cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930199
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
While I do agree with the problems identified, I can’t help but think they also made forums a lot better. Due to the lower discoverability and higher effort to actually join communities felt more personal. You interacted with smaller groups and came to know specific people. I still have friends from back then.
On larger platforms, I never had that. Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.
That’s a double-edged knife. yes it feels closer and personal, but it also breeds inside groups and cliques. I’ve been turned away from multiple forums because I was too ASD to fit in with their culture but there was no other space to discuss it. And this can go much much worse than just a culture-fit. Not to mention that if that forum becomes too popular, that culture is anyway lost.
However using lemmy there’s the best of both worlds. You can still keep your instance small enough so that you know your local users, but also be able to interact with the larger community without the extra effort I explained. For example there’s instances out there like beehaw and hexbear which through have managed to retain their own culture and standards even while federated.
Hard agree. I would also like to add that I think a lot of people remember forums a lot better than they were. Federation keeps admins and mods in check, these features act as checks and balances on instances
*Nothing personal ofc db0 you run an awesome instance.
*Nothing personal ofc db0 you run an awesome instance.
Insult acknowledged! Benned for life!
Uncle Benned, or Obi Wan Kenobi Benned? 🤔
Benned and Jerrys!
I had so many good times on forums back in the day.
The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.
When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It’s like living in a small village versus living in a city.
The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn’t as VPNs were barely a thing) you’d lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.
We trusted corporations.
I’d like to think we’ve collectively learned our lessons, but watching people migrate from Reddit to fucking Discord makes me think that we really have not and probably never will.
Corpos are spending countless resources to infiltrate anything with as much as a iota of traction so that they can bleed the cow cash dry and sell its carcass for money.
Even if you distrust the corpos and want them to die, the majority of the population has so much trouble just surviving that its hard to raise up against that bullshit
I don’t know, but every fucking group’s reliance on Discord pisses me off. I’m very much into modding my games, the problem is that every damn mod author wants to do support only on Discord, which means probably more than half of my 200 servers are just for that.
Man you said it. I despise discord. My gaming group will post things in the chat, and if you ever want to look at something again it’s a pain in the ass to find it
yep. it’s free and easy, and becoming the default. :|
Seriously. I don’t mind it as a platform for socialising, but it’s terrible as a support platform, and it goes against the idea of open and accessible information.
I really don’t get how one is supposed to use more than one server. As in, how to spread one’s attention to feel like one is present in so many places. It’s a total non-starter for me.
Discord is a terrible platform for communities and for support, because it’s one giant group chat and the messages scroll by. You really need a forum type environment for these types of things and while discord does have a forum format option, it’s still really sucks and also gets little use on the count of how the rest of Discord is structured.
This is a fantastic read. I wasnt around for the prime days of forums but I did experience them a bit.
I’m becoming extremely concerned about the number of topics and projects that are migrating to Discord. My main issue is that it is not and never will be publically indexed, and among other problems, is itself a corporate walled garden we consider to be “one of the good ones”.
I really hope we find and establish a “low executive cost” solution before the next time Discord fumbles (which is inevitable) and we can claw some of that activity back.
But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.
But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.
this is unironically such a big problem, there are great voice chatting solutions, mumble, and the handful of other ones that exist out there.
There are basically 0 good usable video conferencing/sharing softwares out there. The same goes for desktop streaming. If we just focused like, a little bit more of our energy on these two things, i think the world would unironically get better. It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?
The ones that do exist are likely to be web based, and thus, webRTC, the dreaded behemoth of both web support and also, generally poor implementation. I just want mumble but with support for video streaming, how hard is it >:(
It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?
It’s not about the hardware. (Not like it’s that ubiquitous anyway; I’m daily driving a machine from 2017)
I’m going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like “seamless screen sharing” or “video conference” doesnt really matter.
And IMO, that’s good if we want to Recover the Web.
The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.
In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can’t really “push to talk” three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won’t want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time. For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.
In the end, something like a simple jabber-like chatroom is far easier and more productive to work on, even before we get to the coding part.
Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on “debt”, which is what “Foo has to have ‘screen sharing’ because Discord has it” ultimately boils down to.
I’m going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like “seamless screen sharing” or “video conference” doesnt really matter.
this definitely makes sense in the OSS community, but i feel like someone should’ve already done it as a semi pet project already. I know i would’ve done it.
And IMO, that’s good if we want to Recover the Web.
that’s an interesting take, but personally i think the web should stick to pretty much static web pages, the browser is turning into a secondary operating system, which is being run on an operating system, which is just, stupid.
