cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930199
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
I loved the old forums, and couldn’t quite see the point of Facebook when it came out. I thought it was just for self-obsessed ‘models’ and wannabe ‘celebs’ when I first heard about it! I joined it eventually of course, as all my friends did and I wanted to see what it was all about. Over the years I’ve had a love/hate thing with FB and only check in a couple of times a week now.
I liked Reddit, it reminded me of the old forums. I like Lemmy more though. It’s still got that feeling I remember back in the old forum days before everyone and his dog got online on their phones and things seemed to go downhill.
Lemmy reminds me of Reddit 10-15 years ago. Back when popular posts would be on the front-page for a few days, when a few hundred or thousand upvotes was a lot, when large communities had tens of thousands of subscribers, not hundreds or millions, when the chance of recognizing and running into the same users on various subreddits was still kind of common…
I 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.
Discord is a terrible platform for communities and for support, because it’s one giant group chat and the messages scroll by. You really need a forum type environment for these types of things and while discord does have a forum format option, it’s still really sucks and also gets little use on the count of how the rest of Discord is structured.
yep. it’s free and easy, and becoming the default. :|
I really don’t get how one is supposed to use more than one server. As in, how to spread one’s attention to feel like one is present in so many places. It’s a total non-starter for me.
Seriously. I don’t mind it as a platform for socialising, but it’s terrible as a support platform, and it goes against the idea of open and accessible information.
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
VC backed user experience
Because we prefer to sign up to one thing that combines all our interests to signing up to dozens of different forums
This is why we have SSO (why on Earth are these always the proprietary ones by default) & decentralized identities such as those on ActivityPub
While your post does mention notifications which really helps with engagement and was lacking from most forums, the main issue was IMHO lack of good mobile support of all the main forum platforms until as you said Discourse came along, but by then it was too late.
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.
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
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
the other users forced me to do it by moving
How did we move from usenet to forums?
Browsers and the internet protocols are were pretty sweet, man
Didn’t usenet also have a lot of spam problems associated with it?
Everything had spam problems 😅
Good point, spam always has been and always will be an issue.
Yes. Still does. Though blocking Google groups cuts down on most of it
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.
Anything big enough becomes a public restroom. Cooperation and syncronization between groups small enough not to devolve in that way seems to be an especially promising path forward.
Power law
Mostly FB wasn’t a trove of far right shit and it was before a lot of the scandals pointing out to what extent our data is sold.
Sure, when only the educated could join it.
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
Even with a free forum host, it’s difficult to keep things running for a long time.
Awhile back I was unsatisfied with how quickly my (new) furniture was degrading, and found a furniture forum run by a guy in the biz. So much knowledge on there about different furniture and how to actually find quality stuff that will last decades.
The owner retired this week, and he had been paying for an IT contract to do basic maintenance / upgrades on the forum (I think he started on a free host, but as it got bigger he eventually had to move it). He needed IT help basically to apply security patches and do upgrades. He’s stated that he no longer plans to pay for the maintenance contract. I’m guessing the forum will disappear soon.
Have you suggested them to move to Lemmy?
Good material for !fedimemes@feddit.uk
Great post!
Millennials naively assumed that the following generations would just naturally be as computer literate as they are. We’re dealing with people now who think that wi-fi is internet service.
The author of the article is specifically referring to bulletin board forums when describing forums. Link aggregators like reddit are not forums. They are comments sections.
I am the author. Heard you were talking shit…
I kid, I kid :D
I insist that in their current form, reddit (and lemmy) can serve as both forums and link aggregators with comment sections.
Well anyway I enjoyed the read.
I am only here actually because proper forums have yet to figure out federation. As soon as Discourse or Flarum or whatever figure out full federation, I’m gone (over to them).
Specifically, I prefer chronologically sorted posts and the absence of voting systems.
You can actually do that on lemmy already like so. Sorting by new doesn’t use the voting. Hell you can even sort them like a forum by sorting by “new comments”
I get it, and thanks for the advice. But I dislike what voting does to spaces like this as a matter of principle. It is a social consensus reinforcement mechanism, even if it is implemented with the best of intentions.
boomers figured out the other mediums.
No, boomers invented forums (and the internet itself). Millenials invented Web 2.0 (as they called it), the corporate takeover of the internet.
The same way you moved from reddit to here. Dissatisfaction and momentum.
I still post on Wil Wheaton’s old phpBB forum from time to time. Nobody else does, though. :(
Does he post on there? Lol
No. He’s on Tumblr.
