You can also request all of your posts on Reddit in a neat little csv. Takes about a month to get though.

No nos importa puto memo

Nice

I almost feel like there’s an answer there for you, but I can’t put my finger on it.

However, last night I had a vision about th singer of Motorhead. I think it means something…

ICQ recently is about to shut down so I got nothing for ya

IIRC there is an open source project for forums communities.

It’s called SMF I think.

Lemmy think on it and get back to you.

Digg

<img alt="" src="https://mario.wiki.gallery/images/thumb/1/19/PMCS_Lemmy.png/150px-PMCS_Lemmy.png">

I know right? Also iirc there was some discord alternative, but I can’t quite remember the name… it’s just as well, the company owning it probably shut it down. It’s not like it’s some free protocol that can be used by anyone, sigh 😞

How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?

Usenet

Individual websites for niches instead of amalgamation websites

Besides Lemmy, HackerNews is decent altho way less subject/community driven

I’ve heard good things about Lemmy

I have been hearing really good things about this new service called X. Very small and friendly community. You just need to register an account and do 12 easy installments of 420.69 yearly

That’s how they git ya.

Unless that “one place” is an open, federated standard that allows anyone to participate with their own self-hosted server - i.e. “one place” = the fediverse, then it’s fine!

it seemed truly cozy and community-based for the first decade or so. you could buy gold to directly pay for servers and that was it, no greedy monetization or shittification. then awards came out with the same transparency, and it was fun to reward people for good posts (i gave gold partially to bookmark excellent comments for myself, as well). then spez got into coke (probably, i dunno, or hit his head very hard on something) and we have modern day reddit, a trash heap. i like how they deleted all the old awards and gold records, pure spit in the face to anyone that still believed in anything they were doing.

Like many others who no longer use Twitter or Facebook, one of the biggest impacts to me is suddenly not having a reasonably proactive way to contact companies for support. It’s amazing how many companies have offloaded their support staff to half a dozen overworked social media operators. Try phoning and you’ll get “busier than usual” phone lines, and if you can even find an email address it’ll auto-reply to say that it’s no longer monitored.

It’s a shit show.

I got banned for something really stupid and they denied my appeal so now I’m kinda just fucked for a lot of stuff, that is too much power for one site to have.

FWIW All I said was “I should be allowed to punch nazis” and I’ve seen way worse things than that said and not actioned on by reddit. (Even when reported)

There are entire communities that “glorify violence” that they do nothing about.

I’m kinda split on it tbh.

On one hand, we have a literal ip spacing crisis - mainly because there’s bajillions of arguably repetitive content among other non scrupulous stuff.

On the other hand, having a niche community has its pros.

Totally agree with your analogy of Walmart though - but then there’s also things like FediNet which basically let people use a standard framework to hve their niches.

It’ll be interesting to see what the future brings

That, and hosting & domains got expensive. It used to be a trivial cost to have a website, now the prices are all “introductory offers” with asterisks.

You nailed it, it’s just like the Walmart effect making small businesses fizzle out. We’ll call it the EnWalmartication of the Internet

It’s s great fit for people with goldfish memory span.

It attracts a different audience, so in aggregate it seems like your community is suddenly bigger because 1+1=2 right? What you don’t realize is that you’ve divided your community into two separate groups with possibly different wants, needs and cultures.

Because its very easy to use and does stuff no other platform does (make it extremely easy to voice/video chat with multiple people streaming screen and essentially make a forum in 2 clicks)

Google doesn’t index Discord, which means the billion dollar ad industry makes little effort to push their ads on Discord.

It has a terrible privacy policy.

tosdr.org/en/service/536

This is Lemmy’s for comparison.

tosdr.org/en/service/9267

Stopped using Discord a few months ago. Not for any specific reason, just felt like I wasn’t using my time effectively. Anyone important added me on Signal, and then I deleted the apps from my phone and computer.

I can’t put words to how much better my mental health has gotten.

This doesn’t really relate to your comment, I guess, but just thought I would mention it in case anyone else is considering taking a break from the platform.

That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.

You could set that up on a lot of forums, you just had to select threaded view in the settings 👍

I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.

A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.

You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.

I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.

.

Also how obsessive forum moderators are over petty things like closing old threads and necro posting.

The worst is when you’re trying to look for something but one of the discord bots has said a word similar ten billion times so that’s all that comes up. You’ll try to ban the bot to see other comments but then you just get like blank space or some shit where the bots comments would be

It’s like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.

I use discord for a a couple of things, but I can’t stand the layout. That’s probably one of the main things that’s kept me from using it more.

The transience and non-indexability is a feature, it’s easier to manage a community if any problem can be solved by just ignoring it for a few days. Just have to hope the issue stays within Discord, sure you could search within discord, but no one is going to and on any large discord the results are likely to be so numerous that it’s worthless. Worst case you lock down a chat channel, mark it as private due to ‘spam’ and create a new one to serve the same purpose as the old to cover it up the rest of the way.