Personally i don’t think any of this stuff should be done over the web, period.
The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.
yeah, my main complaint though is that we do have things like jabber, this is already incredibly accessible, there is almost no need for expanding the current landscape because it’s been around for like 30 years now.
In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can’t really “push to talk” three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won’t want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time.
no but that’s not the immediate use case either, something like mumble is really nice if you’re playing games with other people and just want to VOIP so you don’t have to use a text chat, you can talk and play video games at the same time pretty easily. It’s also nice if you just want to casually hang around other people without having to be physically near them, or at a keyboard typing on it constantly.
For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.
i mean, you don’t need a camera, maybe in a professional setting, but in a casual setting, screensharing something to show someone else for example, you don’t even need a camera.
Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on “debt”, which is what “Foo has to have ‘screen sharing’ because Discord has it” ultimately boils down to.
this is fair, and tbh i don’t even really want a discord clone, you could very easily just adapt one of the many existing text chat protocols IRC being the most obvious, and VOIP is basically a solved problem, that’s not hard either. Mumble has a pretty good low latency implementation of it, but you don’t always need low latency. Video sharing/video conferencing is harder, but we have things like youtube and netflix, so the actual video streaming part isn’t the hard thing. We have entire video manipulation libraries like FFMPEG as well, which will do everything you need it to do.
Mumble i think is the perfect example of a “minimalist” application, it does VOIP and it does it really well. I pretty much just want mumble but for video sharing and i’d be happy.
this definitely makes sense in the OSS community, but i feel like someone should’ve already done it as a semi pet project already. I know i would’ve done it.
Pet project, yes; production-ready, that’s a whole 'nother story.
Ultimately some things are too complex to deliver out on tem “just because”. Such as web browsers, hence ATM there only exist about 2.
Pet project, yes; production-ready, that’s a whole 'nother story.
to be fair, linux was also a pet project, until it wasn’t. I’m not expecting people to drop zoom2 electric boogaloo over this or anything.
Ultimately some things are too complex to deliver out on tem “just because”. Such as web browsers, hence ATM there only exist about 2.
web browsers i could see, because they fucking suck, though there are a few alt browser projects currently going on, so there is that.
but something like VOIP and video sharing i would imagine is probably going to be magnitudes easier than something like a web browser.
Matrix+elements is very easy to selfhost in any homelab. works well enough for goverments. Federated and easy end to end encryption. And one can easily set up a web archive bridge forvarchiveable rooms.
That beeing said i still think IRC is the best for pure text chat.
But neither have seamless voice chat/screen sharing, which is a staple of Discord that users are very used to.
I do not know what you talk about. I use screen sharing and voice chat daily on elements with our own hosted matrix server.
Edit: i felt wrong saying “voice chat” what even is that. I make regular calls and video calls with screen sharing in elements ;)
That is interesting, the last time i tried Element/matrix it did not have these features. Can I ask, is your screen sharing of a quality that you can stream videos and games at equivilant frame rates?
I have never tried that. We use it to share powerpoints in meetings or do troubleshooting together. Or I use it to do family video calls with the kids. Fps are never an issue. There are times where there are compression artifacts tho. Especially if someone have a bad or variable connection. On a buss or a train or similar.
What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.
Besides the expensive Matrix option the parent suggested, IRC covers text fine. Mumble handles low-latency, low-resource voice chat with positional audio for games. XMPP uses more resources that IRC (but can have encryption) but a ton less resources than Matrix which makes it suitable for self-hosting—my partner & I do voice/video calls over my home server fine & Movim is working on group calls with a Web UI (tho it should be noted both Zoom & Jitsi use XMPP under the hood).
What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.
it’s convenient, also it’d be nice if it had the feature capability.
Mumble is great, but if there was something like mumble, that implemented video sharing, that would be miles better, though a lot of people would probably still use mumble, as it’s fine.
From what i’ve dug into, basically every video sharing capable setup is based on web technology, and i simply refuse to go near web technology unless i WANT to use a web browser. It’s just, worse, in so many ways.
Well Discord, Slack, & others are web tech too so it’s not like avoiding it is easy. If I have to use these services, I would prefer it be in the browser’s sandbox.
Even still, almost all debug, troubleshoot, pairing session I have done in the last 4 years have been done over Upterm or Tmate, which is much, much lighter on bandwidth & not crushed by video compression.
yeah, and discord slack and basically everything based on electron is a fresh hell.
