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4am ,

Hey guys not to be a downer but like…what DO we do when a federated instance goes down and takes all its content with it?

BarbecueCowboy ,

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.

MigratingtoLemmy ,

Use S3 and pay up, don’t worry you’re almost never running out of storage

KairuByte ,
@KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Speaking explicitly of text, they can likely be compressed to an insane degree instead of purged, if someone wanted to. For comparison, the entirety of Wikipedia (text only) is ~22GB.

GreatAlbatross ,
@GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk avatar

Just for context, the full database of feddit.uk compresses down to about 4GB. I am not sure what’s going to happen to the ghosts long term, but I don’t think storage will be a huge issue.

stabby_cicada ,

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.

Ibuthyr ,

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.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

If someone hasn’t written a software package to do so already, it’s probably possible to write one to dump and clone all the comments and posts on a server.

Ibuthyr ,

The comments fortunately are still there, but the images are all gone. They had some trouble that was image-related which led to the server collapsing at some stage. I can’t recall the specifics unfortunately.

4am ,

Are those posts/comments/images available on other instances?

If an instance just shuts down, we just lose all that content? Sounds like a pretty fatal flaw.

TheObviousSolution , (edited )

I wouldn’t mind Reddit if it weren’t for the opaque and hidden moderation. Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication. We need that in truly federated fashion, and lemmy was just a step there whose questionable leadership hampers any real wide-scale adoption.

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. Discord, at least it’s much more obvious that you are joining closed off communities and that discussions are essentially time limited.

Things like community wikis have also dropped off in use specially recently because it’s becoming clear how much of their content is intent on milking their users. First it was ads, and it was excused because “hosting costs” (regardless of how comparable they were), now it’s AI scavenging your content and those services actively preventing you from eliminating content you contributed but are no longer willing to let them host.

Even in Lemmy, where’s the option for me to remove my comments when I no longer want them to be hosted? In Lemmy, due to its federated nature, it’s even more difficult, but given that you can edit comments and have those updates propagated, not impossible. But nothing beats reddit in abuse, where they shamelessly tried to say they would allow respect and allow users to monetize their content but instead proceeded to do the complete opposite. The fact that there might/will be some other cache on the Internet that stores the content does not excuse it and give people the right to pressure and dismiss chain of ownership of those contributions.

Add to this that the economy is far worse and that the tech boom is shrinking and much more competition driven along with a general decline in society for respectful contributions and discourse, and you get a lot less of the sort of charity that was involved in older communities.

SwordInStone ,

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

Schadrach ,

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.

protein ,
@protein@programming.dev avatar

Yes please. Sumn like reveddit or unddit for lemmy would be pleasant.

Schadrach ,

This seems like it would be pretty possible - you’d just need an instance that basically just takes in all the data and just marks moderation/deletion as such rather than actually altering the posts. The hard part would be not getting it defederated by half the instances out there specifically for providing unddit/reveddit functionality.

commandar ,

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.

grrgyle ,

Yeah a thread is more like a close conversation. If you comment in a thread you’re going to be heard front and centre. It keeps non-sequiters down and it’s good etiquette to at least acknowledge the points raised above.

Tree based is more like splintered conversations around a party, where people drift in and out of side convos. This lends itself to a more anonymous, transient communication style.

Ideal for a quick little session on your phone, really

AmidFuror ,

I wish there were alternatives to Reddit. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know.

ElderberryLow ,

Nice

ConstipatedWatson ,

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…

AmidFuror ,

I'm struggling to see the connection with Lemmy "Kbin" Kilmister.

Pips ,

Didn’t he tour with Mastodon?

Blackout ,
@Blackout@kbin.run avatar

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

supercargo ,

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

Uh-oh.

AnalogyAddict ,

We could always go back to html chats. Hotelchat, Webmaze…

irreticent ,
@irreticent@lemmy.world avatar

Habbo Hotel

fuggadihere ,

Damn, really?

webjukebox ,
@webjukebox@lemmy.world avatar

IIRC there is an open source project for forums communities.

