Fediverse

Back in mid 00s I created a forum for fellow classmates to share notes, info on exams and whatever. It was active for a year or a bit more, then someone set up a Facebook page for our group and the forum died in about a month. I could not understand why people migrated so quickly, Facebook group was atrocious when it comes to search functions, any files, notes or anything you didn't download immediatelly were lost to time never to be seen again. If the forum is still up I'm sure I'd still be able to easily download exam schedules and all notes from all the classes there, with Facebook it was a pain even a week after someone posted. There is something fundamentally wrong with society if an inferior product can sweep the board so easily. People do not care about quality or usefulness of anything, all that matters is marketing and trends.

It is a problem, but I think it downplays the reason those platforms got popular.

1. No admin required. No updating of software to make sure you're not going to get compromised by a vuln.

2. No account management. You don't have to make a new account, and manage another password for every community you use. Also, no worrying about 1 when somebody like me can't be arsed to update that forum software. I don't want an account for everything.

3. It's all in one place. You look at your "feed" of things and your stuff with a new post every week is right there with the stuff with new posts every ten minutes.

If you're running a big community you shouldn't be building it somebody else's garden, but you do need to manage the garden yourself and it's not super trivial and maybe your little Final Fantasy XIV group can make do with a corner of Discord and abandon it when it goes real shitty. If you've got 50,000 people, it gets a little trickier.

The Fediverse goes a little way to fixing things, but it's all a trade off. Not having corporations involved is a damn good start though.

I hate Reddit, and I hate discord.

I am using discord for a discussion thread of one thing which follows a serial webnovel and it's infuriating because when something new happens there's always a constant influx of people asking the same questions because there is no way to pin or highlight pertinent information and no one is going to go scrolling through a million messages searching for the first time the question was asked and answered.

Discussion threads! Not chat messages!

Make Lemmy great again!

How do we create more forums?

Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.

Fuck Discord

I just closed my The Guardian UK version account. I used to comment on the news stories. I can no longer be arsed because of the stress it causes - 99% of comments are so damn stupid and adrift from reality. Most of the comments are from people who (1) voted Labour in order to get change despite being warned by Labour itself, as well as everyone on the Left, that it was not offering change and (2) are now belly-aching because Labour is too Rightwing for them and no better than Tories. Starmer says he 'likes and respects Trump' - what the fuck!?! Leopards are eating Labour voters' faces and they are lacting shocked? If you say so, your comment gets deleted by the moderators because we are not allowed to be truthful or challenge MSM's imaginary version of the world which is carefully curated to be cosy and profitable. Fuck 'em all.

I only want to hear from people willing to face reality. I need to find a community that is living in the real world not in some self-indulgent fantasy in their head like most British voters seem to be. I reckon that the age of social media is dead because the age of comfort is over. It was fine wasting time on posting nonsense when you were not watching a coup or seeing WW3 developing in real time or could still believe that whatever happened online, offline life was ticking over normally and you could still feed yourself, access housing, get healthcare, rely on benefits if you were sick or old. All of that safety in real life is gone - so to survive this shock we bunker-down and that means finding your village to shelter with because who wants to bunk with Nazis or cultists?

There will still be social media going forward but it will be fragmented because in times of war, you take a side and you do not fraternise with the enemy. Anyone lamenting this is pretending we still live in the past when you could get along with others and 'two side' debates because actually you agreed on 90% of stuff and were disputing details. Now we dispute the nature of reality and fundamental morality and there is no two sides to such existential matters. I mean it has been brewing for almost a decade (i.e. in the west, started much longer ago in places like Russia and 'untruth no reality stop-think' probably infected the west from those places) - ever since the rise of 4chan and bizarre conspiracy theorists started undermining reason, was turbo-charged by the pandemic, and started to infect reality via stuff like brexit and MAGA. There is no excuse to be surprised that we are here, it was clearly signposted for years.

I know it is the Far-Right who brought us to this crisis but as a radical Leftist I say 'bring it on!' You started this conflict, I am determined people like me will win it. I just need to find my comrades and unite in push-back. I get my inspiration from democracy protests like those currently happening in Serbia, Greece, Turkiye. Why is there nothing like that scale of reaction in USA or UK? Because most people in those places are still feeling comfortable and do not grasp the reality of the crisis they are in. They will not react until it is too late. They frustrate me past expression!

I needed to vent.

Honestly reddit's (and Lemmy's) comment formatting structure is so much better than other forums that it's been part of the reason why I don't want to use the other ones.

Don't worry, the enshittification of both is proceeding well.

Replacements are inevitable in time. This one is growing.

I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I'm very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.

Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I'm not arguing with them, I'll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.

(It's a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)

If anyone is looking for a pretty good list of forums-

https://aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today?ueid=6310597850b065b278e2b143b21b73b5

Internet forums will come back when AI overtakes Reddit and Discord goes awry because they go public.

I for one would want a more open source system where a single guy running a server doesn't have all the power in the forum. It would be awesome if a fedi form of forums took over and one could replicate all the info as relays.

Every forum i joined for my hobbies are always been full of shills in disguise.

Everytime I want to look for modern solutions to newer projects online it's always in the damn discord. I have like 20 discords in folders just because I feel like I'll need them to troubleshoot eventually.

Don't forget random Telegram groups!

I'm sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying "it's worrying."

Forums are where I learned literally everything about technology I know now. Every hack, jailbreak, method of bypassing something, building, literally anything I’ve done around my tech hobbies. Pi hole, emulation in the late 90s, how to use Photoshop, how to run Linux from a USB, everything I’ve learned from forums. I’m sad to think that me joining certain discords help deliver the death knell to the concept of forums.

This is unironically on reddit right now. People lamenting a place like Lemmy doesn't exist.

I'm less worried about Discord, honestly.

Ugh, Discord is an information black hole. I despise how so many of my niches have fled there.

Reddit seems to be trying to destroy that "role" of theirs as hard as they can though. A few very niche subs I follow are drying from some kind of "bug" that deprioritizes their discoverability.

It’s not a bug. It’s absolutely a feature for making Reddit more generic, farmable garbage and noise.

I believe this is what they call "preaching to the choir".