I love having three separate instances of chrome running the background while just using my computer, such that they all consume an entire gigabyte of ram for no particular reason.
TBF i wouldn’t do much if any troubleshooting over RDP or anything similar, i use SSH for all that stuff lol. I’m just confused that nobody has put together a “relatively” functional version of this yet, it seems like it would be prime realestate.
That is why upterm & tmate exist… ephemeral shared SSH sessions. Biggest missing feature would be some sort of scoping since someone could raw dog your system—catting SSH keys, deleting config, force pushing a repo if unlocked keys are in memory.
In what way are matrix expencive? You do not have to self host it. You can just make an account on any public matrix server.
Matrix servers chew up an order of magnitude more CPU/RAM which limits the places you can deploy it. The eventual consistency model makes storage balloon as every message, attachment, metadata must be copied to all nodes in a conversation which is resilient, but wasteful in duplicated content in practices which has historically caused many medium & larger servers to shut down due to the explosive just of storage (similar issues with Mastodon). That same model is why it takes on the order of minutes to just join a room or come back to a client that hasn’t been opened recently. Element X & new servers have to work so damn hard to work around asynchronously than fundamental decision to attempt to hide it from the sluggish UX but behind the scenes still too expensive. & since it is expensive to run in many vectors this causes folks to then move to the biggest servers that can handle the load which means the Matrix network is in actuality a small number of massive servers (most of which managed by Matrix.org) & a small number of tiny hobbyists running nodes of <10 users is practice. With so many users on Matrix.org-controlled instances (& again with eventual consistency), almost all data gets synced to their nodes make subpoenas a breeze.
A healthier network would have many fewer massive centralized nodes, medium-sized nodes, & the resource requirements would be low enough that more folks would be encouraged more often to run their own nodes they control so they aren’t required to trust an unknown serves operator. Meaning “just making an account on any public server” isn’t a great mode of operation for privacy—especially as with Matrix joining a medium-sized server will put them under a lot of strain causing them to throw in the tower & joining the few massive servers further exacerbating the centralization issue.
Copying the UX of Slack/Telegram/Discord in a decentralized manner is a fool’s errand. Keeping the chat history for eternity is already a questionable call over using forums, but trying to distribute that out like a blockchain is so wasteful.
https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/ https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/xmpp-matrix/ https://www.process-one.net/blog/matrix-and-xmpp-thoughts-on-improving-messaging-protocols-part-1/
Thank you for a detailed answer. We probably do not notice much of this problem yet, since we are in the low user count of 30-40 with mostly local channels.
It’s once you start federating do the prices start to soar, & most things can hold local channels fine… but that’s kind of the point if you are hitching your cart to say something is decentralized as a bullet point for privacy. But if it’s mostly local channels, wouldn’t IRCv3 cut it?
If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions I would be outta here in a moment.
Ongoing discussions with bumps are so much better for knowledge accumulation (that’s the reason why they’re still used by specialized communities), the major issue with forums, as pointed out, is the hassle of having to go from one website to another to talk about various subjects and needing to sign up to each one of them.
As for solving the “little Kings” issue, dumb backend, smart frontend. Remove admins from the equation, those hosting are only there to host. People moderate communities but communities can easily be replaced. People create a frontend to access the backend but from a user point of view it doesn’t make a difference what frontend they use, they will get access to the same content.
The fact that I’ve written this comment a dozen times since last year proves a point, Reddit/Lemmy style websites just lead to content being repeated again and again. This comment will get lost to time just like all the other times I shared my opinion on the subject. On a forum it would be part of the ongoing discussion and anyone who wanted to go through the whole thread where all discussions on that subject to place would read it, no matter how long it had been since I posted.
It seems to me the only thing you’re missing from the functionality you want on lemmy is a sorting system which just bumps any threads with new comments to the top. I don’t like that approach myself, but if that’s what you want I don’t see a reason not to have it. Why don’t you suggest it to the lemmy devs? It doesn’t seem like it would be difficult to add it.
EDIT: Actually, nevermind, this already exists with the “New Comments” feature. Why don’t you just use that? https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/?dataType=Post&listingType=Subscribed&sort=NewComments
Only works if everyone’s experience is the same and discussions are centralized in threads. I added to my comment but on a forum that discussion would be part of a thread where all similar articles/discussions would be centralized instead of having a new thread being opened on the same subject every few weeks and people having to rewrite the same opinion every time (or just not sharing their opinion anymore because they’re tired of repeating themselves every time someone wants to talk about that subject).