It’s called SMF I think.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Nice avatar lol

grrgyle ,

Darn you beat me to it haha

ILikeBoobies ,

Simple machine forums (smf)

phpbb

Mybb

paid - ipboards, vBulletin

But that’s all software to run on your own server

BobaFett26 ,
@BobaFett26@lemmy.world avatar

Lemmy think on it and get back to you.

CynicRaven ,

Maybe I can help!

cRazi_man ,

Digg

samus12345 ,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

https://mario.wiki.gallery/images/thumb/1/19/PMCS_Lemmy.png/150px-PMCS_Lemmy.png

grrgyle ,

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 😞

rwhitisissle ,

How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?

paraphrand ,

Sail the high seas.

samus12345 ,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

leftist infighting

There’s a place that doesn’t happen?

TheLowestStone ,
@TheLowestStone@lemmy.world avatar

Sure but they are mostly Nazi bars and Klan rallies.

TheRealKuni ,

Nobody hates leftists like slightly different leftists.

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA ,
@HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world avatar

You take that back 👊 💥

iopq ,

Truth social

TexMexBazooka ,

Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft

It’s funny because Lemmygrad, .ml and hexbear are almost indistinguishable from truth social of outside of plain text

Archer ,

Love Linux, but why be redundant about leftists?

yukichigai ,
@yukichigai@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Damn Leftists. They ruined Leftism!

Aceticon ,

The wrong kind of Leftist ruined Leftism, not the right kind.

/s (because this one really needs it)

Akasazh ,
@Akasazh@feddit.nl avatar

I feel like the tankie brand of leftism shouldn’t be called that. Their embracing of technocrat totalitarians kind of puts them out of the left field.

rwhitisissle ,

You know, for all the complaints I see of tankies, I have encountered 10x more people who incessantly complain about them.

Akasazh ,
@Akasazh@feddit.nl avatar

I don’t incessantly complain, but my Lemmy experience had improved massively by banning the most notorious instances.

Aceticon ,

The problem is that a lot of people, specially Americans, have interiorized “red scare” propaganda notions, even when they see themselves as Lefties.

If you don’t just mentally go “uuh, commies” at the mere wiff of communal solutions it’s a lot easier to actually look at certain ideas and judge them on their actual pros and cons, as is spotting authoritarianism for what it is (whether it claims to want to implement leftwing notions or rightwing ones) and tribalism (of the kind that supports Fascism whilst claiming to be leftwing, and I include both Putin supporting “communists” and Zionism supporting “liberals”)

AFC1886VCC ,

Give me leftist infighting over Nazi content any day of the week!

MilitantAtheist ,

Usenet

AmidFuror ,

alt.atheism

i_have_no_enemies OP ,

what is that?

MilitantAtheist ,

Not sure if serious. 😑

Anyway, before forums, there was a network of servers hosting discussions and to some extent file sharing.

The modern version of Usenet is pretty focused on file sharing and mostly so on paid servers.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#:~:text=Usenet is ….

ILikeBoobies ,

Individual websites for niches instead of amalgamation websites

cheese_greater ,

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

whotookkarl ,
@whotookkarl@lemmy.world avatar

Lobste.rs is pretty active too for tech focused topics

jamyang ,

But getting membership is next to impossible. I tried maling them and contacting them on their IRC channel, but to no avail.

enleeten ,

Love hackernews but if it gained huge traction outside of the programmer community, it’d be corpinated and enshittified in the blink of an eye by a team of MBAs.

WldFyre , (edited )

Hackernews is just chock full of techbros who think that since they know how to code, that automatically makes them rational and more authoritative on a subject than most people. Every time I go there I’m surprised by how crappy it is lol

Edit: somehow misspelled “techbros” lol

dumpsterlid ,

Hacker News might be the most insufferable and childishly naive place on the internet.

DannyMac ,

I’ve heard good things about Lemmy

Pacmanlives ,

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

clot27 ,
@clot27@lemm.ee avatar

Honestly who uses discord nowadays? its completely unbearable

Bezzelbob ,
@Bezzelbob@lemmy.world avatar

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

putty ,

discord isn’t a single group lol, it’ll be the type of people that are there for the group you’re getting into lol. If your discord is for a hobby with creeps, then yeah they’ll be creeps. All the hobbies I use discord for don’t have that issue, what kinds of discords are you going into?

