I wish there were alternatives to Reddit. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know.
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...
How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?
Love Linux, but why be redundant about leftists?
Nice
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.
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.
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 👍
discourse does this well. While not exactly reply chain based, it's still fairly easy to follow imo.
discourse > discord
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.
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.
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.
I’m gonna keep posting on Lemmy and hope that helps. Our collective communities should not be in the hands of mega corporations.
I tried running a forum.... With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn... And I followed best practices to set it up.
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.
1998 | 6686
1999 | 40528
2000 | 70379
2001 | 41129
2002 | 171294
2003 | 203642
2004 | 204685
2005 | 173659
2006 | 150000
2007 | 135936
2008 | 126283
2009 | 94894
2010 | 70333
2011 | 48691
2012 | 31197
2013 | 30606
2014 | 30227
2015 | 29334
2016 | 25472
2017 | 27505
2018 | 28551
2019 | 22366
2020 | 17250
2021 | 12794
2022 | 10135
2023 | 7151
If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.
Ooooh. Data. Nice.
I used to think it was great that I could find forums for so many different things in one place. Now I regret it.
That’s how they git ya.
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!
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.
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.
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.
At least Reddit is searchable, while Discord is not. Not trying to defend Reddit though.
At least Reddit is searchable
How long until they restrict viewing the full contents of posts without logging in?
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.
My favorite forum is still chugging along!
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.
You missed when the web KILLED BBSs!!!!
That was the end! We're already dead!!!
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.
why not implement forums with reddit-like threads?
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.
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.
Maybe for the generic cat/dog image sharing boards but niche topics like machining are still thriving.
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.
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.
We already tried this with something awful and it was still in fact kinda awful
Forums are alive and well for BBQ. See Amazing Ribs forums and BBQ Brethren.
if you have a thread you like, make sure to archive.is or archive.org it
- Make it too big to fail
- Wait for the fall while enshittifying
- Cash in on the bail out
- Go to 2
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?
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.
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.
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