There’s no knowledge accumulation with the way things work on Reddit/Lemmy, just repetition and things being forgotten.
I can’t disagree enough. There was little knowledge accumulation in oldschool forums either. There were constant arguments about thread necromancy and people not searching before asking. It sounds like you’re describing a parallel idyllic universe.
This kind of knowledge repository is why were have megathreads and/or attached wikis.
Regardless of that, if you really wanted to run a lemmy instance like that, you can do that right now. You can set up a lemmy instance where you default to sorting everything by “New Comments” and discussions as “Chat” and you get an identical model to old school forums. Hell, as long as you find a good amount of like-minded folks and you all agree to sort the same way, you can build up your “knowledge accumulation” inside the existing lemmy instances and communities.
Everything you’ll ever want to know about a specific model of motorcycle, all in a single thread:
https://advrider.com/f/threads/yamaha-wr250r-threadfest.936588/
Ask a question and people will tell you what page to look at if you can’t find it, post something that has already been talked about and they’ll refer you to the page where people talked about it.
On here? You could repost the exact same text tomorrow in a different community and the same discussion would happen again. Post it again in this community in a month and the same discussion will happen again without anyone noticing that you’re reposting.
Necroing in order to continue talking about something and build on the base already established is much better than the constant repost and knowledge reset we see on here where the same questions are asked again and again and again and people need to explain the same things again and again and again.
Ask a question and people will tell you what page to look at if you can’t find it, post something that has already been talked about and they’ll refer you to the page where people talked about it.
You are relying on some random people being around to serve as your search engine. Cmon. You can do the same thing here with megathreads and wikis. Hell you can also ask around on megathreads and people will link you. Nothing you describe here is unique to forums.
Necroing in order to continue talking about something and build on the base already established is much better than the constant repost and knowledge reset we see on here where the same questions are asked again and again and again and people need to explain the same things again and again and again.
The same happened in forums. Even in forums with megathreads like these, people asked the same question again and again. This is a matter of culture, not of software. You just happened to find a forum with a good culture and assumed it’s the result of the software.
Just build that community here and you have the same results AND federation with other topics if needed.
Also I lowkey find the expectation that you rely on people with thousands of bookmarks to be around to point you to a page in one gigathread to be quite disturbing.
Let’s say you find a month old discussion with a reply to a question you’ve got but you have further questions, here’s the major difference.
On Reddit/Lemmy you have two options, you reply to that same discussion and only the person you replied to knows you replied, no one comes to help OR you create a new discussion leading to the knowledge on that subject being split up between two discussions, meaning that the next person who has the same issue will probably find that first thread and repeat the same process.
On an old school forum you just reply to the original discussion, it gets bumped up, everyone sees that you have further questions, no need for a new discussion, all knowledge is in the same place, next person who needs an answer to that question now finds all the info they need in the same place, no need to ask further questions of the issue is resolved, if it isn’t they just bump that thread and more knowledge is added.
Megathreads are locked at the top and people see new replies only if they bother looking. Nested comments mean that you need to go through all branches to check what’s new (hell, nested comments leads to people repeating the same thing as others,in the same thread, at the same time without realizing it because the same discussion is happening simultaneously in multiple branches!). Wikis are just a third party solution without any discussion happening and where only the people who bother editing the Wiki (or that are allowed to) add to it (which isn’t as easy as just writing a message on a forum).
Edit: Just want to say that I agree with you on something though, having to rely on other users can be a pain on forums but that’s mostly a forum internal search engine issue that has always been an issue…
Let’s say you find a year old discussion, you don’t bother to read 120 pages, so you just ask your question at the end. If you’re lucky enough not to be in a forum that won’t flame you for necroing and not searching, you’re given a link to a page. You visit that page but don’t find the answer. Then ask again. Maybe this time you get a correct link, or maybe you get flamed this time.
See how it’s easy to make hypotheticals? Not to disrespect your preferences, but this approach is downright inane. What you’e describing is working despite the software, not because of it. As others mentioned in this thread, you get the exact opposite reactions to another forum about automobiles.
You know what is superior to this? Having a lemmy community about this one motorcycle model, with an FAQ or wiki on the side. People can ask a question as a new thread, and guess what, people can link them to a previously answered thread, just like they would link them to a specific page in your gigathread. Nothing functionally changes here. The lack of threading or sorting by new comments doesn’t change the experience. It’s the willingness to be nice to newbies that matters.