Discord didn’t replace forums imo, it replaced teamspeak, raidcall, mumble and Skype

I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent.

The funny thing about this is that it’s just plain old threading, which has been around since the 1980s or earlier, with the slight variation of showing message contents directly in the thread tree instead of beside it (thanks to today’s high-res displays).

Usenet readers did threading. Email apps could do it if the developers wanted to; the required information is there. I’ll bet there’s forum software that can do it if an admin enables it.

For some reason, most corporations seem to have decided that classic message threading has no place in their interfaces. They resort to piling things into stacks or serializing them into seemingly endless scrolls. It fails to represent the structure of group discussions, and sadly, has been going on for so long that many people might not have ever seen the better alternative outside of reddit.

Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me

My theory is that it was used as the primary form of informal communication by groups doing something, then it felt like a community.
And since everyone was there…Why not put the documentation there? Sure, it’s not indexable, but the group is open-sign-up, right? Right?

Then a few years down the line, someone suggests switching to another primary storage location…Then faces huge amounts of push-back from people comfy sitting on discord.

Don’t worry, the US government is all governments are hard at work banning social media. Wouldn’t want people to expressing ideas.

FTFY.

Use a password manager, you should.

Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation.

Or had ticker skins and just /ignored assholes.

There's an ActivityPub plugin, though I haven't tried it - just Googled it up now. Looks very new and rough.

Aww shit.

We have a forum at 2009scape.org

Have you been to Facebook lately? It’s like 90% AI spam of “why don’t pictures like this trend” with some body horror Jesus.

If you search back far enough on some lemmy instances that have defederated others, you’ll find ghosts of old content from those defederated servers, but it’s all local to whatever instance you’re viewing it on. A large amount of the content from the server that went down should also exist on the servers that server was federated with.

These lemmy instances have got to start running out of storage though, I haven’t heard of any kind of automated purging. I’d bet someone somewhere is already working on an archive lemmy.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

So this pretty much happened with feddit.de

The admin took off for a business trip and his backup forgot the password and locked himself out. Now the admin seems to have vanished and the server shit itself, making all previously posted pictures unavailable.

The solution is that a bunch of lemmings are forming a “Verein” (Kind of Like a club I suppose?) and will build an entirely new German instance.

So, it’s not pretty.

You should keep posting on Usenet too…rec.+

Yes, we just have to collectively make Lemmy grow until it’s a true and complete replacement for classical monolith websites such as Reddit and Facebook groups.

I think the thing to worry about is these corporations centrally controlling this data. With one fell swoop, they can do whatever they want with it. With forums, at least they weren’t controlled by one company.

umm, Hoomin, that was in the 1900’s!

: P

Unfortunately, I don’t have ten bucks

I wonder if there’s beer on the Sun…

Whos Tom Servo

This is a beautiful thing. I love MST3K, I might just join it.

Thanks for the recommendation.

At this point I try to disregard anything that I can tell is SEO generated though, I wonder how many more feel like me.

Forums existed when everyone had a 1024x800 computer monitor on his desk, before mobile Webbrowsers where a thing. The layout did make sense at the time.

Yeah I’m on OdyClub probably every other day and there’s always new posts coming in

HiFi folks and coffee folks have active forums outside of reddit and discord.

At least Reddit is searchable, while Discord is not. Not trying to defend Reddit though.

Commenting/making posts has always required an account of some sort, at least as far back as I can remember. Maybe the IRC days you just needed a name

New?

Anyway, I think all this is a result of thieves in governments becoming conscious of how the Web works and breaking it with the means they have - helping corps and making litigation more and more likely for anything small and well-behaving, because of failing to remove something etc.

It just makes sense. In 2005 with all the problems with search engines of that time, and with having to use web directories and ask people, you had a lot of information at the tips of your fingers. You could read a lot of things about people who would prefer to do their stuff more confidentially, like mafia bosses and bureaucrats and politicians.

And the shoe will probably drop at some point. Something like “communities must have nitro to access posts from more than 6 months ago”.

Then why are people using it as one?

I know of a couple Discord servers with “help” channels being used to completely replace forums which would have served the same purpose back in the day. Not sure if that’s what it’s talking about.

Discord has evolved from more or less being a series of chatrooms (like IRC) to having “threads” that work a lot like how a forum would typically be used.

In the repair community, a lot of conversation about component level repair has moved to Discord channels. Sites like badcaps.net or the Rossmann group forums have comparatively low usage. Nested away in Discord, this information doesn’t show up in search engine results and can’t be archived by web crawlers. When a Discord server is deleted or made private, that information is forever lost.

Cars too. Lots of marque or model specific forums still kicking it.

