There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

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

CaptainPedantic ,

Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I’m able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It’s not easily searchable, and search engines can’t index it. If people aren’t fastidious about replying to messages they’re responding to, it’s just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.

That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.

Tippon ,

That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.

You could set that up on a lot of forums, you just had to select threaded view in the settings 👍

joyjoy ,

discourse does this well. While not exactly reply chain based, it’s still fairly easy to follow imo.

discourse > discord

CaptainPedantic ,

Good to know, thank you! I’ll have to look closer when I visit a forum next.

DJDarren ,

I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.

A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.

You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.

I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.

axsyse ,

I’ve used OCLP, and I didn’t even realize they largely switched to Discord. That explains why finding some info was such a PITA when I was playing around with it.

I will never understand why people choose to use Discord as a forum replacement. It’s just such an awful platform for that.

Scrollone ,

Discord is awful for everything that’s not live audio chatting. And even in that case, I think Telegram groups work better.

DJDarren ,

Oh, and to add something that’s just occurred to me…

If you had a problem and couldn’t find a solution while the support was on Reddit, you could easily start a new thread that might bring you the help you needed. Now, with Discord, you have to hope that someone who knows how to help just happens to be browsing the feed at that moment, otherwise your post is getting lost in the ether, because who the fuck is searching for problems in order to offer assistance?

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

Also how obsessive forum moderators are over petty things like closing old threads and necro posting.

Graphy ,

The worst is when you’re trying to look for something but one of the discord bots has said a word similar ten billion times so that’s all that comes up. You’ll try to ban the bot to see other comments but then you just get like blank space or some shit where the bots comments would be

Buttons ,
@Buttons@programming.dev avatar

It’s like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

I use discord for a a couple of things, but I can’t stand the layout. That’s probably one of the main things that’s kept me from using it more.

BarbecueCowboy ,

The transience and non-indexability is a feature, it’s easier to manage a community if any problem can be solved by just ignoring it for a few days. Just have to hope the issue stays within Discord, sure you could search within discord, but no one is going to and on any large discord the results are likely to be so numerous that it’s worthless. Worst case you lock down a chat channel, mark it as private due to ‘spam’ and create a new one to serve the same purpose as the old to cover it up the rest of the way.

MentorKitten ,

Discord didn’t replace forums imo, it replaced teamspeak, raidcall, mumble and Skype

aStonedSanta ,

Tell that to the people replacing their forums with a discord lol

fiercekitten ,

I don’t hate those people but I do want to slap them and tell them NO.

mox , (edited )

I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent.

The funny thing about this is that it’s just plain old threading, which has been around since the 1980s or earlier, with the slight variation of showing message contents directly in the thread tree instead of beside it (thanks to today’s high-res displays).

Usenet readers did threading. Email apps could do it if the developers wanted to; the required information is there. I’ll bet there’s forum software that can do it if an admin enables it.

For some reason, most corporations seem to have decided that classic message threading has no place in their interfaces. They resort to piling things into stacks or serializing them into seemingly endless scrolls. It fails to represent the structure of group discussions, and sadly, has been going on for so long that many people might not have ever seen the better alternative outside of reddit.

The_v ,

Forums were awesome until the ads took over. Then apps like Tapatalk made reading them easier. Then Tapatalk went to shit and power users migrated to reddit (mainly for the easy to use wepage and awesome independent apps.).

Then reddit shit the bed so now Lemmy is filling the gaps.

GreatAlbatross ,
@GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk avatar

Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me

My theory is that it was used as the primary form of informal communication by groups doing something, then it felt like a community.
And since everyone was there…Why not put the documentation there? Sure, it’s not indexable, but the group is open-sign-up, right? Right?

Then a few years down the line, someone suggests switching to another primary storage location…Then faces huge amounts of push-back from people comfy sitting on discord.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t understand why discord is so popular for communities. There is 0 permanence, and google does not index it so not even organic growth.

Discord is a black hole of knowledge except for the ai training companies.

lemmyvore ,

It’s s great fit for people with goldfish memory span.

TexMexBazooka ,

Sooooooo… anyone born before 2005

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

Your goldfish lived for 20 years?!

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

It attracts a different audience, so in aggregate it seems like your community is suddenly bigger because 1+1=2 right? What you don’t realize is that you’ve divided your community into two separate groups with possibly different wants, needs and cultures.

GreatAlbatross ,
@GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk avatar

Or that 50% of the users on the discord only went there to find one thing, and probably won’t ever interact again.
So it looks like a bigger community, while losing accessibility.

xnx ,

Because its very easy to use and does stuff no other platform does (make it extremely easy to voice/video chat with multiple people streaming screen and essentially make a forum in 2 clicks)

Zos_Kia ,
@Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com avatar

Also their role system is badass. It’s incredibly fine grained and makes it possible to manage large communities with plenty of different user levels.