Gestrid ,

its completely unbearable

How so?

MossyHabitat ,

Discord is OK for real-time chat or VC, but is awful for forum-like discussions. Comment-specific context is lost in the single-threaded noise and search is borderline useless. The true forum-designed format of Lemmy, Reddit, and predecessors is far and away better. In my opinion Twitter - the legacy, ubiquity and tech - would be a better forum than Discord. That was hard to type and I need to quickly bleach my fingers.

Gestrid ,

You’re right about the forums. While they’re useful as smaller chat rooms separate from the “main ones” (for example, someone in a Discord server I know started a forum for fanart and discussion about a specific upcoming video game), they’re completely useless as a replacement for traditional forums.

Also, like you said, the search feature simply isn’t good enough to be able to efficiently search through all those forums. While Reddit’s (and probably Lemmy’s) search engine isn’t great either, it at least has the benefit of being indexed by other search engines.

clot27 ,
@clot27@lemm.ee avatar

Tooo much bloated after I revisted after 2ish years

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

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

Rayspekt ,

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

grrgyle ,

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.

weeeeum ,

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.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

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.

UltraGiGaGigantic ,

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

ocassionallyaduck ,

I advocate for two things, oddly things I never would have in earlier internet:

  • Paid forums. A one time payment for registration.
  • Strict rules and quick bans. But allow offenders to buy back in. Permaban for serious offenses. .

Why? Because if it costs you $10 or 15 to re-activate after screwing around, you’re much more likely to read the room and not fuck around too much with others. It encourages users to point out bad behavior, and mods to act decisively. If the mods or management totally suck, then it can go sour, but that’s true of any community.

In this case though it can at least partially help to offset costs from shitty users, and keep bots at bay by making them cost a registration fee.

I don’t love it as a “solution”, but when Facebook was small, people behaved better. But now people post the most unhinged shit ever under their full legal name, so no amount of daylight is going to put the proverbial trolls back in their cages. Just gotta lock them out of civil spaces.

You wanna talk about Honda engine tuning here with us? Don’t be a fucking asshole, or get banned.

You wanna chat with fans of 50s cinema and the rise of modern camera film technique? Do it without brining up woke/trump/biden/Covid or get out.

I like that we have free stuff like lemmy and reddit for now, but bots are getting far, far worse.

dullbananas ,
@dullbananas@lemmy.ca avatar

Ideally the world would be moneyless

ocassionallyaduck ,

Honestly to avoid the immense botspam coming for small orgs, you need either a literal army of volunteers, or some kind of “realID” type check to verify they’re human, and I hate that concept immensely as well.

Giant if, but if you could do a one way cryptographic check against an ID to verify its legitimate, without sending anything off the server elsewhere, then a forum could bind your current username to a state issued ID, at least until it’s reissued. And then you could at least reasonably think these users are human.

But who wants to give that info to a stranger online. Even if the hash is unique to the site based on their own seed, the average person doesn’t understand that, and it feels like handing over your actual privacy.

Setting aside that PCs don’t have NFC readers as a standard feature as well.

Everything I think would be effectivd boils down though to needing to know that something exists in meatspace on the other end, and being able to use that to manage your bans. At least 10bux is just money, and not your ID.

GreatAlbatross ,
@GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk avatar

This is the thing, the balance of anonymity and preventing people using that anonymity to be a tit.
In my opinion, one of the answers is keeping the signal-to-noise high: Make sure that there are enough sensible people in a community that if someone starts acting up, they’re alone. And then they can either correct their course, or get banned, ideally before the next moron shows up.

And part of the way of achieving that is raising the barrier to sign-up, if only a little, and rate limiting.

kava ,

Ideally I’d have a 10 inch cock but unfortunately I gotta settle

dogslayeggs ,

Yeah, same here. 13 inches is honestly too much for most women. I wish it were only 10.

Omniraptor ,

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

ThirdWorldOrder ,

Probably stopped a lot of porn spam though

EngineerGaming ,
@EngineerGaming@feddit.nl avatar

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.

ocassionallyaduck ,

Nope. Imo the point is to avoid cryptobro bots and the like, not invite them.

