustrating to learn to find information on classic forums.
So when you are pointed at a mega threads that is 2k posts long over 10 years, where you are told the answer is, how do you attack it? LearnEd one.
20 posts per page? lol. I think usually it was 10.
Don’t forget profile pictures and signatures making every post take up way more screen space than they should.
But I liked profile pics and signatures! /owmyback
I don’t mind the concept, it was the layout that made small one sentence replies become like 15x longer on the page.
Ha. have you seen the looneys here on Lemmy asking for signatures?
I haven’t.
Discourse based forums are quite nice imo. See ubports one for examle
It is a problem, but I think it downplays the reason those platforms got popular.
No admin required. No updating of software to make sure you’re not going to get compromised by a vuln.
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.
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.
If game developers would launch their own fediverse instances (maybe with devs + moderators as the only registered users), to which general purpose instances could freely connect, then problems 2 and 3 would be solved for users as well. Imo that would be a far better solution than having game forums on a walled garden platform like discord. That still leaves the devs with problem 1, but they would also regain control of their data + the data would also be searchable with proper search engines. I can dream :)
It would be solved for people who are primarily interested in tech and gaming. How about bellow challenges?
Gaming is huge so presumably lots of gamers are interested in the wider world, which is not exactly well represented here compared to the major platforms.
And we can’t ignore the inherent complexities of federation. If a user signs up to another instance but for some reason that instance (or game 's instance) is blocked by others or even goes offline, then it will be confusing if not ruining of their experience.
Yeah, I think a user shouldn’t just “exist” on a single instance and the same goes for communities.
And at the same time, an instance owner does need to be able to block things from being federated with themselves. You really do not want any CSAM on hardware you own.
It’s tricky to cover everything, and I’m not even going to pretend I’ve got the answers to it.
But obviously instances blocking other instances is part of it.
If a Lemmy-naut is registered with an instance that’s defederated from the game company instance, they can always register at an instance that is federated, either in addition to their main or to replace it. The company’s instance would likely act as an info hub, but the gamers wouldn’t be members of the instance directly, so it would be like any other content that could be opted into. If it became the norm that games or game companies spun up their own instance, it could become a community and marketing tool for the games. But even if the instances themselves retire, the content made is still around and the existing fans could just start channels to continue the community. Companies that arent complete assholes could even assist with transfer to new channels elsewhere.
I think theres an opportunity down the line for a company/companies to form that specialize in helping orgs to spin up instances and sell their them hosting. Hosting is expensive for small groups to manage, but multiple small groups together could make it viable. Plus having the hosting coupled with help overcoming the tech-knowledge barrier could lead to more orgs feeling comfortable spinning up their own instances.
Well put, and info hub is a great term to describe these limited purpose instances.
The problem with your logic is that now you have to have multiple accounts across the “same bloody Lemmy”. That kills the whole purpose of a decentralised approach. Defederation should not be a thing at all.
Instance defederations should be an option in the user settings.
.
Yes, that should be a user controlled thing, not an admin controlled instance wide thing.
We’re trying to have an intelligent discussion here.
You think every Lemmy admin should be forced to fed with CSAM instances, and therefor host on their own servers CSAM? Wow great plan you have for expanding the fediverse.
Oh, you’re one of those “think of the kids” nutjobs!
No I’m one of those “think!” nutjobs
Respectfully, i disagree. If a person’s main instance defederated from an instance that was set up for a specific game, their main instance is likely doing so for ethical reasons/whim of admins.
If a user of that main instance has values that match with the mission of the instance they will either,
a) not want to be federated with the game instance in the first place, b) only align with a majority of the instance’s values and occasionally need an alt to access places defederated from, or c) find a new main since the one they chose is too restrictive for them.
I agree that having alts is annoying. Ideally, there will be options enough for users to find a main instance that they’re aligned with so they wouldnt need an alt. Regardless, i still think the game company running their own instance for the specific purpose of the game is where the fediverse ought to head.
