Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨tfm@europe.pub⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

https://www-xataka-com.translate.goog/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

What are we going to do about it?

Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.

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Comments

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supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Yeah I remember saying this 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

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- spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  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!
  
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  - mars@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Newest iteration of “this meeting could have been an email” has become “this Discord could have been a wiki”.
    
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- TrickDacy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
  
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  - joshchandra@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    This is exactly what I was gonna say: I’m amazed that so many millions of people can tolerate its atrocious UI. Even now, the amount of notifications I get from the constant text channels across “servers” (which is such a misnomer for merely “communities”) is so ridiculous that I ignore 99.9% of it.
    
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- tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
  
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  - riskable@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Or Matrix?
    
    According to history:
    
    Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
    
    If it reaches a critical mass… You can’t. See: Facebook.
    
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  - lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    XMPP / Jabber is better.
    
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  - supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    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 it…
    
    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 are catering to only a very small subsection of the playerbase that is very active and prominent on the Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large sections of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers.
    
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  - SupraMario@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    You don’t…you go back to forums. They’re searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines
    
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  - DioEgizio@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Matrix sucks. It barely has usable apps and it lacks basic moderation tools
    
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  - XpeeN@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    When we can have push to talk option (client side, which can be done relatively easy) and proper 30+ FPS Screen share for gaming features, I think it’ll be much easier to convince people to try it. Everything else IMO is QOL features that I don’t mind about.
    
    We also tried to use mumble, but the lack of Screen share moved us straight back to discord eventually…
    
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  - atrielienz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.
    
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- simple@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  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
  
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  - supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Excuse me, Jabber / XMPP is about as old as I am!
    
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- fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- maho@lemmy.funami.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  online communities seemed to be going to discord
  
  That can also be seen as “nature healing itself” in context of giant AI botnets scraping the whole internet every second. It’s only natural to go private nowadays.
  
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  - supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    No, it isn’t.
    
    Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.
    
    By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to the people.
    
    Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.
    
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lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.)

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- Bronzie@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Never played the game and probably never will, but I wanted to say this anyways: stay awesome!
  
  It’s people like you, who do stuff out of passion and not monetary gain, that made the internet so great.
  
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  - lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Thank you! :) It’s definitely a passion project for me, because I love the game so much.
    
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- greatwhitebuffalo41@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I appreciate the people who run the forum for the Emergency! Game series. It’s where I found the info on now to run multiplayer on Emergency! 3
  
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  - Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    i still play RA2, apperently there isnt a primary forum for it, but people still play the modded version.
    
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- tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago.
  
  That’s cool!
  
  People still keep using this trash!
  
  Why? I mean if it can be destroyed on a whimp again should be reason enough to not use it again.
  
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  - lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I’d say its mostly convenience. Discord is easier to use on mobile devices and provides voice chat.
    
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- ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Similar. I had a community from 2001 onward where I was variously an admin and a mod over the decades. A lot of us drifted apart from being kids exploring the internet to adults with families and careers.
  
  But mainly the guy that took over the code maintenance became the sole admin in 2018 and he just chased everyone off the site debatebroing with increasingly racist and misogynistic rants. Dude I played games with and talked with online for 20 years started calling me a genocidal enslaver for trying to explain CRT and want solar power in America.
  
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  - fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I kind of don’t ever want a family or a career because it seems like you lose out on the ability to do anything fun
    
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- Fluke@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I played the shit out of I-War 2 decades back now… Cracking game that was :D
  
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- TheJosephAller@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I solute you for your “stubborness”
  
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brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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- tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  They are both trash. How can we get more people to join Lemmy and the Fediverse?
  
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  - Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Keep talking about it abroad
    
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  - FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    
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- yuki2501@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  “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.
  
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  - brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Yeah, well, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok are not the net, they are siloes. 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.
    
    I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.
    
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  - tacofox@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    R.I.P the original Xbox Scene forums 💔
    
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Gointhefridge@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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- melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - monarch@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    a lot of them died because they never bring in new people and people leave for a variety of reasons.
    
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- tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  How about crossposting forum post links on Lemmy? This would help to get them exposure.
  
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- skytrim@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  XDA forum was that for me. Great place to start and then follow links or do more research using the keywords used in the discussions. Just helpful for things like learning if a kernel is potentially fixable or not before buying a second-hand device for a custom rom project. The new look / reorganisation of stuff annoys me though as I find it harder to find stuff than it used to be but that’s because I am using it on autopilot. I guess new users might find it attractive / easy to navigate?
  
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notanapple@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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- tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  What can we do to get more people to switch over to Lemmy from Reddit?
  
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  - balssh@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - JujiFruit@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I found Lenny because someone posted about it on reddit
    
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  - Babalugats@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - PanArab@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    More Lemmy posts in search results
    
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  - Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    
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- fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I’d like to see fedi software evolve past just cloning twitter and reddit into more diverse offerings, like forums
  
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jadedwench@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
The worst is Discord. It doesn’t show up in search engines and somehow you have to know that is where you are “supposed” to go for help. Privacy issues aside, I am fine with discord for playing games with friends or big conventions/LAN parties, but I don’t understand why anyone would use it as a forum.