Plus crypto is volatile and you’d have to manage it a lot more to keep it pegged at “expensive enough”

And even then, you won’t discourage a troll who just happens to have an absurd stash of coins without pricing out legitimate users. A bot farmer with 50k in bitcoin would drop a few hundredths of a coin just to make your day worse.

EngineerGaming , (edited )
@EngineerGaming@feddit.nl avatar

“Cryptobros” =/= “people using crypto”, because this is a legitimate usecase. You can see it discussed on Lemmy too. This is how I can pay for my VPS while my card doesn’t work. This is how I would pay for a service even if my card did work, but I didn’t want to attach pretty much my real name to it. But yea, I agree that it might be complicated logistically. Have seen services where you can buy prepaid cards for crypto - at least that should work.

ocassionallyaduck ,

Yes, but my point was more so that crypto bros swim in that water too, and my thinking was more so to discourage assholes rather than attain 100% immutable anonymity.

Hammerheart ,

Plus crypto is volatile and you’d have to manage it a lot more to keep it pegged at “expensive enough”

this is a solved problem. Just change the crypto cost according to its exchange value. I pay for my vpn and my vps with crypto.

ocassionallyaduck ,

True, but my thinking would be that I wouldn’t want to promote total anonymity when the whole thrust of what I was saying was to attach cost, burden, and some kind of identity if possible.

Pay me ten bucks from PayPal.

I don’t care about your PayPal info but I at least know you’re “real” enough to pass basic PayPal setup screening nowadays. That kind of thing.

palordrolap ,

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.

Natanael ,

See: Twitter bots with paid verification

RecursiveParadox ,
@RecursiveParadox@lemmy.world avatar

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.

fukurthumz420 ,

is metafilter ok with advocating violence? asking for a friend?

RecursiveParadox ,
@RecursiveParadox@lemmy.world avatar

Haven’t been there in a decade despite having been there for a decade and helping many real people in real life from there, and I’d have to say: depends on who the target of the violence is and whether or not it’s phased in the subjunctive mood.

ocassionallyaduck ,

Communities can eventually become insular and crappy, that isn’t anything new. I haven’t ever used/heard of metafilter , but I believe you.

Not a problem unique to lefties or hardcore MAGA folks. It’s just community management for free by volunteers eventually means you have some echo chambering. The site/community manager can steer the mod policies, but without leadership you get fiefdoms. Look at some subreddits that speed run this process.

CptInsane0 ,

The Something Awful Forums still exist, and I go there a lot more than I go here or Reddit these days.

JargonWagon ,

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.

CptInsane0 ,

Yeah that part is annoying. I have to make myself not read every single comment. I have a browser extension that helps organize that a bit.

kandoh ,

Honestly, the layout and formatting of forums just isn’t as good as the way comments are sorted and how they can spawn side discussions like on Reddit or Lemmy.

racemaniac ,

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?

kandoh ,

I think maybe the forums give the illusion of a longer discussion because a low effort reply is given the same weight as a really in-depth reply post.

It bumps the post back up to the top too so that kind of encourages continued discussion in a way Reddit posts don’t. So that’s a benefit to forums.

Irelephant ,
@Irelephant@lemm.ee avatar

Discourse is a great server, i see a lot of places with their own forum now, which is good.

markon ,

Yeah everyone like “AI content flood oh noooo, AI AI AI” yet very few mention this much much bigger issue of centralized algorithmically controlled walled gardens where everyone is. That’s kinda like WeChat in China. It is hard to have real democracy or freedom of information (or privacy of any sort) when only a few big corporations have the social networks all locked down. The bad thing is because of the social network effect it’s extremely hard to get people to switch even if the alternatives are even better! So much momentum. We need to find out a way to be able to help distribute users because the software isn’t the problem anymore and neither is infrastructure or any of the other stuff that is given the big guys advantage really. The biggest problem aside from the social network effect is monetization I suppose. Still, it’s hard to even start any kind of method of monetization for alternative platforms or decentralized platforms when you can’t get anybody to switch in the first place or can’t get critical mass.