RaoulDook ,

That’s all good but those features are not what makes a good discussion forum. This, what we’re typing on, is an example of a good forum.

MentorKitten ,

Because it shouldn’t be used as a discussion forum. It’s more similar to an irc and teamspeak

aStonedSanta ,

You can actually make forums inside of channels now if you are a community discord. But search is still shit lol

lemmyvore ,

People who use discord don’t want to use it like a forum. They want instant interaction.

If you think about it a lot of forum banter is just that, just because it’s slower and persistent doesn’t guarantee a higher signal to noise ratio.

If Discord were to add wikis so people can add persistent FAQs and guides it would cover 99% of its user needs.

Alk ,

Some communities don’t need a good discussion forum, they need voice chat with a little text chat. Originally, discord was for gaming groups and it worked amazingly for that. Now, more communities are on it than should be, but its still a good feature set for gaming groups.

lemmyvore ,

If Discord would add wikis and improve its search it would freaking destroy everything else. It would be the place for everything a modern gaming community could want.

TexMexBazooka ,

People are after whatever fulfills their immediate need

Buttons ,
@Buttons@programming.dev avatar

Google doesn’t index Discord, which means the billion dollar ad industry makes little effort to push their ads on Discord.

disguy_ovahea ,

It has a terrible privacy policy.

tosdr.org/en/service/536

This is Lemmy’s for comparison.

tosdr.org/en/service/9267

TexMexBazooka ,

Whoa, that’s a really fucking cool website, thank you for sharing with us

disguy_ovahea , (edited )

No problem! I’m a big fan.

recklessengagement ,

Stopped using Discord a few months ago. Not for any specific reason, just felt like I wasn’t using my time effectively. Anyone important added me on Signal, and then I deleted the apps from my phone and computer.

I can’t put words to how much better my mental health has gotten.

This doesn’t really relate to your comment, I guess, but just thought I would mention it in case anyone else is considering taking a break from the platform.

Carnelian ,

What did you do on the platform out of curiosity? I felt similarly when I left other social medias.

Discord I mainly use to keep an eye on early access games and dev updates, and occasionally ask or answer questions. Although I did get into it after deleting other social media so I may be subconsciously avoiding the more toxic parts of the experience

mr_robot2938 ,

I’m gonna keep posting on Lemmy and hope that helps. Our collective communities should not be in the hands of mega corporations.

kalpol ,

You should keep posting on Usenet too…rec.+

lemmyingly ,

I read many MBs on Usenet everyday 😉

barsquid ,

What is a good usenet server for reading MBs of discussion every day?

Machinist ,
@Machinist@lemmy.world avatar

Farm and eweka.

corsicanguppy ,

So much this.

But where? How?

Scrollone ,

Yes, we just have to collectively make Lemmy grow until it’s a true and complete replacement for classical monolith websites such as Reddit and Facebook groups.

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

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

I used to think it was great that I could find forums for so many different things in one place. Now I regret it.

paraphrand ,

That’s how they git ya.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Unless that “one place” is an open, federated standard that allows anyone to participate with their own self-hosted server - i.e. “one place” = the fediverse, then it’s fine!

_number8_ ,

it seemed truly cozy and community-based for the first decade or so. you could buy gold to directly pay for servers and that was it, no greedy monetization or shittification. then awards came out with the same transparency, and it was fun to reward people for good posts (i gave gold partially to bookmark excellent comments for myself, as well). then spez got into coke (probably, i dunno, or hit his head very hard on something) and we have modern day reddit, a trash heap. i like how they deleted all the old awards and gold records, pure spit in the face to anyone that still believed in anything they were doing.

The_Picard_Maneuver ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

There was a story recently about a depressing number of web domains disappearing. Everybody just gravitates to the big corporate sites now, and it makes the internet ecosystem boring and less diverse.

It’s the equivalent of Walmarts running every mom & pop store out of town.

stevedidwhat_infosec ,

I’m kinda split on it tbh.

On one hand, we have a literal ip spacing crisis - mainly because there’s bajillions of arguably repetitive content among other non scrupulous stuff.

On the other hand, having a niche community has its pros.

Totally agree with your analogy of Walmart though - but then there’s also things like FediNet which basically let people use a standard framework to hve their niches.

It’ll be interesting to see what the future brings

0x0 ,

On one hand, we have a literal ip spacing crisis

I’ve been hearing about the IPv4 shortage for ages… hasn’t happened yet.

BearOfaTime ,

And IPv6 exists. If even a portion of large orgs switch to IPv6 for their internet exposed interfaces, the “problem” goes away.

