What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
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
Companies putting their stuff into discord is like all the businesses that ditched a dedicated website and moved to facebook however many years ago. Yay, now it is on a format that doesn’t work well for presenting static information and will inevitably require account registration!
Newest iteration of “this meeting could have been an email” has become “this Discord could have been a wiki”.
I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!
I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.
In that regard, fuck Discord.
Yeah anything ephemeral is fine like chats and what not. But this idea of using it as support platform is just dumb. You end up with people asking the same question over and over and it either doesn’t get answered because no one is around to answer it or likely because they’re annoyed at the same questions over and over. There is no organization and no institutional knowledge. It’s like it ends up being set up by people who think it’s what the cool kids want. And these giant communities just exacerbate this issue. Everything ends up being noise. It’s the reason I usually ended up turning off the world or general channels in WoW. It just ended up being annoying and distracting.
When I’m trying resolve a situation that I need some sort of support I wanna be able to search if others have had the same issue and see discussion around that topic. I don’t need synchronous communication for that. I don’t care if it was 3 months ago someone had the problem if they figured out how to fix it. The way to do that is forums, Reddit (well before the enshittification), or even Lemmy.
I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
Element needs to be better. Discord is awesome with the way it auto-plays looping videos/gifs and has animated emojis.
Seriously: That’s all they’d need to do. The element devs need to focus on fun.
Isn’t that a client side issue though? Element is just one Matrix client. I haven’t used it myself but heard from others that Fluffychat (another Matrix client) is more like Discord.
Yeah it’s probably just a client side issue but the OP mentioned Element, specifically 🤷
I just wanted to point out that Element is no fun! No fun at all!
It works and it works great for what it does. Even voice and streaming are great with Element. It’s just got a terrible, no-fun interface and pointless limitations on things like looping videos. You can’t even configure it to make them play properly (as in, automatic and endlessly, the way they were meant to be played! 😤).
Looping videos and animated emojis are super fun ways to chat with people. Even in professional settings! It really breaks up the humdrum and can motivate people to chat and share more.
Element is all serious all the time and going into a chat channel there feels like a chore.
If I’m talking with people about the topical thing which is why I joined a room in the first place, the last thing I want is a looping autoloops fruityloops annoyance. Plus, not autoplaying and autolooping them saves battery.
I hate to break this to you but that means you’re not normal. If all you ever do in chat is talk about serious things that are of such earth-shattering importance that it would be incredibly rude and obnoxious for someone to post a silent looping video you’re not normal, and no fun at all.
The way Element currently works, it’s made for people like you… A strange minority that probably only thinks about “chat” in terms of communicating for an end goal and not for the pleasure of conversation.
Plus all this stuff can be disabled in discord too, if you want to be that serious. There are per-role and per-channel settings that let you disable images, link embedding, external emojis, etc.
It gives you choice. I have no choice in Element, it’s always unfun all the time.
It is, but Element is still the “Gold standard” Matrix client and the most popular. And if you’re going to create a brand new chat protocol, you should make sure that your flagship client measures up to the competition.
Fun is always great to capture the masses!
What would likely help a lot if it was easier to get set up, particularly on a VPS or something like that. Small businesses and or larger community projects would be more likely to jump on possibly.
Another thing is ability to easily join, a lot of the above just have an easy link to join their discord server, not sure how easy matrix on boarding is currently as I still haven’t gotten my instance functional yet (not even half done with synapse configuration seemingly)
I mean, there are quite a few such providers: https://etke.cc/
Fair enough, I do mean moreso for self host in a way, like I’ve seen some game hosting servers, they have a VPS they already paid for and use Pelican or Pterodactyl to host it all, being able to throw matrix into the mix easily would be great in those cases. Seems like this would be a separate situation, which is definitely fine, just not exactly what I meant.
Well if you have a VPS then installing the dockerized Synapse just takes a few minutes.
I’ll have to take a look, I have synapse running but I can’t actually connect to my server at all, need to set up the database and sign-ups and all that shit.