Maybe there are good information, but facebook is just no option. Why would you support meta? Irresponsible behaviour on your part.

The problem with Facebook is that it’s un-searchable from any search engine. Also, Meta.

That’s the way a lot of hobbies have gone. I know for a fact that I can find a dozen motorcycle rides near me for tomorrow if I went on facebook, while the statewide forum I follow has less than 5 little groups that mostly just meet for a lunch or dinner.

I don’t want to point the finger at any age group, but people 50+ seem to be successfully captured by facebook, Millennials are a mixed bag, and Z is definitely on tiktok and instagram. They all look at me like I’m crazy if I mention a dedicated forum.

Never heard of it. Can’t be too big.

Ideally the world would be moneyless

We already tried this with something awful and it was still in fact kinda awful

If there is payment, better support crypto too, because this way you wouldn’t force people to KYC themselves, as well as wouldn’t exclude people from sanctioned regions.

One downside to this is that $10 is worth more to one person than it is to another, and I can't see how that can be fixed.

Well you have just described Metafilter. I’m a liberal a lefty as can be, and eventually even I got tired of the drama and obvious virtue signaling. And at the end of the day, drama and less-than-appropriate virtue signaling were what the mods wanted.

you mean this? old.lemmy.world

Because the vote system inherently supports popularity which creates content masking issues and usually results in communities with mods that want to keep that system.

Stack overflow has this exact same issue where stupid crap gets upvoted and useful stuff gets nuked so users don’t see things that would otherwise be important or useful.

Lemmy somewhat avoids it due to the relatively low number of posts, but that could easily change.

Discourse exists and is free to self-host and open source. Compared to classic forum software (like most *bb variants) it is a pleasure to use and feels not like a remnant of a lost age.

The (only?) downside is the similar name to Discord, but that’s not them to blame, because they had their name first.

Yeah, was gonna say: it’s not just the competition, spams, scams, and trolls are a real issue.

Was it any good?

I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I’m old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.

It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren’t many forum software projects).

But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.

    1998 |   6686
    1999 |  40528
    2000 |  70379
    2001 |  41129
    2002 | 171294
    2003 | 203642
    2004 | 204685
    2005 | 173659
    2006 | 150000
    2007 | 135936
    2008 | 126283
    2009 |  94894
    2010 |  70333
    2011 |  48691
    2012 |  31197
    2013 |  30606
    2014 |  30227
    2015 |  29334
    2016 |  25472
    2017 |  27505
    2018 |  28551
    2019 |  22366
    2020 |  17250
    2021 |  12794
    2022 |  10135
    2023 |   7151

If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.

And I followed best practices to set it up.

Including email confirmation for registering accounts, post limits for new accounts, initially being allowed only to the entry area where one has to post and introduce themselves to be allowed elsewhere?

In my childhood these were the basics.

Well that’s still better than the weird Indian witch doctor spam I see on a couple of forums I visit.

I haven’t run a BB forum for probably well over 15 years but in my experience the best thing was to just limit the ability to post for 24 hours after the account is being created (that makes getting caught and banned a bit more of a pain point because they have to wait 24 hours before they can do anything again) combined with just blocking Russian and Chinese IP addresses.

It’s surprising how much rubbish that stops.

Oh no, that’s really sad and disgusting. Please share the link so that we know to avoid it.

It’s just 1 level of the tree nesting, so just sub forums

Lemmy does slightly better, but essentially proves that when you have shitty administrators and moderators, the only thing that’s going to be transparent is the quickest and easiest excuse, and when it’s a lie it remains it remains incontestable. You only need to look at threads titled “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” and read the comments to get a sense of the scale of the problem.

Forums are only as good as their moderators. Always have been, always will be. I’d love something akin to Reveddit for Lemmy though.

Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication

Heavily depends, IMO.

Nested threads are great temporary discussion of a specific story or idea. They’re absolutely miserable for long-running discussions. New posts get lost in the tree and information ends up scattered across multiple threads as a result.

It’s also been my personal experience that the nested threads format just doesn’t seem to build communities in the same way forums did. I have real-life friendships that were made on forums decades ago and I never had that experience with reddit despite being a very early user.

I don’t think that’s entirely due to the ephemeral format, but I do think it plays a part in it. A deep thread between two people on Reddit might last a few hours and a dozen replies before it falls off the page. On forums threads running months or years were pretty common, and that kind of engagement with the same people certainly changes how your relationships develop with them.

How so?

Huuuuuh

Yeah that’s what drew me in, just one account.

So tired having a million accounts for everything

Shootout to doomworld. I think that software is Discourse. Anyway they’ve always had a vibrant communities

Man for some reason local musicians are unable to connect aside from the facebook, at least from my subjective pov.

Nonetheless I moved on from the zuck, but I realise I’m shooting myself in the foot a little just to make a point.

