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

Comments

• Tag365@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Yeah, forums were pretty cool!

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• bizza@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I actually just launched a PHPBB forum for specific interests in regards to the indie web, building websites, and sharing random banter (among a few other things). I find Reddit and Lemmy to be useful for seeing what’s going on in the world overall, and Discord has mostly just been annoying ever since its launch, and forums seem like a good answer to recreating actual communities. And if there are more people who feel this way, maybe they’ll make a comeback (because they definitely haven’t just started to be affected by corporations attempting to centralize everyone to one thing).

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  • MECHAGIC@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Do you have a link to your forum?

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    • bizza@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Haha sorry, would have responded earlier but am stuck at work

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• espressdelivery@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m looking for a study group for a specific maths textbook I’m reading

  Discord math forum is too big and my queries get swamped so I don’t use it

  I’d appreciate some advice on this and also how to develop my federated use of the internet

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  • Itzdan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Let us know if you find something!

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    • espressdelivery@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Thank you, I’ve posted in math.lemmy to see if anything crops up

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  • tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Maybe !math@lemmy.world ?

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    • espressdelivery@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Cheers I’ll check it out and revert back

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• mint_tamas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  “Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.

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• FreakinSteve@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Funny thing…an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed

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  • Based_and_Cool@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    which one?

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    • FreakinSteve@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Its a private one that spun off from the Cakewalk user forums in 2003

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    • DontMakeMoreBabies@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Hopefully /misc… Any other refugees here? Bruh.

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• adrianhooves@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  without forums or decentralized social services i wouldn’t have met my husband

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• UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Here is a chrome extension that copies all messeges and media from a discord server you’re a part of.

  In case the stuff on a server is what keeps you coming back.

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• TragicJonson@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Let’s hope the resurrection of Digg starts to fill this void.

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  • Auli@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Digg well just be another reddit. I don’t expect VC Rose to be the saviour.

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• early_riser@lemmy.radio ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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  • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Check lemmybb.

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  • Obelix@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah, those old forum threads really were great. Many forums had threads that were discussing topics for years, all in one place. There were people posting how they were building something and they would just reply to their thread with an update. It’s a great way to collect information and better than we are doing it here

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    • Saleh@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      On the flip side, you can also have threads where people hold different conversations, but it becomes impossible to read, because you don’t get the reply-tree structure like we have here.

      Then again with reply trees you cannot easily see, which tree has the latest answer and if things are generally active or not.

      Different formats for different focuses.

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    • early_riser@lemmy.radio ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’d like to see a federated, self hostable forum platform. I believe NodeBB is implementing or has implemented activitypub, but while it’s open source it seems even less of a turnkey solution than Lemmy or Mastodon.

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• SleafordMod@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Maybe Lemmy is a 2020s version of phpBB (the forum software, which is open source like Lemmy is). Lemmy and phpBB can both be hosted by anyone, but of course the interesting thing about Lemmy is that Lemmy servers can share their content with each other.

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  • twice_hatch@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There’s gotta be federated bulletin boards around

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    • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      nodebb does this, discourse is working on AP.

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    • Suoko@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It’s called lemmybb github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB

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• Itzdan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s why I went to the Chime.In app. It’s not perfect, but it’s not Reddit

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  • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    ChimeIn is cool.

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• homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they’re in the AI bed with them.

  Your Favorite Forum still rules.

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• Gluca23@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Every forum i joined for my hobbies are always been full of shills in disguise.

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  • tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That’s sad

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• buliarous@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.

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• theblips@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Forums are still alive in ultra niche communities. My favorites: Badger and Blade for wet shaving, Snuffhouse for snuff tobacco, Quantnet for quantitative finance. All of these gather way better content and users than their Reddit counterpart, which usually devolves into memes and pic of the day stuff

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  • VolumetricShitCompressor@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    How do you discover these nowadays? Feels like finding new websites on the net has gotten so tedious.

