The same way you moved from reddit to here. Dissatisfaction and momentum.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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I still post on Wil Wheaton's old phpBB forum from time to time. Nobody else does, though. :(
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I don't know, but every fucking group's reliance on Discord pisses me off. I'm very much into modding my games, the problem is that every damn mod author wants to do support only on Discord, which means probably more than half of my 200 servers are just for that.
Man you said it. I despise discord. My gaming group will post things in the chat, and if you ever want to look at something again it's a pain in the ass to find it
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We trusted corporations.
I'd like to think we've collectively learned our lessons, but watching people migrate from Reddit to fucking Discord makes me think that we really have not and probably never will.
Corpos are spending countless resources to infiltrate anything with as much as a iota of traction so that they can bleed the cow cash dry and sell its carcass for money.
Even if you distrust the corpos and want them to die, the majority of the population has so much trouble just surviving that its hard to raise up against that bullshit
Yeah. Federating forums seem like a useful feature to keep them going. The forum style has it benefits that the discord and reddit style lacks. Sadly a forum I used a lot for my community is now in its final days, even if it managed to last a lot longer than others
Maybe ask if they're willing to switched over to lemmy? You can sort like a forum does. Long shot but hey....
true. I didn't consider that. That would could work. Lemmy is a lot more advanced in that regard. Currently the best ideas are Discord and give up, and the original owners are done with the idea, but I could try and create a spiritual successor on here. Lemmy suffers a bit from the same isues as Forums with lack of people, but I only need to convince the OGs. I need to think about that, and a forum from 2004 whose software is a decade out of date is easy to beat in that regard
Also thanks for creating this awesome instance.
Also tools like Lemmy Federate can help broaden the reach and allow more people on Lemmy to discover your communities, since communities and their content doesn't get federated until someone is subscribed to them.
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This is a fantastic read. I wasnt around for the prime days of forums but I did experience them a bit.
I'm becoming extremely concerned about the number of topics and projects that are migrating to Discord. My main issue is that it is not and never will be publically indexed, and among other problems, is itself a corporate walled garden we consider to be "one of the good ones".
I really hope we find and establish a "low executive cost" solution before the next time Discord fumbles (which is inevitable) and we can claw some of that activity back.
But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that's a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.
But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.
this is unironically such a big problem, there are great voice chatting solutions, mumble, and the handful of other ones that exist out there.
There are basically 0 good usable video conferencing/sharing softwares out there. The same goes for desktop streaming. If we just focused like, a little bit more of our energy on these two things, i think the world would unironically get better. It's 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven't we figured out how to do these things yet?
The ones that do exist are likely to be web based, and thus, webRTC, the dreaded behemoth of both web support and also, generally poor implementation. I just want mumble but with support for video streaming, how hard is it >:(
It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?
It's not about the hardware. (Not like it's that ubiquitous anyway; I'm daily driving a machine from 2017)
I'm going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like "seamless screen sharing" or "video conference" doesnt really matter.
And IMO, that's good if we want to Recover the Web.
The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.
In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can't really "push to talk" three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won't want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time. For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.
In the end, something like a simple jabber-like chatroom is far easier and more productive to work on, even before we get to the coding part.
Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on "debt", which is what "Foo has to have 'screen sharing' because Discord has it" ultimately boils down to.
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Usenet and bbs erasure.
Usenet is still useful for... other things 🏴☠️
I was considering mentioning that GenX stuff, but I felt it was too obscure and would only serve to posture my creds :)
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While I do agree with the problems identified, I can't help but think they also made forums a lot better. Due to the lower discoverability and higher effort to actually join communities felt more personal. You interacted with smaller groups and came to know specific people. I still have friends from back then.
On larger platforms, I never had that. Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.
That's a double-edged knife. yes it feels closer and personal, but it also breeds inside groups and cliques. I've been turned away from multiple forums because I was too ASD to fit in with their culture but there was no other space to discuss it. And this can go much much worse than just a culture-fit. Not to mention that if that forum becomes too popular, that culture is anyway lost.
However using lemmy there's the best of both worlds. You can still keep your instance small enough so that you know your local users, but also be able to interact with the larger community without the extra effort I explained. For example there's instances out there like beehaw and hexbear which through have managed to retain their own culture and standards even while federated.
Hard agree. I would also like to add that I think a lot of people remember forums a lot better than they were. Federation keeps admins and mods in check, these features act as checks and balances on instances
*Nothing personal ofc db0 you run an awesome instance.
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I had so many good times on forums back in the day.
The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.
When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It's like living in a small village versus living in a city.
The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn't as VPNs were barely a thing) you'd lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.
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How did we move from usenet to forums?
Forums still exist, there only for extremely niche things though...Like high powered flashlights
Here in Germany the forum culture is still somewhat alive, social media did take a big cut though.
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tl;dr the internet didn't used to be about making money, it was a place where people created all kinds of content, for almost no reason at all, and almost nobody was making any money, except AOL which blew all their money on CDs probably
Much easier access.
You make a reddit account or a discors account and you have limited access to thousands of forums.
Imagine giving your email address and making a password and solving a captcha hundreds of times instead. Who would choose to?
And don't even get me started on the ease of operating these subreddits and discord channels instead of building and hosting websites.
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Hosting a forum costs money, and we ain't got that
There were plenty of free forum hosts back in the day. (edit: just did a search and there are still free forum hosts)
But then social media came out, and everyone got addicted to the gamified dopamine mechanics like upvotes and shit. So now everything has to have upvotes, or likes, or whatever other stupid bullshit shit that has absolutely ruined human interaction and discourse and is single handedly to blame for the extremity in modern discourse, because the need to drive clicks and upvotes leads to extreme polarization where no common sense, honest discussion can be held.
because you either 100% agree with me (upvote) or you are a baby killing bastard who disagrees with me (downvote), and there can be no middle ground! /s
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the other users forced me to do it by moving
Well written, interesting article.
Really getting momentum from Reddit will be tough though. Our main advantage is that we have the rest of the Fediverse as a potential user base, and existing forum apps that also activate apub; reducing network effects. If the Fediverse has momentum, so has the threadiverse.
Millennials naively assumed that the following generations would just naturally be as computer literate as they are. We're dealing with people now who think that wi-fi is internet service.
The author of the article is specifically referring to bulletin board forums when describing forums. Link aggregators like reddit are not forums. They are comments sections.
I am the author. Heard you were talking shit...
I kid, I kid :D
I insist that in their current form, reddit (and lemmy) can serve as both forums and link aggregators with comment sections.
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People prefer centralization, and it makes sense. The Fediverse resolves most of the issues with decentralization, but so does centralization, which came way sooner, and arguably did it better.
Also, people seem to forget that Facebook was pretty cool back then. It had superior features, and was not the buggy mess it is today.
Mostly FB wasn’t a trove of far right shit and it was before a lot of the scandals pointing out to what extent our data is sold.
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Anything big enough becomes a public restroom. Cooperation and syncronization between groups small enough not to devolve in that way seems to be an especially promising path forward.
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