There are at least as many spam/bot signups as there are humans, so account approval negates that completely. Forums aren’t time-based like lemmy and reddit, so there is no sense of urgency. Discussions can take place over months/years. It’s possible to turn on the ability to make a post prior to registering, then when your registration is finalized it gets posted, but I’m not sure how dependable that is. I wouldn’t want people losing content they tried to post due to some cache issue.
I haven’t bothered creating anything on Lemmy. I’ve been urging the Xenforo software developers to join the fediverse. Discourse forum software is doing it, so we may soon see discourse forums show up on lemmy.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Ah, that’s why I was asking about Lemmy. Provides a more open quick discussion path than forums, which then helps funnel actual people to the more regulated forums in the future.
MaximilianKohler@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’m doubtful that creating a lemmy community would funnel people to the forum. There is a lot to like about the forum format over time-based ones like lemmy. And the lemmy software is much newer and more incomplete/deficient than Xenforo. I think creating a lemmy community might just lead to fracturing of content/discussions, which would be detrimental. Also, unless you host your own instance it’s not super reliable (as we’ve seen with reddit and other reddit-alternatives).
Lumisal@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’ll expose more people to the topic though.
Forums are great for detailed conversation, but not so fast for spreading information and garnering commentary.
There’s a reason sites like Reddit sprang up and grew huge despite forums having already existed.
Those then interested in assisting more or having slower but more in depth discussion however will then gravitate towards the forums.
MaximilianKohler@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah, but it comes with many major downsides that have become more apparent in recent years. For example, even lemmy seems to get hit hard by astroturfing, misinformation, disinformation, and toxicity. That’s more rare and easier to prevent on forums I think.
Yeah, I was considering using lemmy instead of creating a forum, but decided on the latter after weighing the pros and cons.