Fun is the least of my concerns. I don’t know why people compare the 2 when they have almost nothing in common. One is a chat app and the other is a voice/streaming/community app. Matrix is slow as hell and the way “spaces” are implemented is a joke.
Honestly outside of the incessant pop-ups and upsells and the whole selling everything to AI companies, it’s pretty great for private communities.
Your view of Matrix seems a bit weird. AFAIK I can do all the voice/streaming/community in Matrix as well as it’s done in Discord.
Also, no, my server isn’t slow. matrix.org might be, I don’t know.
Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.
I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.
I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.
I run a Matrix family instance. My elderly parents use it as their main way of communicating with us.
Sure, I set up their accounts - but all that difficult to use UX seems to have passed them by completely since they’re very happy with it.
I set up their accounts
Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.
The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.
I have a Matrix server. I’ve also used a half a dozen others. Every one of them you have sit there and stare at it for 5-10 secs and watch the messages roll in every time you open the app.
I can’t speak to your server but I don’t have that issue. It was solved with Sliding Sync quite some time ago.
Sliding sync did nothing.
Sorry but this sounds like a skill issue.
Loading times are a skill issue? You could at least try to make sense while you’re being a dick.
Or Matrix?
According to history:
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Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
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If it reaches a critical mass… You can’t. See: Facebook.
The Fediverse can adopt a few nice communities, but honestly bringing the larger population seems hopeless.
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable
Discord is going public soon, so start the timer…
Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.
they already forced ads on discord.
RIP D&D campaign’s chat service 😬
Yeah, so many projects and companies using Discord for support seemed like such a bad idea.
Or Matrix?
Element is a Matrix client
larger population seems hopeless.
But what is the barrier? We have a functioning infrastructure. We need to solve the last piece of the puzzle.
People need an easy way to join!
Mastodon has already shown that this works. Even if they aren’t as big as others yet, they still make up about two-thirds of the Fediverse. Now we need to replicate this for Lemmy, Pixelfed, and so on, and share our findings along the way.
You mean drag them from platforms that have a vested interest in keeping them locked in and squashing competitors like the Fediverse?
In platforms that spend billions on engagement optimization algorithms, with the sole purpose of keeping users addicted, basically with government and business landscape backing?
Look, I’m optimistic about the Fediverse, this is a great refuge in the hellscape that is the internet. But you can’t make people want to change. I’ve learned this IRL, but see it with (for example) persecuted people continuing to use Twitter even though its owner basically has a gun to their heads. There’s a big gulf between being a fantastic refuge and taking the internet from Facebook and Google. Even if every phone on the planet had an easy button to switch to Fediverse alternatives in one click… many would not take it, and that’s an utter fantasy.
This pretty much. At some point one has to accept that the people who want to be saved can be saved, and those who don’t, can’t. We shouldn’t (reasonably or not) waste ourselves for the latter in spite of the former.
Matrix/Element has shitty usability and reliability compared to Discord.
For lots of communities, they could use modern forum software like Discourse with better results.
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Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn’t a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.
Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.
Isn’t there any solution for that yet?
XMPP / Jabber is better.
Rant
I don’t think you can for most people that is what is so infuriating right? In my experience people who are entrenched in Discord are completely and utterly entrenched in it, to the point that I have lost contact with a lot of these people effectively since I don’t use Discord.
The important choice was with all the community leaders who decided to make the move to Discord at crucial moments where they could have NOT done that.
I think any shift off of Discord is also going to have to come from community leaders of organizations, projects, game development communities etc… deciding to move off the platform at crucial decision points.
However, and this is something people who happily pushed their entire lives onto Discord would confidently tell me we could easily do if Discord got bad, everyone isn’t just going to straight up leave once they have built their entire digital communication around Discord…
Now I frequently see game developers complain that they can’t accurately get a picture of their playerbase because large categories of players aren’t on their discord!! and I have to keep my palm from blowing a hole through my face when the two loudly meet.
