Moving to: m/AskMbin!

Yeah, that’s the one thing I miss about forums. Want to bring up some old obscure topic? Just comment on it and everyone suddenly sees it again.

I guess kbin’s active tab is somewhat similar? Not enough though, probably.

facebook groups really killed off long term availability of information. If you want true niche communities, and easy to find information, you have to go looking for true old school forums (xenforo, phpbb, vbulletin etc). so many forums I used to use had a mass exodus to facebook.

Reddit doesn't really help either, it's still centred around instant gratification and doomscrolling.

Just look at say one of the largest woodworking forums (www.woodworkforums.com), vs /r/woodworking. The forums are full of subforums so filtering information is easy. Default sort is by newest response, so if you bump a week/month/year old post, it will get noticed. The combination of easy to find information, and the display mode reduces duplication of information.

Whereas /r/woodworking is mostly just a showcase of work, minimal conversation, and minimal advice. It might as well be instagram. If you respond to a 2 day old post with a question, good luck having anyone even read it, let alone respond.

A lot of forms ceased to exist after facebook came along, or at least exist to the same extent. Facebook groups are horrible. Searching for information/help is so hard, no one does it, so you get the same questions over and over. it's easier to post your question, wait for a response, than it is to actually search for the same question that was asked just the other day! My other issue with facebook groups is there are so many of them (I am in three or four for once hobby). You see a post in your feed, accidentally cause a feed refresh, and do you think you can find that post again? nigh on impossible.

I'd love to see kbin/lemmy introduce a solid tagging system, or sub communities somehow so information can be stored and accessed in a meaningul way.

eg
/m/woodworking/furniture
/m/woodworking/tools

etc etc.

I don't think my personal motivation is the same as what you describe, but there is a functionality in kbin that may somewhat get at what you'd like in your experience.

Instead of sorting by hot, top, or new, you can sort by active and see the most recent thread that had a comment added.

Now, admittedly, it's not fun if you alone are the only person contributing to older threads, but perhaps you can promote awareness of this feature and start building a community that uses the feature.

I realized this at some point in my Reddit "career" and didn't really like it much. Dig a little further and threads get archived or something and you CANNOT comment on them.

There are many conversations that should never stop or expire. Philosophy, religion, politics are first to come to mind but any significant issue like abortion, nuclear weapons, etc. is the same.

I think kbin better supports these longer conversations. Why don't we start one?

This is what sorting by active fixes.

It's like the old "sort by recent replies" on forums.

I would argue that the current form of Lemmy (and kbin, and lotide) is a lot like a forum, to the point that there's a phpbb front-end.

I think the key to long-term discussions is going to be having small enough communities that you can recognize the other people you're talking with.

Once you recognize the person you're talking with, then the conversation naturally becomes a continuation of the last one.

My soapbox instance is a good example. There's a number of people that I routinely have discussions with, and because I recognize those people and I know who they are, and I know where they're coming from, we don't need to rehash earlier forms of the discussion. Instead, we can keep the conversation going even though the Twitter style conversation thread would suggest that you can't do that.

One of the things that I think will help in the long term is having profile pictures. Somebody who's having a conversation with me may not remember my specific name, but the icon next to my message is going to be the same and so they will remember the last time that they had a conversation with me.

I think that that sort of long-term conversation also might help with some mutual tolerance. You see someone, and you know their views and so you end up having a conversation with the person rather than with the class of people that they represent.

I think that's one of the biggest problems in political discourse online today, is that instead of people having conversations, people have conversations with classes of people as represented by one other person. In that way, there can't be any nuance because not agreeing with the class that you represent is itself a sort of own, instead of common ground two individuals can agree with.