What you’re describing is simply changing a lemmy community into a single thread in a bbforum. It is an objectively worse scenario.
In lemmy you start with a generic topic. Say, automobiles. If it starts getting too busy, you start two new communities, cars and motorcycles, if those get too busy, you expand to brands and models. Each of them nicely organized and easily searchable by titles.
What I see here is a community that coalesced around an old forum software and did the best it could. Unlike most others, it happened to have the right people to make the best of it and find a working system with what they got. But again, it’s not the software, it’s the people, which is proven by so many similar communities in similar software just failing miserable instead.
I would argue that this community would work much better with a software much better suited for it.
I don’t disagree.
There is one forum I still participate in:
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum/
It’s mostly tech-focussed and Australia-centric, but it does have other topics like sport, TV etc…
I wish there were more like this.
I hate that the bulk of online discussion is now owned/monopolised by a couple of huge corporations.
There are many forums like that, especially if you’re not limited to one language. Most of the ones I frequent have been around for 10 or 20 years or more, but kind of fly under the radar. ilxor being a very good example. AFAIK, the latter also adds only one new user per day. I’d say that’s a good thing, even though I had to apply several times.
Specific forums for certain things are still the best.
I have an Aprilia motorcycle from 1999, and the Aprilia forum has 20 years of info, discussion, and advice on that specific motorcycle.
It is also a bit surreal seeing someone reply to my question and see that they joined the forum itself back when I was less that 1 years old.
the major issue with forums, as pointed out, is the hassle of having to go from one website to another to talk about various subjects and needing to sign up to each one of them.
Honestly the “having to sign up” part would be trivial to solve if topical forums just globally adopted OpenID sign-in or similar. No need to have one account per community if you already have (or “are”) an account in the World.
But even then, there’s a point to having to go through a sign-up process. At least some sort of vetting. We have seen how far have fallen all the communities that have ever relaxed sign-ups (as another comment in this thread shows, there was once a time when FB only allowed educated people in).
I don’t know, if there’s any hosted instances of it, or how mature it is, but one of the Lemmy devs has experimented with using the frontend of phpBB (basically the software for old-school forums) with a Lemmy backend: !lemmybb@lemmy.ml
To my knowledge, they had some pretty quick successes with it and one might be able to just slap this onto a server right now…
Last updates where in April 2023, priority not on their priority list
Once a thread gets large enough, no one is going back to read the first page. Maybe for communities on Lemmy, “Active” is the sort method that would work the best as you’d describe, but sorting the comments/replies by votes seems the best method to make sure the most important knowledge is visible
If there was a Reddit/Lemmy style website (where people create communities for various subjects but it’s all available from the same website using the same credentials) with forum style discussions I would be outta here in a moment.
My brother, this is that website
No, it’s not. Unless they only allow the sorting of threads based on which discussions has the newest comment (bumping) and remove comment nesting (so discussions are ongoing instead of branching off which makes it difficult to keep up with what’s new in the different threads), it’s not that website.
Can’t someone make a client or a UI which does this?
Lemmy already has both of those sorting options built in
Only works if everyone is sorting the same way otherwise by replying to an old post you’re just screaming in the void.
They have !lemmybb@lemmy.ml
Lemmy is just a forum set to sort by new posts, not new comments.
Again, unless it works the same way for everyone then people are just replying to old discussions and no one knows about it except for the person they’re replying to.
How so? I generally scroll to the bottom on here
Look at this conversation, it’s old enough that it doesn’t show in my feed anymore (sorted by top 6h), if I wasn’t taking part in it no matter how many people replied to it I would never know it took place.
That’s what I’m talking about, if sorting is up to the user then most people only see “fresh” content, not ongoing conversations that they might want to take part in if they realized they’re happening. Same for the comments sections, threaded makes it harder to check what’s new (have to go down each branch to get the context).
I see this comment two days in the future.
We probably could promote using “New comments” more.
You can use “New comments” to see, well, new comments.
Isn’t that exactly what “Active” sort does?
Only works if it’s the way everyone is sorting their feed.
People prefer centralization, and it makes sense. The Fediverse resolves most of the issues with decentralization, but so does centralization, which came way sooner, and arguably did it better.
Also, people seem to forget that Facebook was pretty cool back then. It had superior features, and was not the buggy mess it is today.
Anything big enough becomes a public restroom. Cooperation and syncronization between groups small enough not to devolve in that way seems to be an especially promising path forward.
