What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
I hope someone is archiving that data. Lots of great small communities with great info/help.
Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
Submitted 1 year ago by tfm@europe.pub to fediverse@lemmy.world
Comments
ABetterTomorrow@lemm.ee 1 year ago
iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Reddit (and Lemmy/Mbin) is just a kind of forum.
TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Am I mistaken in saying that the new Reddit/Lemmy format of forum is to message boards, as message boards was to BBS?
tfm@europe.pub 1 year ago
And still is Reddit by far the biggest. How can we change that?
Machefi@lemm.ee 1 year 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.
Nighed@feddit.uk 1 year ago
The Reddit style voting/threading is superior of forums though.
An unfederated Lemmy instance for example would actually be really good.
tfm@europe.pub 1 year ago
Why does it need to be unfederated?
Nighed@feddit.uk 1 year ago
If you are a company looking for a forum, you want to be able to control it. Unfederated means you can control account access and don’t have to worry about someone going to All and seeing porn etc.
Federated could work, but you need to make it clear that it’s just a community on a platform.
nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
The benefit to a forum is that posts with new comments move to the top. If a Reddit/Lemmy post gets a single new comment it may or may not be seen again by anyone except the OP or of the comment was a reply then to the op of the replied comment.
Some forums do have up/down votes as well as nested comments.
Die4Ever@programming.dev 1 year ago
The benefit to a forum is that posts with new comments move to the top. If a Reddit/Lemmy post gets a single new comment it may or may not be seen again by anyone except the OP or of the comment was a reply then to the op of the replied comment.
Lemmy does have this actually
New Comments: Bumps posts to the top when they are created or receive a new reply, analogous to the sorting of traditional forums
Nighed@feddit.uk 1 year ago
You could force latest comment sort on the posts, but leave the comments sorting to the user.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Forums lifespans weren’t all that much anyways.
The real downside to everything being on StackOverflow, Reddit, Discord, etc is that it has made it easier for big tech to run their shady data collection and analysis schemes including AI Training.
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Most sites that were hosted before 2010 are gone now.
yeah, because virtually all communities moved to Discord or Reddit.
nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Most sites that were hosted before 2010 are gone now.
I hosted a forum for guilds in several games I played over the years. I had mine up from 2005-2019 but my board’s php version got way behind the host‘a and it no longer works. Someday I will find someone to help me fix it, or start a new one.
tfm@europe.pub 1 year ago
Forums lifespans weren’t all that much anyways.
Couldn’t this be much different if “web 2.0” hadn’t taken over?
Most sites that were hosted before 2010 are gone now.
Many of them are still alive but don’t get the exposure they deserve because of centralized networks.
The real downside to everything being on StackOverflow, Reddit, Discord, etc is that it has made it easier for big tech to run their shady data collection and analysis schemes including AI Training.
Right. But what can we do to get people to switch to the Fediverse and put an end to this?
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Couldn’t this be much different if “web 2.0” hadn’t taken over?
Probably not, even if you have time to maintain your site by updating it occasionally then it still falls upon individuals to fund the hosting services and hold the domain name. Even Hexbear’s domain wound up for auction a little while back because they forgot to pay their bills.
Many of them are still alive but don’t get the exposure they deserve because of centralized networks.
Since Net Neutrality has been off and on enforced, it’s generally been considered illegal to block, hide, or throttle traffic, but I agree those small sites didn’t get as much search indexing unless they paid for ads.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 1 year ago
Then my so called “friend” calls me a manbaby for freaking out about this. They are going to be policing the entire internet soon!
riskable@programming.dev 1 year ago
To be fair, both you and your friend can be correct 🤷
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 1 year ago
Yeah, it’s why my new approach to problems is “Don’t tell anyone, find a quiet place to blow your head off instead”.
tfm@europe.pub 1 year ago
That’s why we have to strengthen the fediverse!
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 year 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.
yuki2501@lemmy.world 1 year 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.
tacofox@lemm.ee 1 year ago
R.I.P the original Xbox Scene forums 💔
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 year 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.
tfm@europe.pub 1 year ago
They are both trash. How can we get more people to join Lemmy and the Fediverse?
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Keep talking about it abroad
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 year 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
maho@lemmy.funami.tech 1 year 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.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 year 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.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 1 year 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.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
joshchandra@midwest.social 1 year 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.
simple@lemm.ee 1 year 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
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Excuse me, Jabber / XMPP is about as old as I am!
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 year 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.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 1 year 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!
mars@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Newest iteration of “this meeting could have been an email” has become “this Discord could have been a wiki”.
tfm@europe.pub 1 year ago
How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I tried element a week ago after a similar discussion. Afaict, it does not fill the same niche. I’m very open to being corrected, but it doesn’t seem like element has support for multi-room communities.
Also, multi device login was extremely wonky. I’m not going to recommend something that’ll end up with me having to play tech support to get it working.
XpeeN@sopuli.xyz 1 year 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…
SupraMario@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You don’t…you go back to forums. They’re searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines
Kichae@lemmy.ca 1 year 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.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
XMPP / Jabber is better.
DioEgizio@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Matrix sucks. It barely has usable apps and it lacks basic moderation tools
riskable@programming.dev 1 year 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.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 year 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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
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jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 1 year ago
There’s a shared theme with like all of humanity’s woes: people don’t care that much.
From pollution to injustice to shitty websites, if people cared just a little more the problem would be dramatically reduced or even eliminated.
But so many people are just apathetic. Overwhelmed and checked out.