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- A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Yep.
  
  Discord is a black hole where information goes to die.
  
  Its not indexable, its not searchable, If you are having a problem you will never find it via conventional means.
  
  and the second the discord shuts down, all the information is gone forever.
  
  Discord is not a tech support platform. it is not a information storage platform.
  
  it is a communication platform.
  
  and far, far to many organizations use it for tech support and information storage. To the detriment of everyone… even themselves.
  
  Because people don’t want to have to join special services just to find out why their piece of software doesnt work.
  
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- jokersteve@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Oh thank the gods. I was worried I didn’t grasp some basic modern internet concept, because I couldn’t understand why people misuse Discord as a forum. Thanks to this thread i feel vindicated.
  
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- tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  why anyone would use it as a forum
  
  That’s what I also would like to know. It’s such a bad platform for it.
  
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  - A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Discord is a great platform for bullshitting with your friends while playing games and shit.
    
    but people are using it for things that its not, and wasnt ever meant to be.
    
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  - Chreutz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    They made a ticketing system for using discord for customer support, which is not a bad idea. But that also kinda works as a forum, so the round peg went in the square hole
    
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- reiterationstation@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  It’s because they are blocking off their communities through paywalls or a means to feed them advertising. Everyone is an idiot for using discord for support. Imagine being a company and thinking answering the same stupid questions 100x a day instead of having a damn FAQ on a website is efficient and makes sense. Lost their damned minds. I’ll die on the hill that discord is stupid to use for anything but gaming and casual conversations and the people funneling their fan base or userbase to discord are assholes.
  
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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  You need to think of why people would choose to use it for creating a forum. It’s comically easy to set up. Making a server (their terminology, blame Discord, not me) just takes a couple of clicks.
  
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Formfiller@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Reddit is shadow banning people in droves for bad upvotes

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- quack@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Yeah they are shit now. What can we do to move them over to Lemmy?
  
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- splendoruranium@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  What’s a bad upvote?
  
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- atlasraven31@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I am one of those people and I wonder. Is it because I upvoted a news article about war or a nazi getting punched?
  
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Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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. We don’t need them and we don’t them.

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- null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  100% agreed.
  
  Every time I bring this up I get accused for gatekeeping or something.
  
  I’m not averse to new users coming to lemmy, that’s great, no problem.
  
  I am resistant however to the idea that lemmy needs more users and that those users should come from reddit.
  
  Lemmy could do with more content, but a huge influx of users probably wouldn’t be great.
  
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- explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I disagree. Email is still perfectly usable and helpful because we simply filter out the commercial stuff. The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad. Luigi Luigi Luigi. I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.
  
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MordercaSkurwysyn@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Back in mid 00s I created a forum for fellow classmates to share notes, info on exams and whatever. It was active for a year or a bit more, then someone set up a Facebook page for our group and the forum died in about a month. I could not understand why people migrated so quickly, Facebook group was atrocious when it comes to search functions, any files, notes or anything you didn’t download immediatelly were lost to time never to be seen again. If the forum is still up I’m sure I’d still be able to easily download exam schedules and all notes from all the classes there, with Facebook it was a pain even a week after someone posted. There is something fundamentally wrong with society if an inferior product can sweep the board so easily. People do not care about quality or usefulness of anything, all that matters is marketing and trends.

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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Every forum I used before Reddit even existed is still active. IDK what the fuck these articles are talking about. Maybe they just don’t know how to actually find anything on the web? 🤷🏻‍♂️

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werefreeatlast@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I for one would want a more open source system where a single guy running a server doesn’t have all the power in the forum. It would be awesome if a fedi form of forums took over and one could replicate all the info as relays.

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DicJacobus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
They’ve been dissapearing for a long time, if they were an animal, they’d be somewhere between Endangered, and Critically Endangered…

The eye-opener now has been that Reddit has turned into corpo/authortiarian boot licking trash, and Discord is planning on going publicly traded. (Read More Corpo bootlicking trash)

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NutWrench@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
You should be using Lemmy instead of Reddit. It’s defederated, and it’s spread out over 600 Instances in many different countries. This way, one rich egomaniac can’t ruin it for everyone else.

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Obsidian@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
If anyone is looking for a pretty good list of forums-

aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today?…

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Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I hate Reddit, and I hate discord.

I am using discord for a discussion thread of one thing which follows a serial webnovel and it’s infuriating because when something new happens there’s always a constant influx of people asking the same questions because there is no way to pin or highlight pertinent information and no one is going to go scrolling through a million messages searching for the first time the question was asked and answered.

Discussion threads! Not chat messages!

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artifactsofchina@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I’m so inspired by the Fediverse, the social options we have these days are just magical.

A decade ago, Diaspora got press because they were going to build an alternative to Facebook. But there was hype and then there was disappointment.

Now, everybody knows how terrible legacy social media is. Everybody knows. Sure, most people are still stuck there. But these vibrant alternative places exist! The options are exciting! It is so much better than it’s ever been!

Just keep building. This is great, and it’s only just started.