The brainworms are so bad that these developers will conclude the issue is with their playerbase not wanting to use Discord instead of it being an issue with DEVELOPERS DECIDING TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR PLAYERBASE WITH A SHITTY, EXCLUSIONARY TOOL THAT HAS AWFUL SEARCH.
I can’t express how much this gets under my skin, it is like this assumption that if you are even slightly a gamer than you are on Discord all the damn time has become rheified and cemented into place so rigidly that developers are literally tossing away large swaths of their playerbase feedback because they refuse to use a different tool to get feedback and communicate with their community. No forum, no custom website, nothing, Discord or bust.
I have seen the effects in games like Battlebit where it is clear that the developers were catering to only a small subsection of the playerbase that was very active and prominent on Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large portions of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers.
I have watched this problem, stewing in my frustration, evolve from a minor personal annoyance to being a serious systematic issue causing community organization to become dysfunctional and broken because Discord is clearly a shitty tool for that community (that clearly a lot of people refuse to use or check regularly)… and YET everybody in those communities behaves like it was always a foregone conclusion that the community would have to move to Discord, that is just the way it is.
screams into void
Gamers are so confidently stupid.
Also before anyone says “well it is a good tool for communicating with friends in a DnD group or something” … yes I know it is good for that, you know why I know that it is good for that? Because that is the easiest usecase for any communication and organizational tool to tackle, Discord isn’t good at this usecase, it is just a laughably easy usecase compared to how mindbendingly difficult it is to wrangle larger communities of… not necessarily friends.
I think your argument relates closely to something I’ve noticed happening over and over with more than just game developers. Far too often I see people expressing frustration that the Internet doesn’t give them more accurate information about the real world. Way too many people, apparently including many of the richest and most powerful people alive, have come to see the Internet as a magical machine that will do anything they want it to do… if only people would use it differently! Like, they legitimately seem to expect the entire population to post their entire lives online, unfiltered, so they can be used as automatons by people they’ve never even met.
Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.
This is so true! I always hated the Slack/Discord format and will always do. It’s just a mess.
You don’t…you go back to forums. They’re searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public, even if privacy is a illusion there.
We have to accept that and provide a solution for both.
You can lock down forums to were they’re un searchable unless you have a login. Tons of forums are like this.
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public
This isn’t true at all. Most people do not care about privacy; those that do are an extreme minority. You (presumably) and I are part of that minority yet even we still comment here, in a public space. The issue with forums has never been about privacy because most are content with pseudonymity. It is a big mistake to think we need to cater to the extreme minority in the privacy space when tackling big issues that involve a majority who do not care.
Matrix sucks. It barely has usable apps and it lacks basic moderation tools
Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.
Element is the name of the official Matrix client, but there are many others.
It’s a secure messenger
What are its pros and cons? What does it offer that telegram or similar don’t offer? Is it good for group chat? Is it available on multiple platforms?
Telegram is not a secure messenger.
Yes to multiple platforms, groups etc.
So, I’m going to say that I don’t use telegram and only know it as being presented as a secure messenger platform. As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable. And this is no different because I feel like this is exactly the problem lemmy and other platforms like it have. There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Matrix is a decentralized platform with the same level of security/encryption as Signal. Being decentralized you can run your own server, and chat with others on other servers.
It supports groups, voice, streams etc - similar to Discord/Slack/Teams etc.
Open source. Multiple different server and client implementations. Mobile platforms, “all” operating systems, and with bridges so you can have your IRC, Telegram, Slack, FB Messenger etc channels go to your Matrix account/server.
As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable.
If you are against a change in the first place you won’t switch, anyway.
There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
Please, ask.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Simple. It’s fully free and open source. The server as well as the apps. Therefore, you can trust it as a privacy friendly solution a heck of a lot more, than any other solution like WhatsApp.
Signal is secure as well, but the server is centralized.
And Telegram is not considered secure because of their implementation and shady practices.
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.
Because there hasn’t been a single proper alternative until very recently, and even then they’re not as user friendly.
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.
Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…
What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.
Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects
Terrible how, though? That’s exactly what it gets right. You have easy-to-setup roles and channel accesses, onboarding experiences for people joining a larger server, a huge ecosystem of bots for various purposes, etc.
okay, it is bad for not being indexable, but it’s good at what it does and it’s popular for a reason.
It’s searchable but information doesn’t stay pinned and available. It’s meant to be a chatroom style place for gaming and as that it’s fine but when you want to build a community for something like a video game or a. Product, what ends up happening is you end up making a channel for every single announcement etc. say you have a channel for FAQ? You either lock it so only moderators and admins can use it or you end up with a constantly ballooning channel where everyone can contribute. There’s no in-between and because each post isn’t really collated the way it would be here or on a forum the information is hard to navigate without search which often only gives a truncated section that you can’t even navigate to. There’s no context more often than not when you use the search function and it’s a very poor substitute for a forum as a result.
I don’t think discord is a good substitute for a website and I don’t think it’s a good substitute for a forum but it’s being used as both fairly frequently.
Excuse me, Jabber / XMPP is about as old as I am!
I once had my account banned because I was a member of a server that was banned in that hugely discouraged me from using it for that purpose. I might be in the half dozen servers at the moment none of which I’ve looked at save for two in the last year and I primarily use it for offsite DMs and even then I strongly prefer signal for people I know.
I’m sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying “it’s worrying.”
Agreed, this article would have made sense in 2020 or earlier.
And now we have the fediverse, which is causing a resurgence of content that is independent of Reddit or Discord.
Is it? When was the last time you googled something and the first website that came up didn’t spit out some SEO or garbage content?
Like every day? Yeah it’s worse now but Google is still useful for a lot of things.
That being said, I do have AdBlock so it’s a different internet for me.
Have you ever tried DuckDuckGo or Qwant? They have better results in my opinion, as long as you don’t care about the business snippets.
DuckDuckGo is so much better than Google. Barely any ads, and results that are actually useful 9 times out of 10.
It has been my experience that, yes, the user experience of DuckDuckGo is far superior to that of Google, but, DuckDuckGo doesn’t always provide the precise results. I’m looking for. I can still get the information, but it takes a little bit more work.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not shilling for Google. Their search engine has definitely gone to shit in the last 5 to 8 years. But DuckDuckGo simply doesn’t have the incredible precision that Google can if it’s properly used.
I use both
I forget the command but you can google search on ddg without ever going to google.
I’ve been using it for what seems like forever, but getting fewer and fewer relevant results over time for some reason. Switching to &udm=14 has been helpful, but I’m still uncertain about it: https://udm14.com/
Today. Among thousands of times.
I’m with OP. People have been screaming this for ages, and the collective societal reaction hasn’t even been apathy, but “We vote for Big Tech CEOs, full steam ahead.”
So… Yeah, I’m tired, too. Screw it all. Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
How about strengthening the Fediverse and Lemmy?
Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
So basically, let the world burn? Because that’s what it looks like we’re heading toward right now because of big tech.
Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
The big question is whether it will be us who do that.
let the world burn
That’s what’s gonna happen.
Maybe Europe and China will “isolate” themselves from much of the burning. I hope they do. But the rest of the world seems quite entrenched in Big Tech.
Maybe burning quickly is better, since more people will notice.
A couple dozen times yesterday.
I’m tired of articles that just act like nothing else exists or has existed. It’s just so dishonest and not very intellectual. Right, Reddit and Discord, that’s all we have now right? Forget Facebook, Xanga, MySpace, Skype, the Messengers, IRC, ICQ, Twitter, WhatsApp, Kik, Telegram, Signal .etc it goes on and on.
But Reddit and Discord, that’s all we have!
Perfectly said dude /cheers
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.
They are both trash. How can we get more people to join Lemmy and the Fediverse?
Keep talking about it abroad
“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Users will search for new places. The fact that we are here is proof.
Build it, and they will come.
Yeah, well, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok are not the net, they are siloes. Discord too. Even Reddit is trying as hard as it can to be insular.