So much lost knowledge. Even on forums that remain, I feel as though 80% of all images no longer function. Especially frustrating when said image is constantly referred to.

I feel like it’s all the ppl who unironically use “kitten”

its completely unbearable

How so?

Discord is great for casual chatting. Was it ever intended to be a forum though? For that use case, it’s completely impractical.

I’ve never gotten really into it. It’s such a mess, you don’t find shit so you ask around in channels hoping someone says something relevant. After one or two replies the next person wants to talk about something else and your question disappears into the void

Ugh too many people. My book club and local dev group are on Discord, also a few old co-workers, and then various communities like rainwave, ocremix diaspora, gamedev stuff…

I wish it was still interoperable with IRC. It’s come to really grate on me.

People who use it (for forum type chatting) are probably trying to avoid non enshittified platforms. Ironically they don’t realize discord is heading towards the same path. Free screen sharing, high quality voice calls, image and video sharing and file sharing for FREE is not sustainable. Eventually they are going to crackdown on its users, which is unfortunate but predictable.

Unfortunately way too many companies and people.

It’s pretty easy to get in there and throw a couple of bots around. People have created entire help desk ticketing systems inside of it. They integrate payment systems. You don’t see any of this until you have a certain specific set of needs and then it’s everywhere.

There’s a lot of plug-in support for corporate apps and people that create themes for things for corporate.

Matrix is the way to replace discord everyone! It is very rough around the edges, but it’s (AFAIK) all self hosted. I even read about discord “bridges” that copy’s your discord channel content into matrix!

matrix.org

I like your idea

Thanks for your contribution.

Isn’t the main difference just that forums are focused on longer discussions, and reddit/lemmy are focused on a constant stream of content?

I’d prefer forums for a lot of my interests, a well managed forum will contain long in depth discussion regarding important topics that the likes of lemmy/reddit/discord either don’t, or if they do, good luck finding it. If however you just want to visit it in the morning and see something different than you saw yesterday, yeah for just raw speed of content, forums suck.

But is that really better?

I’m kind of wondering what forums you visited.

What however is a recurrent issue with young people on forums is them asking questions that have already been answered a million times. On sites like reddit & discord, that’s the norm, we need new content all the time, the 526th person asking just keeps the social media going.

On forums however the etiquette is that you do some effort yourself, and something that gets asked that often is either a sticky, or a long running thread with all the information you could possibly want (but you’ll need to invest some of your own time to get the information from there). And if you then arrive on the forum, read nothing, and ask the same question… again… yeah… you won’t be welcomed with open arms.

Ugh… This was already mentioned before in another channel. Did you even read the rules? Modding you down and banned.

(These actions haven’t been better, in fact they tend to be worse. I’ll take PC forums over this ego tripping mod actions).

Haha yes, but this applied to reddit as well I’d say, maybe just not as much.

I’d call Reddit and the Threadiverse and Usenet and such forums. They’re just broad, with many different categories, or “meta-forums”, as compared to a site with a dedicated-to-a-single-topic forum.

Some other drawbacks of having many independent forums:

• You have to create and maintain a ton of accounts.

• Different, incompatible markup syntax.

• Often missing features (e.g. Markdown has tables; few forums let one create tables)

• Some forum systems ordered comments by time rather than parent comment, which was awful to browse.

• Often insane requirements to get an account. I can think of a few forums that were very difficult to get access to, either because the “new user” system was incompatible with some email system or just had other problems.

I mean, there are a lot of websites with “comment” sections, which is kind of a lightweight forum attached to a webpage, and they’re almost invariably awful.

Cmon reddit is worse than almost any forum. You have to really carefully choose your words and add a lot of word sugar so that no one jumps at you saying you are a worthless pos for even having some opinion with their throwaway trolling account enjoying the anonymity. Or worse some genuine crazy person.

Whereas on mature forums users know each other more closely and it wards off the most freaky behaviour and attack.

They won’t usually say stuff like you are a racist pos for idk getting a white phone the dumbest of things. Because they will just be ostracised out of the platform.

You kind of worry about your reputation. You don’t want ppl to see your avatar/nick and immediately write you off.

Lemmy is only better than Reddit because it is smaller but if it was the size of aforementioned we would have it even worse than r.

Back in the newsgroup days when only people who worked for a government agency or university had access, it was all very nice. It’s once the general public got in that every thing went to shit. Suddenly everyone could create their own fiefdom from which to project their internal insecurity.

I’ve been going more often lately. I do hate having to catch up on 600 pages that’s been discussed over the past 8 years though.

Yep. A traditional forum ages and grows old. And as they get older and older, it becomes harder to draw new members because of the clique of the core membership. I’ve seen a few traditional forums die that death over the years.

And some forums, and I belong to several, the members are literally dying from old age. We are all mostly old and retired. And we lose members every year due to death. Several times a year there is an obituary post for some long time member.