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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

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.

rwhitisissle ,

And both of those things SUUUUUCK.

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.

roserose56 ,

They are not disappearing, I still use forums like discogs, XDA, satellite forums, local forums country or city etc. You just have to search and find.

Sam_Bass ,

Please PLEASE nobody tell them if you value your sanity at all

anon_8675309 ,

Only thing on Reddit is AI bots.

AbidanYre ,

Have you been to Facebook lately? It’s like 90% AI spam of “why don’t pictures like this trend” with some body horror Jesus.

christophski ,

I’ve said this before, the thing I hate about reddit and discord is that you only get exposed to “current” threads or “top” threads. On old forums everything was just there and if someone commented on it, it came back to the top and re-ignited conversations.

I was a big user of the command and conquer forums and I definitely miss the community of it. But that may just be the scale of Internet then compared to now. Back then you saw the same users every day and we ended up chatting on msn and working on projects together. I couldn’t tell you any users on my instance or elsewhere other than the admins of my instance.

pewgar_seemsimandroid ,

linux trolling

adam_y ,
@adam_y@lemmy.world avatar

All my heart still belongs to the canon HV20 forum. It taught me how to film, it taught me how to chat to people in an online community.

It was never about a camcorder. It was about connection.

Plus, you could search for stuff on google and the forum results would pop up. Good look with discord doing that.

Smokeless7048 ,

I just found that Runescape shut down its forums, replacing it with a discord.

Look, i love my clans discord, and my discord with friends, but one for a game like that is nearly unusable.

NOPper ,

Aww shit.

ryannathans ,

We have a forum at 2009scape.org

Pantherina ,

Discourse is awesome. Just needs federation.

As a mod, it is lovely to work with, extremely well indexed, has tags, categories, roles and everything you want.

Everything should be done there. Matrix or Discord make no sense, its just chatting into nirvana, nobody every finds it again

And people… dont… use… threads! They just spam everything in a single chat which makes it unusable

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

There's an ActivityPub plugin, though I haven't tried it - just Googled it up now. Looks very new and rough.

NuXCOM_90Percent , (edited )

As someone who very much “grew up” on vbulletins and irc for better or for worse, I miss this.

But also… I am not sure if them going away is a bad thing. Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation. Specifically moderation of hate and the like. Because when you are "a small group of friends’, it is a lot easier to ignore the guy with “weird vibes”. Same with the people who went out of their way to “keep women out” by insisting on making their signature images so horny that even a diehard Fairy Tail fan would blush.

But, as many of us saw, as those boards get larger? Now you need real moderators. Just having the guy who hosts it in his parents’ basement delete the worst stuff no longer works and now they are asking their friends to be mods. And you basically get the same problem people still complain about on discord where you get very cliquey communities and incredibly biased moderation.

And it inevitably leads to boards either becoming a cesspool of hatred, selling the board to an internet company, or just saying “Fuck all y’all” and shutting it down overnight.

And even stuff like legacy tech support or technical knowledge? Those are already a mess of the top result being some greybeard asshole talking about how OP is a jerk and this is a common problem and they should search for it. Or we have the stack overflow problem where the accepted answer is actually wrong.

But also? For living software, bugs change over time. And plenty of times I have found exactly my symptoms/behavior and… it is for something that was fixed three years ago. So I am now looking at a different bug with the exact same symptoms and basically every search engine is worthless.

And… going back to the moderation aspect: One of the biggest Looking Glass Games or Unreal fansites in existence was still MAYBE a hundred or so people who knew it existed and a couple dozen who cared enough to hang out at the forums. Now? The fansite for a mod for the latest Microprose game is one google search away and might get name dropped by an influencer and have thousands of people swarm overnight. Let alone anyone who gets targeted by the latest hate campaign. There are no “small” communities that aren’t private and spun out of larger ones.

So… I dunno. I very much miss the good old days. But I also increasingly understand those weren’t all that “good”. And communities are so ephemeral that they map well to a discord or even a reddit that people rage delete a few months later.

0x0 ,

Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation.

Or had ticker skins and just /ignored assholes.

Buelldozer ,
@Buelldozer@lemmy.today avatar

Or had ticker skins and just /ignored assholes.

That was the answer right there. Stuff the assholes in your ignore list and forget that they exist. Too many people on the internet are wanna-be cops out to police everyone else’s ideas, language, or tone. The other person in a dispute is always a Commie or a Fascist and needs to be silenced as quickly and brutally as possible.

The internet wasn’t for normies and making it easy for them to participate was a serious mistake.

expatriado ,

i miss the specialized topic forums, the only downside was I needed to create a separate account for each website

0x0 ,

Use a password manager, you should.

cyberpunk007 ,

I think they mean SSO. While not as privacy friendly, SSO means you use one set of creds for multiple places.

PlasticExistence ,

Talk like Yoda, you do

DirkMcCallahan ,

I remember when I used to be able to find dedicated message boards for bands that I liked. Now I’m lucky if there’s a subreddit where it’s just a bunch of people submitting poorly drawn fan art of the band.

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