Much of my family doesn’t even know how to use a browser, at least not beyond the bare minimum for work. They probably never will.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
With all sincerity this is fine. Seriously, let’s leave it this way.
As someone who was already around when Eternal September happened the Internet was never for normies and inviting them into the space has destroyed it. Everything that attracts the attention of normies ends up ruined; MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Slashdot and so very many more…they are all trashed because when they attracted enough users the commercialization started.
So maybe lets just leave the Fediverse for those “in the know” as long as we can.
Thing is it’s kinda too late, and the, uh, “commercial net” has all but taken over society.
Whatever happens, it would be nice if that part burns down. And I think yanking the techies from the space with the Fediverse will help.
Subreddits were not a problem before since they were accessible on the web without needing an account. But now reddit is gradually locking them down behind authwalls and things like not letting search engines index (other than Google).
Lemmy communities dont have this problem and because lemmy is federated, its resistant to such enshittification (plus you can easily create your own lemmy instance for only your team). So imo they are a good alternative to forums (and reddit) and a good solution to this problem.
What can we do to get more people to switch over to Lemmy from Reddit?
I guess once more and more content is posted here, naturally more people will come. And also any further steps of reddit enthitiffication will move people over.
Can we actively do something to help this process?
yes. do what i’ve been doing. tell your irl acquaintances about the fediverse. tell them about the lack of algorithm and the lack of ads. tell them about the lack of billionaires farming you and yours for data.
Already on it! ✊
But I think we need a simple elevator pitch to win them over. No ads is definitely a great start.
It’s reddit with better/real people. Most people probably can feel reddit going to shit. Quality of comments is way down.
That’s true. Quantity over quality.
but that was my elevator pitch.
You are right. 😅 Basically all important information in there.
The main thing is post more. Lack of content is the main reason people don’t use Lemmy more, and the only way to fix this is to share/produce more.
Its a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think even (transparent, community-relevant) bots are a good idea at this point, given that 99% of interests have little to no activity currently. For example, if we had bots that post game update changelogs to their relevant communities, it would at least provide a baseline amount of content and make it easier to discuss for fans of those games.
Some forum software is starting to support activitypub with plugins. If they add the plugin then you can follow and interact with the forum from Lemmy. The best option for everyone is to start pestering forum admins to add those plugins so they get users and Lemmy gets more content.
Long term creating migration scripts for popular forum software like phpBB, so content, users, etc, can be moved to a custom Lemmy instance would be an option.
That sounds like an awesome idea! I’m sure that many forum owners don’t even know that they can federate.
More Lemmy posts in search results
Awesome. Let’s do that! :)
Start copying as many of the top searches that bring people to Reddit. Have them answered here, possibly in more detail, or maybe copy paste.
That’s a great idea!
I found Lenny because someone posted about it on reddit
Awesome! What was the post and what convinced you?
I honestly don’t remember exactly but I think people were complaining about Reddit’s trajectory and someone mentioned lemmy voyager so I download it immediately.
Cool. And are you still using Reddit or are you using Lemmy exclusively?
The pinned posts have ways to present Lemmy in a clear way to new joiners
Some good stuff there. Thanks!
Happy to help.
There’s also !fedigrow@lemm.ee about community growing (so more internal than external growth). Happy to discuss there as well.
Would love to! I’m already subscribed.
Just FYI, you’ll see that the consensus over there is that consolidation is beneficial to a lot of topics, as you can see on the latest topics there
I keep an eye for engaging content on reddit and just rip it here. Mastodon and I think even BlueSky ran on repost bots in the early days. People have to find stuff here first.
I think, though, I stuck a Leminal Space link in my bio or upvoted a Luigi and got banned. So, not sure if you can directly link to Leminal over there or not.
People have to find stuff here first.
I have thought about creating a bot to crosspost content from reddit here but I suppose they will quickly block access. RSS could work to a degree, but it doesn’t include the full content and media.
If you or somebody else has ideas, I’m listening.
I think, though, I stuck a Leminal Space link in my bio or upvoted a Luigi and got banned. So, not sure if you can directly link to Leminal over there or not.