Power law
Much easier access.
You make a reddit account or a discors account and you have limited access to thousands of forums.
Imagine giving your email address and making a password and solving a captcha hundreds of times instead. Who would choose to?
And don’t even get me started on the ease of operating these subreddits and discord channels instead of building and hosting websites.
Discord and Reddit also had uniquely improved their UIs over the existing options.
Until that API nonsense I was always using old.reddit because the redesign was ass.
Discord is cool tho, better than skype gui for sure.
Usenet and bbs erasure.
I was considering mentioning that GenX stuff, but I felt it was too obscure and would only serve to posture my creds :)
Your creds could be diminished based on which usenet forums you frequented. I had a little while in my 90s youth obsessed with researching marihuana, libertarian ideals, and discrediting Scientology in the alt.scientology groups. Not great, kind of normal for usenet, but there were much darker places to inhabit there. Worst of all was posting from my university account with my real name.
Usenet is where I discovered slack.
Usenet is still useful for… other things 🏴☠️
Yeah. Federating forums seem like a useful feature to keep them going. The forum style has it benefits that the discord and reddit style lacks. Sadly a forum I used a lot for my community is now in its final days, even if it managed to last a lot longer than others
Maybe ask if they’re willing to switched over to lemmy? You can sort like a forum does. Long shot but hey…
true. I didn’t consider that. That would could work. Lemmy is a lot more advanced in that regard. Currently the best ideas are Discord and give up, and the original owners are done with the idea, but I could try and create a spiritual successor on here. Lemmy suffers a bit from the same isues as Forums with lack of people, but I only need to convince the OGs. I need to think about that, and a forum from 2004 whose software is a decade out of date is easy to beat in that regard
Also thanks for creating this awesome instance.
Also tools like Lemmy Federate can help broaden the reach and allow more people on Lemmy to discover your communities, since communities and their content doesn’t get federated until someone is subscribed to them.
I was going to bring up this post, but it’s actually yours
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28227815?scrollToComments=true
Yeah it seems not a lot of people are aware of this tool anymore. I guess since it’s no longer advertised on lemy.lol’s sidebar people just sort of forgot about it.
I used to participate in (what was then) the largest and most active automotive enthusiast forum for a specific brand. They had forums for each major model run, and classifieds, etc. I’d go there for how-to’s, detailed info, reviews, tips and tricks, and of course, to tall with like-minded people. Meet ups even spawned from these groups, and friendships were forged.
As it really picked up steam, though, the forum creators decided to monetize, as every large website grapples with how to sustain their growth. Unfortunately, they decided to implement ads, subscription/pay wall, and within a month, there were five competing websites. The majority of us left in the first two weeks.
Now that forum still exists, but the content is gone, deleted by users who didn’t appreciate their content being monetized (sound familiar, June 2023?). The replacements? Some struggle on, and one or two are vibrant, but mostly, it imploded. There was one glorious pair of years though, when I (and thousands of others) spent hours every day on the forum, and every topic was covered.
In hindsight, the downfall was more than just the advertisements and pay walling. It was a few non-admins that were treated as defacto mods, and they had bad attitudes. Flaming anyone who asked questions that were asked before (this was before Google made searching easier), and also holding their own practices as the only way to maintain their cars.
The reddit versions of the forums were not remotely the same, with people coming and going and not really sticking around. The best place for the info is still forums, though I think they struggle with server upkeep and costs. It’s sad to me, but all things change. I’m glad for archive.org.
Advrider still going strong!
toxic users and flamers
I left Tacoma world for very similar reasons, if you searched and necro posted you got flamed, if you started a new but similar topic you got flamed.
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Whilst I don’t disagree with your points, don’t they primarily apply to specifically a support forum?
Fewer barriers to entry? A forum is just a simple registration, usually with email confirmation and maybe a captcha once. Facebook wants real life personal information, blocks VPNs and nowadays I think you have to even provide phone numbers or a custom video of yourself. Discord, ON EVERY LOGIN, wants me to solve a 2 level captcha that loves to repeat itself multiple times and to do a two factor authentication while being just a bloated confusing mess of a chat. Reddit also now blocks VPNs like crazy and loves to shadowban you if you’re inactive for a while (or whatever random reason they went with that I cannot think of).
They’re the absolute worst possible choices and exclude countless of people.
Article claims the forums were expensive and difficult to maintain. I thing it more likely that Facebook groups are epopular because people are already there.
