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JackbyDev ,

Lemmy!

pyrflie ,

Never heard of it. Can’t be too big.

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.

nutsack ,

why not implement forums with reddit-like threads?

i_have_no_enemies OP ,

you mean this? old.lemmy.world

nutsack ,

no I don’t know what that is

mlg ,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

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.

EarMaster ,

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.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

NodeBB is probably less painful to deal with as a system adminstrator, since it doesn’t use Ruby.

Lots of forum software used to have threaded discussions, but most of them settled on a more linear commenting experience, maybe 20 years ago.

ava221 ,

great work チャットGPTchat gpt deutsch

thorbot ,

No it isn’t. Forums are cesspools.

LordCrom ,

I tried running a forum… With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn… And I followed best practices to set it up.

phx ,

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

mrgreyeyes ,

Was it any good?

cjk ,

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.


<span style="color:#323232;">    1998 |   6686
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    1999 |  40528
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2000 |  70379
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2001 |  41129
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2002 | 171294
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2003 | 203642
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2004 | 204685
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2005 | 173659
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2006 | 150000
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2007 | 135936
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2008 | 126283
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2009 |  94894
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2010 |  70333
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2011 |  48691
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2012 |  31197
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2013 |  30606
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2014 |  30227
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2015 |  29334
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2016 |  25472
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2017 |  27505
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2018 |  28551
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2019 |  22366
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2020 |  17250
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2021 |  12794
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2022 |  10135
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2023 |   7151
</span>

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

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In ,

Ooooh. Data. Nice.

Scrollone ,

From your stats, it’s clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.

cjk ,

Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.

But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.

macrocephalic ,

I spent a lot of time in a few forums in the 00s. Many of them still exist but they are shells of what they used to be. One that I check into once a year or so has about one post per year - and it’s normally a post asking if anyone is still there. The owner keeps it running as a memorial to one of the mods who has passed.

mrvictory1 ,

Distro-specific forums are alive and kicking.

cjk ,

yeah, I feel this. Currently it is mainly nostalgia and memorial why we keep it running.

ThirdWorldOrder ,

I used to love Something Awful, which I think is still doing pretty well at a glance. So many good book recommendations.

dependencyinjection ,

Why don’t you share it here, I for one would be interesting in checking it out.

cjk ,

It’s a german language forum. I guessed that it is not very interesting to most people reading here because of the language barrier. But I’m happy to share the link: forum.selfhtml.org

Steak ,

Thanks for sharing and for doing a big part in keeping the free internet we all love alive.

cjk ,

❤️

It’s a pleasure!

RootBeerGuy ,
@RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Selfhtml is how I made my first webpages! Didn’t think its still alive. Godspeed!

cjk ,

I believe most of DACH learned writing web pages with SELFHTML. Those were the times :-)

dependencyinjection ,

Thanks.

I guess I need to learn German now.

rottingleaf ,

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.

Blackmist ,

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

echodot ,

It’s always fake passport scams that I get, where they will offer people fake passports but of course they don’t actually have any capacity to make them, so they just take your money. Is there really a massive demand for fake passports all of a sudden?

echodot ,

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.

dutchkimble ,

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

LordCrom ,

Taken down long ago. I think on day 3

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

SeattleRain ,

I think a big stumbling block is authentication. I think Web 3 could really revive indie forums if the was integrated properly.

It was give people a single sign on for thousands of forums.

LunarLoony ,
@LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

How so?

curiousPJ ,

Maybe for the generic cat/dog image sharing boards but niche topics like machining are still thriving.

rob200 ,

I would had concern over internet forums disappearing back in 2015-2012, but now a days, I don’t worry as much. if it wasn’t being replaced by the fediverse. Well maybe not replaced, but it is an alternative that has some good activity surprisingly and still growing, thanks to Mastodons marketing. It’s like an upgraded forums. And everyone can communicate no matter where they go on the Fediverse.

UltraGiGaGigantic ,

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

So tired having a million accounts for everything

yournamehere ,

remember myspace? thats what reddit is. an ancient webartifact.

nl4real ,

I actually went out and looked up a bunch of forums after the Reddit controversy last year. They’re slow, but I actually feel comfortable just browsing through and only posting if I feel like I can actually contribute. I would definitely recommend just going out and hunting for boards relevant to your interests.

grrgyle ,

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

MaXsteri ,

Internet Forums disappearing is a real shame.

For my hobby there’s still lots and lots of old and relevant archived forum threads that regularly help me out.

But for new information, that has all moved to Facebook Groups. This forces me to keep a Facebook account, which I hate and would otherwise ditch in a heartbeat.

Rayspekt ,

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.

weeeeum ,

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.

jvw ,

Ha – one of my favorite hobbies has an active listserv. They also apparently have a FB group but it’s not as active nor as helpful.

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

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