I have a link to my instance in the bio and regularly post about it and haven’t had problems with exposure until now.
I have thought about creating a bot to crosspost content from reddit here but I suppose they will quickly block access.
That’s cool! Definitely have to check it out.
FYI, the general consensus is that people disliked it as it was just a systematic repost bot from Reddit.
Reposting from Reddit is fine, but you need to filter the good content from the bad one
I thought about only crossposting uprising content and only a few a day. Simply crossposting everything would be definitely a bad idea.
I’d like to see fedi software evolve past just cloning twitter and reddit into more diverse offerings, like forums
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.
proudly not a part of the problem. and I fucking told everyone so at the time.
I swear my real name is cassandra, and my parents just misspelled it badly.
I’m not convinced at least half of those communities trust Reddit and Discord enough to leave forums, but then again I stopped using them mostly because I haven’t had time for those hobbies. My emulation groups are still active on forums, at least.
How about crossposting forum post links on Lemmy? This would help to get them exposure.
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.)
Reddit is shadow banning people in droves for bad upvotes
Yeah they are shit now. What can we do to move them over to Lemmy?
Pornography was a very popular draw for Reddit, but posting in general helps too.
High resolution pictures on lemmy is a bit slow still. Worse for video. That’s the second most important issue left to fix on lemmy
Isn’t that just a bandwidth issue?
still is, since many accounts are there to just spam thier OF profile.
did you just seriously say posting is the cure to one of the world’s ills?
I’m not even sure you’re wrong. fuck. I may have to retire that bit.
Good content here will keep people off of Instagram, or shitter.
Honestly if reddit kills porn it’s over for them.
like I said; I’m not even sure you’re wrong.
and didn’t they kill all the queer porn? so don’t we just need to, like, do more queer porn on lemmy?
Let’s get more queer porn on Lemmy!
Go ahead, create some content! ^^
As a gay man I agree, to get more people seeing good content no other reason, nope.
Dicks out for Lemmy!
i think there still alot of porn on reddit, all kinds, its just reddit have purging many bots/users who have hundreds or thousands of accounts for no good reason since they dont make it to front page anyways.
they already try to force porn users on mobile to use thier crappy app if you dont want to login, or use thier app. thier app makes it easier to mine your data and recognize your device for easier banning.
Lemmy is just reddit under different management.
Lemmy is decentralized. So very different.
In some ways yes in other ways no. The urge to hivemind and purity test everything is definitely the same however the ability to move to another instance and get away from a group of power tripping mods is different.
Lemmy is essentially a collection of 2000s era forums that have agreed to share user accounts.
Lemmy is a lot of different Reddits under a lot of different managements.
This is why I’m making more effort to move to Lemmy permanently. The thing is that they’re also refusing to say what exactly will get you banned, and that they can and probably will change the criteria pretty much when they feel like it. This is the kind of shit abusive partners do. They cannot expect anyone to be able to follow a rule that they refuse to define. Personally, I don’t think that’s an accident. It feels more like they’re laying the groundwork to be able to censor whoever they like, most likely at the behest of the current US administration.
What’s a bad upvote?
Upvoting what they deem as bad or violent content.
Anything anti billionaire, to sum it up.
I am one of those people and I wonder. Is it because I upvoted a news article about war or a nazi getting punched?
This is unironically on reddit right now. People lamenting a place like Lemmy doesn’t exist.
I’m less worried about Discord, honestly.
Every forum I used before Reddit even existed is still active (hell, PHPBB was updated as recently as November!) and new platforms, like Lemmy, pop up all the time . IDK what the fuck these articles are talking about. Maybe they just don’t know how to actually find anything on the web? 🤷🏻♂️
What are we going to do about it?
Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they’ve showed up starting in the early 90s. They don’t want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.
If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there’s enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.
The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don’t fit into a box. It’s that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can’t hold the castle once it’s being assaulted by the normies.
So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It’s for the best.