Discord has done an amazing job at convenience. It’s free, they have a rather generous API. The communities have created fantastic bots. But it’s important to remember discord isn’t a forum it’s a live chat. Two people having a live discussion is a very different thing than two people carefully curating their responses in a forum.
Reddit and Lemmy are curated knowledge repository wrapped in discourse. Which brings an advantage over old forums.
More or less I would argue that the article is missing convenience as a driving factor.
Edit: I poorly skimmed this article and mistook some of its points. This comment deserves no upvotes and I’ll circle back later and give some credible feedback.
Discord has a bloody server limit which makes it impractical
They also make it incredibly difficult to even pay for their service. I needed to fund one for work a few years ago It was a pain in the arse. I had to buy $200 worth of boost packs. Just give me a single line item premium server and be done with it.
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that Discord was the viable option, even though it didn’t have the features you needed unless you dropped $200 in microtransactions?
It was a discord for a game.
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No, 100 servers
More or less I would argue that the article is missing convenience as a driving factor.
Did you…uh…read the article?
Saying that I mentioned paragraphs from the actual article … yeah.
I’m not a researcher, but I was there from the start and I saw the same process play out multiple times in the old forums I used to be in. Accessibility and convenience won.
…how?
Article claims the forums were expensive and difficult to maintain
Not to mention that the article never even mentions “expensive”. Wait, you fed it to an LLM and asked for a summary, didn’t you?
I’m sitting here trying to figure out why you’re coming out on the attack so hard, it’s your own blog. That makes perfect sense.
LLM? no, I skimmed it because it’s extremely long and very fluffy. I mistook some of the fluff, my apologies. I’ll go back and thoroughly read it when I have time later today and give you credible feedback. Off the cuff, I’d recommend you try to tame the writing down a little, you’re obviously very excited and feel strongly about the topic, but that doesn’t always translate to a good read for others.
I’m not upset, mate. I’m just perplexed why you’re confidently making statements which directly contract the article and appear as if you didn’t read it. But you do you.
I usually wouldn’t take the time to dissect and explain the issues I have with someone’s writing, but since you’re posting this on multiple platforms and called it an “effort piece”, I assume you’re looking to gain readers and for positive feedback. I misread the article and got upvoted by others who also didn’t read it fully, so I feel obliged to offer some help and encouragement. Ironically, this will end up being long and boring, but it’s meant for you, not for general readers.
Starting with setting the stage is usually a good approach, but nine paragraphs is too long before getting to your point. You need an early hook to keep readers interested.
The first sentence of the second paragraph is missing a word. It reads as if the people are the rage. Also, “whoever” is used for a subject and “whomever” for non-subject usage. Consider starting with “For whomever” to clarify the subject has yet to come. It’s a minor grammatical error, but it makes readers re-read the sentence to understand it. This isn’t a big deal, but it’s early in the article, and the text is lengthy with no point or summary in sight. Many readers will just close it and upvote someone who half-read it (like me).
I skimmed down to the bullet points, assuming the earlier paragraphs were a detailed history I already knew, and the points would be concise. But terms like “executive costs” and “discoverability was too onerous” make readers think too much about their meanings. You should make your points clearly and use simple language, like early high school or late middle school dialects. After making your point clear, you can elaborate further, perhaps even get a little flowery. Remember, this is a non-technical post for the general public, so it should be easy to read if you want it to be popular.
In the first set of bullet points, in #2, you start a subset with (1) but never follow up with (2). This makes readers feel like they missed something and adds to the difficulty of reading.
After your first set of bullet points, you returned to your chronological account, then broke into another set of bullet points. It’s not clear that you’re setting up a contrast here. Including a line like “in contrast” would help readers follow your thought process and transition more smoothly.
At the end of your second set of bullet points, you reference the 4th item from the first set, which makes readers think they missed #4 from the second set. It would be better and more readable to add a #4 to the second set and include the concepts in that paragraph.
I agree with the ideas you present, but it’s hard to grasp them with so many snags in the article. Proofreading it out loud might help. If English isn’t your first language, it might not help as much. I ran it through Grammarly, but it can’t fix the context issues I’m mentioning here. It catches a lot of the easier errors, but most of its recommendations don’t improve the thoughts you’re trying to convey.
Running your opening paragraphs through a readability calculator, your average score is “very difficult” to “extremely difficult.” This isn’t ideal for a weblog opinion piece. If you were writing a technical document or research paper, it would be fine, but for general consumption (which IMO is where this piece belongs), you should simplify it. Think of a New York Times article. The piece i’m writing here to you will gauge as very difficult as well, but that’s to be expected on an instructional piece.