I want, as an example, the US Forest Service to have their own instance. It solves two problems. One, the USFS gets to personally interact how they want in the fediverse and federate when they want with who they want (just like the rest of us) and two, Anyone with an @usfs.fedi.gov account could be trusted to actually be who they say they are. I would like this trend to include news outlets, gov angencies, schools, etc. It helps with validating information and provides trusted first-source information directly from orgs.
If the girlscouts changed a girlscout cookie flavor, their @girlscoutsofamerica.federated.social could make the announcement and we could trust the info and be mad that a cookie flavor changed.
It solves #1 as well because the Lemmy-phile/end user is already apart of an instance that would federate with the game instance.
Administration is taken on by the game company for their own instance, so updating and technical, server side stuff isnt a worry for the end user. As far as the instance owner, its no more difficult to keep updated as it is for other instances. If anything it would be easier because only the devs and company folks would be users of the instance itself so an update doesn’t impact their user base directly, there might just be a pause in new content while it was updating
I research information, I don’t like to pop into spaces and ask questions while sitting around waiting for the good will of a random to answer (in my experience they don’t).
Discord makes it so I can’t research and am basically forced to ask, sit around, waste the time of myself and a million others, hope that whoever answers me isn’t an asshole or an idiot (I typically need help for more difficult things and the answer I usually get from people in these cases is typically a waste of my time and theirs).
I just don’t understand why use it for support. It’s a chat room.
This is my exact beef with MS Teams. Companies tie it to a SharePoint and then only give access to all of their shit…via Teams.
It’s a fucking chat app, Microsoft, leave it at that for the love of god
RSS exists, sadly average people just couldn’t figure out how to use it.
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)
We’ll probably flux forever in between centralized corpo trash and open decentralized projects, until of course to governments collectively outlaw decentralized projects because they can’t control/police them.
In the USA, Section 230 protections are going away in 2027 so that should finish off any remaining forums.
That’s for editorialized content aka algo feeds
Damn. Good that I’m not in the US
Decentralized and smaller platforms definitely help preserve open discussion. But when it comes to company security culture and internal comms, even forums are giving way to automation. Tools like cyberupgrade.net show how even training and risk detection are now handled without Slack threads or forum debates.
Make Lemmy great again!
Im starting to see Lemmy isn’t any better. Mods deleting my comments for asking questions.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/f9ed9d3b-5f1f-4b82-abae-e39acb075a36.webp">
Switch to another server or start your own?
Im participating in all. I dont pay attention to server or the drama around servers.
Its just always something we are going to face no matter the platform. Mods generally will always get power unhinged no matter if its privately funded or not.
But here unfavourable admins don’t run the whole show. On reddit if you didn’t like the admins you’re out of luck entirely. Here they only control one slice of the pie.
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Is this the comment or just the mod message? If it’s just the mod message what was the comment?
Stay away from any communities on .ml, they censor so many things.
Do you know if there’s a way to filter them out?
Yes, you can go to setting < blocks and blocked instances.
Thank you!
There are tons of forums out there, the search engines just won’t show them to you. The search engines are the real problem.
How funny if we revert back to tons of search engines and web rings… Frankly that might not be the worst.
Web rings still exist, you just wouldn’t know it because search engines don’t show you the types of sites that use them, which is usually personal sites.
I sometimes use excite.com (oldschool) for searching, and get better results than the major ones, sometimes not. Most people have no clue its even still up. I haven’t dug much, so I don’t know much about its current state. Like tripod sites, how they still exist but are full of hidden junk.
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.
This is the way. Democratize technology or be ruled by those who’d control it.
do you mean federated? Defederation is when a server blocks another.
Yeah, probably just a typo.
I think in that regard, Lemmy is a forum software just like vBulletin or Discourse is. However, I would really like to see a flat forum with federation.
!nodebb-development@community.nodebb.org
github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
Internet forums will come back when AI overtakes Reddit and Discord goes awry because they go public.