What Reddit did 2 years ago proves that most people aren’t going to switch to alternatives just because it’s “the right thing”. They only do that when they want or need something from the new platform. If we want people to come to Lemmy, Matrix, and whatnot else, we have to make them into appealing alternatives both in functionality and content.
I think this is an XY problem.
People keep trying to bring back the old internet ; This is an broken and outdated solution.
The root problem (in my opinion) is that we need to share critical information to the masses, but the masses introduce “tyranny of the majority”. It’s a really tricky problem to figure out, and I really really really want mathematicians working on this.
If you live in the states, the Electoral College exists because they were looking for a practical solution to this problem. Considering the outcomes, it did not work - but there is no shame in this, as I think this is actually a really hard problem to solve.
The only known solution is to not share information to the masses (a.k.a keeping the normies out). In essence, this is what the old internet was - and a large part of what made it great. But this is not correct as it does not meet the criteria of the problem. Nor does it translate well, since your neighbors are apart of the masses.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share. If you do math for a living, please gather your friends and make an open-thesis about this.
I proudly still use a super specialised old school online forum and it works great for those purposes.
during the first big migration to lemmy a lot of folks were splitting between discord and here, and a really common refrain was “anything but old school forums” and i absolutely did not and do not get this attitude. old school forums were great! the discussions were always super relevant because everyone was there to discuss whatever specific thing everyone had signed up for, and the people posting were always super reliable, knowledge wise, because, again, it was a dedicated place for discussing something specific, and the frequently asked questions would always end up in a really good wiki. sometimes i wonder if people had bad experiences on those forums because they’re much more focused. like on reddit everyone would complain about the arch forums on r/arch, but none of what they said matched the actual tone of the arch forums. it made me think they posted short one liner questions as thread starters instead of giving a full breakdown of the error they were seeing, what they did to troubleshoot the problem, and what errors had come about during that process.
overall, i think we’ve had a shift in the architecture of the internet thanks to general purpose discussion sites like twitter and reddit. before, the internet was cathedrals filled with texts related to their specific topic. everything on a sportster related forum was going to be about the maintenance and modification of sportsters. maybe there was a subsection where people could talk about their other motorcycles, but that was more of a social lounge than anything, like the equivalent of the fellowship hall in my cathedral analogy.
after reddit and twitter took over those scenes, the internet became a mall. unfocused, impersonal, and only meant to pipeline you into purchasing products. none of the people up front are very knowledgeable because you don’t need to be knowledgeable to make sales, you need to be attention getting. especially when what’s for sale is disposable
At risk of rambling… It feels like attention spans have shortened, too.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/29/gen-z-kids-reading-tv-songs
People don’t want to dig through long discussions and documentation, they want a quick fix in a YouTube Short, or for it to be fed to them shooting the breeze in Discord.
And this sorta works short term, until the “old” information well those shorter systems rely on dries up.
It’s already a serious problem in newer topics. I’m part of the “localllama” community, for instance, and it feels like any central organization of knowledge has completely collapsed, and there is no old info to fall back on because everything is so new.
We have to fight back since the commercialization of the Internet by refusing to use corporate systems. Old school forms are great although I will say the friction of having to sign up for a new account just to post is a pretty big deterrent, being able to just subscribe to a new subreddit makes it easier to explore very wide range of topics all at once, and to have all the newest post brought to you in one place you can check on your work break.
Maybe a hack with RSS or something could have worked but we all use those platforms for a reason, back when they were objectively much better
It seems so innocent at the time we didn’t know it was going to get this bad. At least there’s broad consensus nothing’s going to fundamentally change. We’re already taking first step. I’d like to see old school style forums, and also a focus on atemporality. Being able to have conversations with people over different time zones or even different months is extremely useful and something basically you need no internet conversations that we should really lean into the ability to do that. We need to get rid of the culture of shaming people for responding to old posts
and maybe bring back some of the old personal touches like forms signatures but with Federation so you can just make one account and do everything through it if you so choose. Reddit was kind of sort of system that worked like this and let me is now but the feature set was Bare Bones in comparison. We can do better we just need to develop the software
The one thing I don’t like about oldschool forums is that I have to make an account for each one. With each account comes a new place where your email address is registered, and a new password, with each password comes a new avenue for attack if you’re shitty about web security and use the same password (or a variation thereof) for everything. If you use a password manager you’re fine, but I don’t want my email being put everywhere.
