I’m sure Jellyfin considered the Fediverse but some projects like the idea of having more control of the community discussions they participate in so having a forum makes sense. I still think a Jellyfin community on Lemmy can thrive with an official forum in place.
This is probably true. Forum software is a lot more mature then Lemmy etc and probably a better overall option currently for a project like Jellyfin to operate. They just want something that works and provides the least amount of moderation overhead possible.
The moderating tools on MyBB is worlds away and better than Lemmy/Kbin.
True but the downside is exposure and footfall. Subreddits work well as people can dip into them easily from elsewhere in Reddit, both new users and regular contributors can keep an eye from their feeds.
A forum is on it’s own and only people out looking specifically for the forum or who know about Jellyfin will go looking for it, and it won’t pop up in people’s feeds. The Internet used to be littered with forums, but social media is the very reason they fell out of fashion.
But users have also created a Jellyfin community on Lemmy: jellyfin@lemmy.ml
Yeah, but at the same time Reddit is kind of an awaful place for getting tech support for things like this. It’s great for general discussion, but as a mod you have no real power to do things like move support requests from “general” and into a space where it will be highly visible by those willing to lend support.
Forums are better for community management than link aggregators along every axis except for footfall.
Jellyfin is all about self hosting. I don’t see why they wouldn’t just create their own Lemmy instance if that was the concern. It wouldn’t need to be big if they limited the userbase
Lemmy is pretty immature, and probably doesn’t suit their needs compared to a forum.
They don’t really need a link aggregator, so using Lemmy there wouldn’t really make much sense.
The only thing that they might use Lemmy for is the community, but otherwise, it’s not a great fit for what they need.
Yup, “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Lemmy and the Fediverse are great, but they aren’t the end all, be all solution to online content.
Lemmy and KBin are cool and all, but VERY rough around the edges so I wouldn’t expect large projects or communities not directly related to then to adopt either. Keep in mind for most of these projects, they picked Reddit because the users were already there and the software was relatively polished. These are both things that many of us users are interested in improving, but that projects with communities aren’t going to want to use until theyre already more advances than they are right now
I find the biggest problem with Lemmy and these federated apps is that search engine indexing kinda sucks right now. They get pushed so far down the bottom of the results, you only really see them when you search site:lemmy.ml or whatever.
I believe this was a good decision. Hopefully in the future search engine indexing will improve. Otherwise I can’t see Lemmy being as useful as Reddit.
forums is all around an infinitely better solution for support and discussions on specific tech and interest. It’s also more searchable and less ephemeral. At least reddit and fediverse is better then ephemeral solutions like discord.
Totally agree, it pains me to see communities move to Discord.
I thought this was an announcement they were moving to the Fediverse.
Seriously, how about they stand up a lemmy instance? That way peeps could follow their forums without having to travel to a proprietary place.
According to the footer they’re running MyBB so although it is more centralised, I wouldn’t call it proprietary.
What advantages would Lemmy have over the traditional style of forum for their use case?
The only real advantage I can see is they would be another mass of users on the fediverse, which is what we want I suppose. I mean I do want it to be populated, and if more people migrate, it ensures survival of their community. I don’t like how we have all scattered to the wind, but it’s their choice where to go
Yeah it’s not the end of the world. It’s slightly disappointing that you have to create yet another account unnecessarily.
Ah, a traditional forum. Makes sense.
Since we’re talking about forums, who here is old enough to remember the IMDB message boards?
I’m old enough to remember dialing into different BBSs with my 14.4 Kbps modem.
These days my teenaged son is complaining that his 12GB Fortnite update isn’t downloading fast enough and he has to wait a whole 20 minutes.
In all fairness, it probably did take less time to load messages on BBSs than it takes to update Fortnite :)
I too remember those bygone days of the modem handshake sound. I wish all these kids would get off my lawn.
Ooooh! Look at you with yer fancy 14.4k modem! 13 year old me was pretty excited after swapping out a old 300 bps modem for a “blazingly fast” 1200 bps. BBS menus loaded almost instantly! Prodigy running on an IBM XT with 640k was almost usable!
Now all they need to do is move away from twitter.
Please note they also have a Mastodon account where they’ve made the same announcement:
https://mastodon.online/@jellyfin/110568058365759513
Let’s support the Fediverse or FOSS alternatives when we can.
right, i didn’t know they were in Mastodon
For a second I thought they were launching their federated lemmy/kbin instance. With different communities, like “support”, “bugs”, “news”…
Would have been freaking awesome and a great use case for Lemmy and federarion.
Good for them anyway.
At the same time, it might not fit them. Lemmy is a link aggregator, which seems like extra functionality that they don’t really need, not when existing forum software will do what they need, while also being more stable/mature.
I’ve been using Plex forever. Got the lifetime subscription a million years ago.
Is there anything I’m missing out on by not using Jellyfin? Anything I’d miss on Plex moving to it?
The main reason I use jellyfin over plex is just because they only host my media, nothing else. None of the plex pass bs cluttering it up
Does it support OTA recording?
It mostly comes down to personal preference honestly.
Jellyfin is open-source and more focused on your own selfhosted media. I, too, bought a Plex pass years ago and have enjoyed Plex but they’ve been adding a bunch of crap to their interface.
I’m big on free open-source software but I won’t be biased and say that Jellyfin has some rough edges, but it works well enough for me to watch movies with my wife. Plex is a bit smoother and more production-ready for those power users that host Plex for several others.
I’d encourage you to try it out if for nothing more than exposing yourself to alternatives.
Plex is better overall currently imo having tried both recently. It’s just simply more mature software where things just work and it has a ton more features.
Jellyfin is pretty awesome though in its own right and heading in a great direction.
I too would like to know…
I’d actually love if companies/products/software went back to forums and other specialized means to get support. I hate when they refer to Reddit or worse, Discord.
Strange they don’t even mention Fediverse. It just felt too dated.
I can understand wanting to bring your discussion hub in house to avoid something like what’s happened. But bringing it into essentially an old school phpBB forum is certainly, ah, a choice.
I wonder why those chose mybb over discourse. I definitely prefer the latter.
Here I am wishing they had chosen VBulletin or Invision, lol. I think it’s just a case of what I’m more familiar with in terms of forums though.
I get their decision, forum software is stable, has plugins and tools to help with moderation, has been around a long time and they don’t have to worry about things like LemmyNSFW or other instances they don’t want the hassle of because they control all the content that shows up in a forum space.
I’m just glad it’s not a fucking Discord thing.
I think vBulletin is - at best - dormant these days. I spent about 10 years on a vBulletin-powered forum before I went over to reddit… 12 years ago.
Finally. I’m happy to see them moving from the subreddit. It wasn’t terrible, but a forum will be better I think in the long run.
Good for them. Hopefully this will make it much easier to consolidate guides and helpful info for Jellyfin.
TIL about Jellyfin. Is it like Plex? Better? I assume it’s solid since everyone knows about it?
Imho, it is better. Being free is an extra bonus
Way better!
It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out for them. I’m a fairly casual user of Jellyfin - not enough that I’d sign up on their forum or regularly read it, unless I specifically needed tech support. Unfortunately though that means that I might miss out on updates and if there was any (relatively easy) tech support questions I won’t see them and be able to contribute. I suspect that the pool of people they interact with is going to be substantially smaller on their forum than it was previously.
Well it’s a good decision. As they say, never put all your eggs in one basket, especially if you have no control over the basket.
