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Katana314 ,

Just to pose a thought; how practical would it be for a small subject owner to run a FediVerse instance intended to stay localized to their domain?

For example: Indie game owner makes a reasonably popular game, they set up a website that Lemmy users can subscribe/join directly, and use that for forums/tips/discussions related to their game. People don’t need to register as long as they have an account somewhere. Some number of users would be new to Lemmy and use that site’s registration for later discovery. And, someday when X instance (the game, or the next popular one) gets infested by neonazis, everyone just moves to another and/or has other discussions backed up.

I don’t know how practical or convenient that is though. I imagine a lot of groups don’t want to risk lost users.

RippleEffect ,

I like your idea

ArcaneSlime ,

I’ve been complaining about this for years now.

LukyJay ,

Thanks for your contribution.

ArcaneSlime ,

You’re welcome!

PanArab ,

At least the Fediverse exists.

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.

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.

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.

TechNerdWizard42 ,

I like the idea of Reddit and it works much better than Lemmy. But the moderation and AI scraping make it a no-go site for me anymore which is a shame.

I love internet forums and have been a mod at some and very high poster at other. But the snowball effect gets them. If there’s no traffic, there’s no posts, so there’s no traffic. You need to have a good community to make it work. One area reddit really shines, small communities exist on a huge platform. Great idea before the enshittification.

I hate discord and the fact that anyone replaces customer support or fan support pages with it, is just fundamentally broken. The idea of a forum is that the question is asked and archived. 20 years later someone else googles the question and sees the answer and all the replies that lead up to it. That’s what forums are for. In discord you ask a question and 30 seconds later it’s gone forever eaten by useless drivel. Never to be searched or found again. Idiotic.

bluewing ,

Yep. A traditional forum ages and grows old. And as they get older and older, it becomes harder to draw new members because of the clique of the core membership. I’ve seen a few traditional forums die that death over the years.

And some forums, and I belong to several, the members are literally dying from old age. We are all mostly old and retired. And we lose members every year due to death. Several times a year there is an obituary post for some long time member.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Irelephant ,
@Irelephant@lemm.ee avatar

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

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