There needs to be some kind of SSO that’s open source (like Google but not Google), so I can log into any forum that implements it, but with that comes the cost of running an identity provider and I don’t think forums are going to want to pay for that in addition to their own costs. Maybe some sort of distributed system or something where each forum donates a little bit of compute power to running the IDP, I dunno…
Mozilla’s Persona protocol/service could have been this, but it failed to get traction and they abandoned it. Maybe it was an idea that was just too early. Decentralized auth is a really hard problem.
My problem with forums is that they spiral out of control. Forum lovers see this as a huge plus but I’m not reading 1700 pages (not posts) of bullshit across three posts just to get to the current info.
Any time I see
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …, 653
At the bottom of a post I just click off the website and go somewhere else.
You don’t have to read everything posted over the entire history of the forum. Old threads are kept so that when you need information they contain, you can find them with search, not with the expectation that new people are going to read all of them before posting.
i do, especially with a forum i am on after i was banned from reddit, its was discussing how people were recently banne dand how to evade it.
Reddit is literally unusable now. I use old.reddit to browse certain subs but there’s no point commenting or interacting cause pretty much everything gets you banned
Its been driving me crazy, I am so close to abandoning the internet and going back to old reading just out of spite. yesterday I went looking on how to fix something simple a small electric item and all i got was adverts for a replacement, I use DDG and i closed the screen at three pages. I miss when you could simply search a question and the answer was there. Excited to see the resistance starting to emerge.
Try Ifixit next time. If it runs on electricity, there’s a good chance that they have taken it apart and documented how to repair it.
Its finding it in the first place. It wasn’t even a tough question it was actually about changing a plug on something, i just wanted to double check it was suited, but the effort of finding out the info outweighed the effort to just do it. Something like iFixit is a good idea but you have to find it in the first place. These places are so buried now. Thanks for the answer by the way.
This is precisely the reason I’ve been using LLM so often. Finding what I want on Google or DDM has become too time consuming. I’m sure the answer is on there but I’m not willing to take the time to scroll through all of the BS ads, spam content, AI written garbage. Why should I?
not trying to make fun of the idea and I share big part of your sentiment, but I just got the mental image of a person leaving the internet, opening a book angrily and saying to the air: “ha! it serves you right! I don’t need you anymore!”
and I chuckled a little xD
Me too! What do you think we can do to get more people to join the Fediverse?
One of the things for me is over the last few years i have suppressed my inner geek, censored my voice and gone along with the common group areas. I have tended to read rather than be part of something. I am kinda techie always have been however I have slept walked into a hole that I need to get out of, and instead start contributing to real communities of interest. Spaces i love, spaces where people share my passion.
I think the benefits of diversity the fediverse and infact the world we live in needs communicating. Convenience (or what i believed to be) has been a hell of a drug that I am waking up to and walking away from. And that means me getting involved in healthy internet spaces. Spaces that work me not me not the other way round. As a real life analogy, Supermarkets are great, but as i get older i am going back to farmers markets and boot sales, i like the experience, i find things i didn’t know i wanted.
I found reddit was easy to scroll, easy to read, it is like being in a corridor full of people all heading the same way, you feel like part of something, it fills time and you are never lonely. It was however not true communities like the old days of the internet.
You should definitely start creating content and communities! It’s a lot of fun.
I’m currently establishing a new Lemmy instance and it’s fun as hell. Especially since it’s a lot easier to build communities in this Reddit like format than in any other. I simply post content I see and want to share into the appropriate communities and discussions will naturally follow. This can also be original content of course.
I have been considering it. Not sure what on. I love to craft, make reuse, there are a few here but i guess there could be space for more.
Just start with something. The more that participate with good content, the better :)
