Lemmy think on it and get back to you.

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?

Nice

IIRC there is an open source project for forums communities.

It’s called SMF I think.

Digg

ICQ recently is about to shut down so I got nothing for ya

Individual websites for niches instead of amalgamation websites

Usenet

I know right? Also iirc there was some discord alternative, but I can’t quite remember the name… it’s just as well, the company owning it probably shut it down. It’s not like it’s some free protocol that can be used by anyone, sigh 😞

I’ve heard good things about Lemmy

I have been hearing really good things about this new service called X. Very small and friendly community. You just need to register an account and do 12 easy installments of 420.69 yearly

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 👍

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.

Discord didn’t replace forums imo, it replaced teamspeak, raidcall, mumble and Skype

The transience and non-indexability is a feature, it’s easier to manage a community if any problem can be solved by just ignoring it for a few days. Just have to hope the issue stays within Discord, sure you could search within discord, but no one is going to and on any large discord the results are likely to be so numerous that it’s worthless. Worst case you lock down a chat channel, mark it as private due to ‘spam’ and create a new one to serve the same purpose as the old to cover it up the rest of the way.

It’s like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.

Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me

My theory is that it was used as the primary form of informal communication by groups doing something, then it felt like a community.
And since everyone was there…Why not put the documentation there? Sure, it’s not indexable, but the group is open-sign-up, right? Right?

Then a few years down the line, someone suggests switching to another primary storage location…Then faces huge amounts of push-back from people comfy sitting on discord.

The worst is when you’re trying to look for something but one of the discord bots has said a word similar ten billion times so that’s all that comes up. You’ll try to ban the bot to see other comments but then you just get like blank space or some shit where the bots comments would be

Also how obsessive forum moderators are over petty things like closing old threads and necro posting.

I use discord for a a couple of things, but I can’t stand the layout. That’s probably one of the main things that’s kept me from using it more.

deleted by creator

You should keep posting on Usenet too…rec.+

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.

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.

I haven’t run a BB forum for probably well over 15 years but in my experience the best thing was to just limit the ability to post for 24 hours after the account is being created (that makes getting caught and banned a bit more of a pain point because they have to wait 24 hours before they can do anything again) combined with just blocking Russian and Chinese IP addresses.

It’s surprising how much rubbish that stops.

Oh no, that’s really sad and disgusting. Please share the link so that we know to avoid it.

Was it any good?

Yeah, was gonna say: it’s not just the competition, spams, scams, and trolls are a real issue.

Well that’s still better than the weird Indian witch doctor spam I see on a couple of forums I visit.

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.

I’m kinda split on it tbh.

On one hand, we have a literal ip spacing crisis - mainly because there’s bajillions of arguably repetitive content among other non scrupulous stuff.

On the other hand, having a niche community has its pros.

Totally agree with your analogy of Walmart though - but then there’s also things like FediNet which basically let people use a standard framework to hve their niches.

It’ll be interesting to see what the future brings

You nailed it, it’s just like the Walmart effect making small businesses fizzle out. We’ll call it the EnWalmartication of the Internet

At least Reddit is searchable, while Discord is not. Not trying to defend Reddit though.

And the shoe will probably drop at some point. Something like “communities must have nitro to access posts from more than 6 months ago”.

Commenting/making posts has always required an account of some sort, at least as far back as I can remember. Maybe the IRC days you just needed a name

I got banned for something really stupid and they denied my appeal so now I’m kinda just fucked for a lot of stuff, that is too much power for one site to have.

FWIW All I said was “I should be allowed to punch nazis” and I’ve seen way worse things than that said and not actioned on by reddit. (Even when reported)

There are entire communities that “glorify violence” that they do nothing about.

Like many others who no longer use Twitter or Facebook, one of the biggest impacts to me is suddenly not having a reasonably proactive way to contact companies for support. It’s amazing how many companies have offloaded their support staff to half a dozen overworked social media operators. Try phoning and you’ll get “busier than usual” phone lines, and if you can even find an email address it’ll auto-reply to say that it’s no longer monitored.

It’s a shit show.

I wonder if there’s beer on the Sun…

This is a beautiful thing. I love MST3K, I might just join it.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Whos Tom Servo

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.

Forums are only as good as their moderators. Always have been, always will be. I’d love something akin to Reveddit for Lemmy though.

Tree nested communication is much more superior than traditional thread based communication

Heavily depends, IMO.

Nested threads are great temporary discussion of a specific story or idea. They’re absolutely miserable for long-running discussions. New posts get lost in the tree and information ends up scattered across multiple threads as a result.

It’s also been my personal experience that the nested threads format just doesn’t seem to build communities in the same way forums did. I have real-life friendships that were made on forums decades ago and I never had that experience with reddit despite being a very early user.

I don’t think that’s entirely due to the ephemeral format, but I do think it plays a part in it. A deep thread between two people on Reddit might last a few hours and a dozen replies before it falls off the page. On forums threads running months or years were pretty common, and that kind of engagement with the same people certainly changes how your relationships develop with them.

It’s just 1 level of the tree nesting, so just sub forums

We already tried this with something awful and it was still in fact kinda awful

One downside to this is that $10 is worth more to one person than it is to another, and I can’t see how that can be fixed.

Ideally the world would be moneyless

If there is payment, better support crypto too, because this way you wouldn’t force people to KYC themselves, as well as wouldn’t exclude people from sanctioned regions.

Well you have just described Metafilter. I’m a liberal a lefty as can be, and eventually even I got tired of the drama and obvious virtue signaling. And at the end of the day, drama and less-than-appropriate virtue signaling were what the mods wanted.

Huuuuuh

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.

you mean this? https://old.lemmy.world/

Because the vote system inherently supports popularity which creates content masking issues and usually results in communities with mods that want to keep that system.

Stack overflow has this exact same issue where stupid crap gets upvoted and useful stuff gets nuked so users don’t see things that would otherwise be important or useful.

Lemmy somewhat avoids it due to the relatively low number of posts, but that could easily change.

Yep. A traditional forum ages and grows old. And as they get older and older, it becomes harder to draw new members because of the clique of the core membership. I’ve seen a few traditional forums die that death over the years.

And some forums, and I belong to several, the members are literally dying from old age. We are all mostly old and retired. And we lose members every year due to death. Several times a year there is an obituary post for some long time member.

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.

umm, Hoomin, that was in the 1900’s!

: P

Cars too. Lots of marque or model specific forums still kicking it.