Let’s hope so
I’ve been saying it for years. People should have stuck with usenet.
lemmy is similar to usenet, in a way.
Don’t forget random Telegram groups!
I fucking hate telegram as a news/information source.
That’s just IRC again, not a forum
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.
That’s what I also would like to know. It’s such a bad platform for it.
Discord is a great platform for bullshitting with your friends while playing games and shit.
but people are using it for things that its not, and wasnt ever meant to be.
They made a ticketing system for using discord for customer support, which is not a bad idea. But that also kinda works as a forum, so the round peg went in the square hole
Yep.
Discord is a black hole where information goes to die.
Its not indexable, its not searchable, If you are having a problem you will never find it via conventional means.
and the second the discord shuts down, all the information is gone forever.
Discord is not a tech support platform. it is not a information storage platform.
it is a communication platform.
and far, far to many organizations use it for tech support and information storage. To the detriment of everyone… even themselves.
Because people don’t want to have to join special services just to find out why their piece of software doesnt work.
It’s because they are blocking off their communities through paywalls or a means to feed them advertising. Everyone is an idiot for using discord for support. Imagine being a company and thinking answering the same stupid questions 100x a day instead of having a damn FAQ on a website is efficient and makes sense. Lost their damned minds. I’ll die on the hill that discord is stupid to use for anything but gaming and casual conversations and the people funneling their fan base or userbase to discord are assholes.
I literally went and asked a question and someone responded “?faq” and a bot responded with the FAQs. Mind blowing. They could’ve just posted it on their GitHub page. This was for a Minecraft mod.
You need to think of why people would choose to use it for creating a forum. It’s comically easy to set up. Making a server (their terminology, blame Discord, not me) just takes a couple of clicks.
Oh thank the gods. I was worried I didn’t grasp some basic modern internet concept, because I couldn’t understand why people misuse Discord as a forum. Thanks to this thread i feel vindicated.
Quit whining about it and make a good community outside of those.
Be a good community member yourself.
I see myself coming less and less to Lemmy due to how monotopic this place is. And how aggressively stupid people here can be.
quit whining tho?
Consider joining a different server, .ml is blocked by a lot of other servers.
Is there an easy way to see the relationships of lemmy servers of the known federation? Who defederated who?
If you check your-instance-name/instances it will show the blocked ones. ie, lemmy.world/instances there is also defed.xyz
Nice. Be the change you wanna see!
What happened to “quit whining”?
Lol nice going telling people to be good community members and in the same comment calling them aggressively stupid. Maybe you’re not so stupid yourself but you need to work on your tact
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?
How do we create more forums?
Lemmy communities are basically forums. So let’s post and interact more here. :)
No they’re not. This is just more reddit but federated
subreddits are forums.
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
Not just ultra niche, I’d say. League of Comics Geeks is an amazing site for comic book discussion. Board Game Geek has very active forums. I guess what both of those have in common is that they integrate collections and metadata with discussion.
I’ve never went further than tracking issue releases for comic geeks but it would be great to talk comics
Forgot about BGG! That one is amazing, too
How do you discover these nowadays? Feels like finding new websites on the net has gotten so tedious.
I just stumble upon them using Kagi search and phind.com
Search in your favorite search engine: “<specific topic> forum”
plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.
Every forum i joined for my hobbies are always been full of shills in disguise.
That’s sad
.
I’d argue that YouTube censors way more than reddit does. (Not to imply that reddit isn’t evil, cause it is.)
If I say anything even remotely leftist, I get a “some activity may not appear yet” message showing in my YT comment history, and the comment doesn’t appear when I log out. Yet any comment promoting MAGA and Fascism shows up just fine. Yet nobody ever talks about it anywhere on the web. Why aren’t we discussing this clear and blatant bias?
Just left it today. Good riddance!