(I’ve been hearing about the shortage since 1995…and it hasn’t happened. Large orgs will always find a way to resolve issues like this that affect them).

catloaf ,

No, it’s happened. You basically can’t buy IPv4 addresses any more. Want to start up a hosting company or ISP? Better hope you know someone willing to sell, or you’re going to be paying through the nose to a broker.

stevedidwhat_infosec ,

Gamblers fallacy exists, but yes ipv6 exists. Now getting archaic systems to use ipv6…

iopq ,

AWS lightsail just increased prices for ipv4 instances, while ipv6 only is the old price

WordBox ,

The IP space consideration is nonsense. You can put many small sites behind a single IP. Bigger sites end up needing tons of their own+cdns, etc.

That and IPv6 is a thing.

perviouslyiner ,

That, and hosting & domains got expensive. It used to be a trivial cost to have a website, now the prices are all “introductory offers” with asterisks.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

I’d say yes but it also really depends where you go. I used to host Feddit.dk at DigitalOcean, it was expensive af for like no hardware at all. Now I use Hetzner instead and it feels reasonable, especially their server auction.

0x0 ,

Change domain provider perhaps?

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I’m just renewing a domain I don’t want used for something else at this point. I’m not even paying for hosting.

PlasticExistence ,

Oh so YOU’RE the owner of ObsessedWithPlasticExistence.com

I’m flattered!

iopq ,

Really? I’m paying $2 a month for hosting. Maybe you have bigger needs then

I use a free subdomain because I don’t have professional needs

RobotZap10000 ,

$2?! I hope that you’re paying for a server as well. My domain only charges me €8 a year!

iopq ,

It’s for the server, I don’t have a domain, I use a free subdomain

RaoulDook ,

You nailed it, it’s just like the Walmart effect making small businesses fizzle out. We’ll call it the EnWalmartication of the Internet

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”.

dhork ,

I’m particularly concerned about companies who have effectively outsourced their tech support to Social Media.

I am a Google Fi subscriber, and their customer support is so abysmal that a Google employee started up a “Reddit Request” system for Redditors to use to escalate support requests.

When I quit Reddit in a huff over the APIcalypse, the main thing that led me to not delete my account was the notion that if I ever had issues with Fi, and didn’t have an active Reddit account with sufficient karma to be believed, my issue may never get enough attention to be fixed.

DJDarren ,

Like many others who no longer use Twitter or Facebook, one of the biggest impacts to me is suddenly not having a reasonably proactive way to contact companies for support. It’s amazing how many companies have offloaded their support staff to half a dozen overworked social media operators. Try phoning and you’ll get “busier than usual” phone lines, and if you can even find an email address it’ll auto-reply to say that it’s no longer monitored.

It’s a shit show.

stealth_cookies ,

Seriously, I had an issue with Uber awhile ago and their support was completely unhelpful until I contacted them on Twitter and an employee finally looked at my issue and confirmed I was right instead of giving me bullshit answers.

This is literally the only reason I haven’t deleted my account there is for situations like that.

AbidanYre ,

At a certain point that “unusual call volume” is just the standard call volume. They just don’t want to hire more support folks.

Aeri ,
@Aeri@lemmy.world avatar

I got banned for something really stupid and they denied my appeal so now I’m kinda just fucked for a lot of stuff, that is too much power for one site to have.

FWIW All I said was “I should be allowed to punch nazis” and I’ve seen way worse things than that said and not actioned on by reddit. (Even when reported)

There are entire communities that “glorify violence” that they do nothing about.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

My favorite forum is still chugging along!

forums.mst3k.com

If you’re a fan, you’re most welcome.

If you’re not a fan, you’re still welcome, but you probably won’t get a lot of our references.

If you’re a dickweed- well, you probably won’t last any longer than Tom Servo did as an Observer.

PlasticExistence ,

I wonder if there’s beer on the Sun…

Lost_My_Mind ,

Well there better be! Otherwise I’m not going to vacation there!

pirating ,

I see Rowsdower, I up vote Rowsdower!

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Even many fans don’t get this reference now, sadly. The DVD set it was on is long out-of-print and Tjardus Greidanus won’t grant them the rights to re-release it. He also sends takedowns to anyone who uploads The Final Sacrifice to YouTube.

It really sucks when one of the best episodes of a TV show can’t bee seen.

PlasticExistence , (edited )

Yeah, I’ve read about his refusal to let people enjoy it. That’s a shame as it’s one of my favorite MST3K episodes.

Keep circulating the tapes!

IzzyJ ,

Whos Tom Servo

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

He’s the wind, baby!

Snowcano ,

Sorry, baby. No one rules the Tom Monster!

ocassionallyaduck ,

This is a beautiful thing. I love MST3K, I might just join it.

jamyang ,

Thanks for the recommendation.

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

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.

Crashumbc ,

You missed when the web KILLED BBSs!!!

That was the end! We’re already dead!!!

DannyMac ,

I think the thing to worry about is these corporations centrally controlling this data. With one fell swoop, they can do whatever they want with it. With forums, at least they weren’t controlled by one company.

Paragone ,

umm, Hoomin, that was in the 1900’s!

: P

curiousPJ ,

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

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