As much as you might hate this suggestion, please try it: Run your drafts through an LLM like GPT-4/Copilot with the prompt “make this simpler [your text here].” Don’t just copy and paste what it says, but look at the changes in wording and see where the changes are significant. This can help make your writing more approachable.
Here’s an example
Yours:
“Whoever didn’t like the real-time nature of the IRC livechat, forums were all the rage and I admit they had a wonderful charm for the upcoming teenager who wanted to express themselves with fancy signatures and some name recognition for their antics. Each forum was a wonderful microcosm, a little community of people with a similar hobby and/or mind-frame.”
Theirs:
“For those who didn’t like the real-time nature of IRC live chat, forums were very popular. They had a special charm for teenagers who wanted to express themselves with fancy signatures and gain some recognition. Each forum was a small community of people with similar hobbies and mindsets.”
I’d take the advice up to the first comma, take out upcoming it’s not pertinent, add in gain, for the sake of readability, I’d take out microcosm, it’s a proper term, but it’s just duplicating the same thought and really doesn’t add to the comprehension or visuals while making it harder to read.
Mine:
“For those who didn’t like the real-time nature of the IRC live chat, forums were all the rage. and I admit they had a wonderful charm for teenagers who wanted to express themselves with fancy signatures and gaine some name recognition for their antics. Each forum was a wonderful little community of people with a similar hobbies and mindsets”
Also of note: maybe do lay into every person who gives you negative criticism, If your goal is to have people read your thoughts, some of these people may have viable critiques or real misunderstandings you can adjust your writing style for and draw a more substantial audience.
Best of luck!
I actually don’t care to grow my readership, I’ve been blogging for 20 years now but it’s more of a personal space to write some opinions. Nevertheless thanks for the long analysis. I think some things go against the my style, but will seem what I can retain.
Edit: I poorly skimmed this article and mistook some of its points. This comment deserves no upvotes and I’ll circle back later and give some credible feedback.
Thank you for this constructive approach
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Discord has forums built in. I know everyone hates it when I mention it, but there is continuity on Discord and has been for several years now.
That’s because it’s not exactly a great point. Look, we’re all glad they caught up to 1980’s bbs tech, but it’s behind a login screen. YOU HAVE TO GIVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER TO ACCESS IT.
Discord had always been a square peg beaten with a hammer to fit in a round hole. Eventually gaining basic features for the things it was never meant to be used for. Forcing people to sell themselves out just to read some documentation on an open source project.
discord forums are terrible though. it’s hardly an upgrade from a threads only channel
They’re not search engine indexable though.
You can’t view it without logging in.
Forums still exist, there only for extremely niche things though…Like high powered flashlights
Somethingawful is still going strong, even after Lowtax died.
Out of all the things, Reddit is probably still the best for flashlight purchasing advice.
Here in Germany the forum culture is still somewhat alive, social media did take a big cut though.
I wish retro gaming was niche enough for nintendoage and assemblergames to still be around…
Plenty of console Homebrew and general gaming forums are still around. Like GBAtemp and ResetEra. I think all forms have really been about niche things for the most part. There were some general purpose forms but most of them focused around some Central subject that is core to their identity.
Truly general purpose platforms that attempt to be about everything weren’t really a thing until social media, with digg and Reddit.
The grossest franchise of all time (Pokémon) still has like 20 forums going on.
Great post!
I would be curious to know how many people on here have found memories from BBcode-style forums.
Personally I kinda skipped web 2.0 - I had some accounts, sure, but I hardly interacted with anything else than direct messaging. However I used to hang out on phpBB for probably hours every day before Facebook took over, having been lured in by needing help progressing in Pokémon on my GameBoy Advance.
I guess I’m a minority around here in never having used Reddit much. But I’m wondering if we’re, in general, a bunch of ageing nerds who are nostalgic to web 1.0, or if we’re a more diverse bunch than that. ;)
Edit:
Oh, and speaking of nostalgia, I’m sad LemmyBB is not maintained any more! It makes perfect sense that it isn’t of course, but what a blast it would be.I used to use them a lot before Reddit, but I never really liked them. Too many to list or even remember at this point.
I guess a large part why I liked them was that I was really only active on one or maximum two, and I was happy just embracing the community there. It was also in my native language rather than in English, which feels excotic in retrospect.
Seems like an interesting post, thanks for writing it!