Here here
I just left it this week after getting banned from a sub without notice and having not broken the rules as far as I can tell, getting no response about why, and then making new accounts that didn’t even participate in that sub that kept getting shadowbanned because “my other account broke the rules”
Fuck reddit. They’re happy to let r/conservative call for people’s deaths, but say “oh no, anyways” on a post about Teslas at a dealership catching fire and all of a sudden you can’t use the site ever again with no explanation why.
Fuck reddit. I’ve been using it for nearly 15 years. I’m done with it.
My only regret is that I won’t be able to call out as many stupid people on their bullshit.
No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they’re in the AI bed with them.
Your Favorite Forum still rules.
It’s why I went to the Chime.In app. It’s not perfect, but it’s not Reddit
ChimeIn is cool.
Maybe Lemmy is a 2020s version of phpBB (the forum software, which is open source like Lemmy is). Lemmy and phpBB can both be hosted by anyone, but of course the interesting thing about Lemmy is that Lemmy servers can share their content with each other.
There’s gotta be federated bulletin boards around
It’s called lemmybb github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
nodebb does this, discourse is working on AP.
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.
Yeah, those old forum threads really were great. Many forums had threads that were discussing topics for years, all in one place. There were people posting how they were building something and they would just reply to their thread with an update. It’s a great way to collect information and better than we are doing it here
I’d like to see a federated, self hostable forum platform. I believe NodeBB is implementing or has implemented activitypub, but while it’s open source it seems even less of a turnkey solution than Lemmy or Mastodon.
On the flip side, you can also have threads where people hold different conversations, but it becomes impossible to read, because you don’t get the reply-tree structure like we have here.
Then again with reply trees you cannot easily see, which tree has the latest answer and if things are generally active or not.
Different formats for different focuses.
Check lemmybb.
Let’s hope the resurrection of Digg starts to fill this void.
Digg well just be another reddit. I don’t expect Venture Capitalist Rose to be the saviour.
Here is a chrome extension that copies all messeges and media from a discord server you’re a part of.
In case the stuff on a server is what keeps you coming back.
without forums or decentralized social services i wouldn’t have met my husband
Funny thing…an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed
which one?
Hopefully /misc… Any other refugees here? Bruh.
Its a private one that spun off from the Cakewalk user forums around 2002
“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.
I’m looking for a study group for a specific maths textbook I’m reading
Discord math forum is too big and my queries get swamped so I don’t use it
I’d appreciate some advice on this and also how to develop my federated use of the internet
Maybe !math@lemmy.world ?
Cheers I’ll check it out and revert back
Edit: does an app like lemmy have the foundation to host something like a “specific math textbook forum” where subsections are dedicated to individual textbooks?
Not right now, unfortunately. But it looks like tags like on Reddit are planned in the future. Right now I’d just create a post with the specific question. There are helpful people, for sure. :)
On one hand I want to foster discussion so I don’t mind older posts being buried.
However it would be good to have the space organised by text books perhaps, but this may eventually get stale
I was thinking tags would be useful but i don’t know effective it would be to have #ArbitraryBook #ChapterOne #Question13 as tags to search for? Would it even work?
No perfect solution for this currently, unfortunately.
But let the information flow. Create a post and look for feedback if people would be interested in a specific community on the topic of the textbook. There are a lot of scientists here, so there is surely a space for your topic.
Let us know if you find something!
Thank you, I’ve posted in math.lemmy to see if anything crops up
I actually just launched a PHPBB forum for specific interests in regards to the indie web, building websites, and sharing random banter (among a few other things). I find Reddit and Lemmy to be useful for seeing what’s going on in the world overall, and Discord has mostly just been annoying ever since its launch, and forums seem like a good answer to recreating actual communities. And if there are more people who feel this way, maybe they’ll make a comeback (because they definitely haven’t just started to be affected by corporations attempting to centralize everyone to one thing).
Do you have a link to your forum? Edit: nvm I just found it linked on your website :}
Haha sorry, would have responded earlier but am stuck at work
Yeah, forums were pretty cool!