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Critical_Thinker@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Don’t worry, the enshittification of both is proceeding well.

Replacements are inevitable in time. This one is growing.

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green@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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

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sfu@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
There are tons of forums out there, the search engines just won’t show them to you. The search engines are the real problem.

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early_riser@lemmy.radio ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I’m getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.

First the centralized (I prefer to say “urbanized”) nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.

However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who’s hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by “last comment” which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it’s not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won’t bother.

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Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
It is a problem, but I think it downplays the reason those platforms got popular.

No admin required. No updating of software to make sure you’re not going to get compromised by a vuln.

No account management. You don’t have to make a new account, and manage another password for every community you use. Also, no worrying about 1 when somebody like me can’t be arsed to update that forum software. I don’t want an account for everything.

It’s all in one place. You look at your “feed” of things and your stuff with a new post every week is right there with the stuff with new posts every ten minutes.

If you’re running a big community you shouldn’t be building it somebody else’s garden, but you do need to manage the garden yourself and it’s not super trivial and maybe your little Final Fantasy XIV group can make do with a corner of Discord and abandon it when it goes real shitty. If you’ve got 50,000 people, it gets a little trickier.

The Fediverse goes a little way to fixing things, but it’s all a trade off. Not having corporations involved is a damn good start though.
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skytrim@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I just closed my The Guardian UK version account. I used to comment on the news stories. I can no longer be arsed because of the stress it causes - 99% of comments are so damn stupid and adrift from reality. Most of the comments are from people who (1) voted Labour in order to get change despite being warned by Labour itself, as well as everyone on the Left, that it was not offering change and (2) are now belly-aching because Labour is too Rightwing for them and no better than Tories. Starmer says he ‘likes and respects Trump’ - what the fuck!?! Leopards are eating Labour voters’ faces and they are lacting shocked? If you say so, your comment gets deleted by the moderators because we are not allowed to be truthful or challenge MSM’s imaginary version of the world which is carefully curated to be cosy and profitable. Fuck 'em all.

I only want to hear from people willing to face reality. I need to find a community that is living in the real world not in some self-indulgent fantasy in their head like most British voters seem to be. I reckon that the age of social media is dead because the age of comfort is over. It was fine wasting time on posting nonsense when you were not watching a coup or seeing WW3 developing in real time or could still believe that whatever happened online, offline life was ticking over normally and you could still feed yourself, access housing, get healthcare, rely on benefits if you were sick or old. All of that safety in real life is gone - so to survive this shock we bunker-down and that means finding your village to shelter with because who wants to bunk with Nazis or cultists?

There will still be social media going forward but it will be fragmented because in times of war, you take a side and you do not fraternise with the enemy. Anyone lamenting this is pretending we still live in the past when you could get along with others and ‘two side’ debates because actually you agreed on 90% of stuff and were disputing details. Now we dispute the nature of reality and fundamental morality and there is no two sides to such existential matters. I mean it has been brewing for almost a decade (i.e. in the west, started much longer ago in places like Russia and ‘untruth no reality stop-think’ probably infected the west from those places) - ever since the rise of 4chan and bizarre conspiracy theorists started undermining reason, was turbo-charged by the pandemic, and started to infect reality via stuff like brexit and MAGA. There is no excuse to be surprised that we are here, it was clearly signposted for years.

I know it is the Far-Right who brought us to this crisis but as a radical Leftist I say ‘bring it on!’ You started this conflict, I am determined people like me will win it. I just need to find my comrades and unite in push-back. I get my inspiration from democracy protests like those currently happening in Serbia, Greece, Turkiye. Why is there nothing like that scale of reaction in USA or UK? Because most people in those places are still feeling comfortable and do not grasp the reality of the crisis they are in. They will not react until it is too late. They frustrate me past expression!

I needed to vent.

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Skellysgirl@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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Machefi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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NoMansCat@jlai.lu ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I hate Discord.
The interface is clunky.
They always try to sell you useless (at least for me) options.
What with the users posting so many gifs?

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HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Indeed, especially since both (Reddit more than Discord admittedly) give out blanket bans on a whim and that means being blocked off from the modern internet, the stakes are too damn high.

Though what do they mean “Disappearing”, isn’t this like pulling the alarm because you just learned “There’s not that many dinosaurs left”

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perestroika@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Indeed, forums are almost gone. In particular, I miss one forum about science fiction, one about aeromodelism, one about electric vehicles (another still exists) and one about anarchism. An interesting hold-out in the country where I live, is a military forum. Mods do a cursory background check, rules say that respectful discussion is the only kind of discussion accepted - ironically, the military forum has a peaceful atmosphere. But it could come crashing down much easier than a social media company.

As for why forums disappeared - I think that people became too convenient. They wanted zero expense (hosting a forum incurs some expenses and needs a bit of time and attention), and wanted all their discussion on one place. Advertisers wanted a place where masses could be manipulated. Social media companies wanted people to interact more (read: pick more fights) and see more ads - and built their environments accordingly. Not for the public good.

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FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I proudly still use a super specialised old school online forum and it works great for those purposes.

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europeanfan122@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Make Lemmy great again!

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