BrightCandle ,

I feel like we need a better model. Reddits/Lemmys algorithm makes long conversations impossible and forums make long conversations dominate and this causes a lot of additional disruption. There has to be a design that meets a middle ground that can take over which better represents both the ephemeral nature of news and article discussion while also supporting a number of long standing more detailed discussions which expel low effort content.

Roflmasterbigpimp ,
@Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe I’m too young or just had bad luck, but ALL the interactions I’ve ever had with Internet forums have been unbelievably awful. Whenever I asked a question, I was asked why I wanted to know that and was lectured that my reasons were stupid, bad, or wrong (how is that even possible?). People hijacked my post and talked about anything else, and I received NO answer whatsoever! This kind of thing happened way too often, regardless of the type of forum. This occurred in Skyrim forums, Coh2 forums, PC forums, aquarium forums, … I hate forums. It’s good that they are dying, and I, for one, will not miss them at all.

racemaniac ,

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.

Roflmasterbigpimp ,
@Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world avatar

I wish I would just have gotten a Link to a Post where the Answer to my Question is, but I just got this BS.

racemaniac ,

Without actual examples it’s really hard to tell if the forum was just a toxic environment, or you were the newbie not reading the room. I’ve seen both happen.

Roflmasterbigpimp ,
@Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world avatar

Could be, but I found my place in the Fediverse and I’m happy here.

Yearly1845 ,

Oh a long running thread, my least favorite thing on the entire internet.

“Hey do you have an answer to my question”

Yeah bro, its in this 700 page forum thread. Here’s a tent and some supplies, godspeed."

Fuck that.

racemaniac ,

Once it becomes too big the forum admin should realize it’s time to make a subsection regarding that topic XD.

Forums for sure aren’t perfect, but a 20 page forum thread that does a deep dive into a topic with a lot of good contributors beats anything i expect to find on discord or lemmy.

Xatolos ,
@Xatolos@reddthat.com avatar

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).

Roflmasterbigpimp ,
@Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world avatar

You do you, but apparently more people tend to dislike forums as time goes on.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

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.

racemaniac ,

Don’t agree with this, there’s a huge difference between a forum and something like lemmy: how what you see is determined. On a forum as long as discussion is happening, a thread stays on top. On a more social media site like this, things only remain relevant a couple of days at most, while forum threads can go on for years. That makes sites like this more focused on short and shallow discussions, where forums imo allow for more in depth discussions.

Rayspekt ,

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

Nicoleism101 , (edited )

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.

stoly ,

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.

HawlSera ,

Especially since Reddit passes out bans like candy, it’s the biggest forum on the internet and I can’t use it because of a site wide ban that I didn’t deserve.

cumskin_genocide ,

Mods all over the Internet killed forums with their bullshit. The users too. You can’t tame the mob and the users drag their shit on the carpet like a dog doing the scuttle.

Take a look at the shit show of the Neogaf/Resetera split as an example.

limelight79 ,

I run an internet forum for a very specific topic. I have to manually register people, because before I did that, spammers would come in and crap all over everything. (Fortunately it’s not a very popular topic, so I only have to register new accounts a few times each month.) I run the forum on my own dime, no advertising or anything, as a side hobby.

There’s also a very active Facebook group. The Facebook group is great for general conversation, but often when a technical question comes up, please just link to the forum where the info is stored. Searching in Facebook is terrible, and what happens if Facebook decides to block access to history for some reason? (Not that they necessarily would, but I’ve seen it happen many times. Remember when Photobucket blocked access to old pictures unless you had a paid account? We lost a bunch of useful pictures on the forum when that happened.)

Peddlephile ,

Welcome to the new era of enshittification where you’ll eventually have to subscribe to access or make posts, and none of it will be searchable on any search engines.

rimjob_rainer ,

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

nossaquesapao ,

At least Reddit is searchable

How long until they restrict viewing the full contents of posts without logging in?

SnipingNinja ,

They recently had a deal with Google, so not soon I guess

rxin ,

They already did for mobile browsers.

UltraGiGaGigantic ,

I think Facebook won’t let me look at their videos without logging in

Hoomod ,

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

rottingleaf ,

With guestbooks - not always. They were full of spam, of course

rottingleaf ,

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.

GreatAlbatross ,
@GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk avatar

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

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