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    • lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Search in your favorite search engine: “<specific topic> forum”

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    • theblips@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I just stumble upon them using Kagi search and phind.com

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  • TragicJonson@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Not just ultra niche, I’d say. League of Comics Geeks is an amazing site for comic book discussion. Board Game Geek has very active forums. I guess what both of those have in common is that they integrate collections and metadata with discussion.

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    • theblips@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Forgot about BGG! That one is amazing, too

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    • Based_and_Cool@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ve never went further than tracking issue releases for comic geeks but it would be great to talk comics

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• Formfiller@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  How do we create more forums?

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  • tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Lemmy communities are basically forums. So let’s post and interact more here. :)

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    • Rob1992@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      No they’re not. This is just more reddit but federated

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• NoMansCat@jlai.lu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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• shapis@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  What are we going to do about it?

  Quit whining about it and make a good community outside of those.

  Be a good community member yourself.

  I see myself coming less and less to Lemmy due to how monotopic this place is. And how aggressively stupid people here can be.

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  • faultywalnut@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Lol nice going telling people to be good community members and in the same comment calling them aggressively stupid. Maybe you’re not so stupid yourself but you need to work on your tact

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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Quit whining about it and make a good community outside of those.

    Be a good community member yourself.

    Nice. Be the change you wanna see!

    I see myself coming less and less to Lemmy due to how monotopic this place is. And how aggressively stupid people here can be.

    What happened to “quit whining”?

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  • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Consider joining a different server, .ml is blocked by a lot of other servers.

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    • jokersteve@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Is there an easy way to see the relationships of lemmy servers of the known federation? Who defederated who?

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  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    quit whining tho?

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• jadedwench@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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  • jokersteve@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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  • reiterationstation@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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 ⁨year⁩ ago

      I literally went and asked a question and someone responded “?faq” and a bit responded with the FAQs. Mind blowing. They could’ve just posted it on their GitHub page. This was for a Minecraft mod.

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  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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  • tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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    • Chreutz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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• generic_computers@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Don’t forget random Telegram groups!

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  • Rob1992@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That’s just IRC again, not a forum

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  • DontMakeMoreBabies@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I fucking hate telegram as a news/information source.

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• Spaniard@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Internet forums will come back when AI overtakes Reddit and Discord goes awry because they go public.

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  • Ironfist@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’ve been saying it for years. People should have stuck with usenet.

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    • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      lemmy is similar to usenet, in a way.

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  • tfm@europe.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Let’s hope so

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• NutWrench@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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  • princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I think in that regard, Lemmy is a forum software just like vBulletin or Discourse is. However, I would really like to see a flat forum with federation.

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    • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB

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    • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      !nodebb-development@community.nodebb.org

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  • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    defederated

    do you mean federated? Defederation is when a server blocks another.

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    • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah, probably just a typo.

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  • MasterReflection1916@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is the way. Democratize technology or be ruled by those who’d control it.

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• sfu@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • DontMakeMoreBabies@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    How funny if we revert back to tons of search engines and web rings… Frankly that might not be the worst.

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• mrodri89@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Im starting to see Lemmy isn’t any better. Mods deleting my comments for asking questions.

  Image

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  • Irelephant@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Stay away from any communities on .ml, they censor so many things.

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    • mrodri89@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Do you know if there’s a way to filter them out?

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• europeanfan122@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Make Lemmy great again!

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• nothingspecial@retrolemmy.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Decentralized and smaller platforms definitely help preserve open discussion. But when it comes to company security culture and internal comms, even forums are giving way to automation. Tools like cyberupgrade.net show how even training and risk detection are now handled without Slack threads or forum debates.

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• f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  In the USA, Section 230 protections are going away in 2027 so that should finish off any remaining forums.

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• DicJacobus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ 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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• Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It is a problem, but I think it downplays the reason those platforms got popular.

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

  2. 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.

  3. 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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• qnvx@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Honestly reddit’s (and Lemmy’s) comment formatting structure is so much better than other forums that it’s been part of the reason why I don’t want to use the other ones.

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