Submitted 2 weeks ago by tfm@europe.pub to fediverse@lemmy.world
What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
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.
Agree. And there are cultural issues in forums that make them really annoying. Some forums like to consolidate topics into mega threads like “if you have questions about xyz go to the xyz mega thread”. Then you go there and its a 300 page chronology starting in 2008 of completely disorganized conversation. 20 posts per page with no way to read it more easily.
You could do that on reddit with a pinned post but usually mega threads were at least limited to daily/weekly/monthly instead of indefinite.
20 posts per page? lol. I think usually it was 10.
Don’t forget profile pictures and signatures making every post take up way more screen space than they should.
I agree with you. It can become frustrating to learn to find information on classic forums.
Discourse based forums are quite nice imo. See ubports one for examle
Fuck discord and fuck reddit.
Let’s do that and get more people to join the Fediverse!
Discord, Reddit and Lemmy are bad choices for forums. If you want ANY useful information to stick, put it on forums you know are gonna get indexed and archived reliably. Reddit is indexable but there’s no guarantee the page will still be there when you search for it through Google.
Discord is completely unindexable so any information that exists on a server that gets deleted is lost forever.
Lemmy is a half-way house. As far as I know it’s kinda indexable but not really.
Discord is bad because its forums are not world-readable, therefore not indexable. It’s very useful to the rest of the world to have conversations be public. I bet the youngest users here don’t even remember but searching Google in the 2000s before Facebook went huge and when forums were all world-readable, it was a different world. You could find somebody who was talking about your niche issue/product - no matter what it was. It was kind of magical. No matter what thing happened to you, you could be pretty sure it had happened to someone else and they were talking about it.
Not anymore. Everything’s on Facebook now and Google can’t see it, nor can anyone else - except Facebook. All that legacy knowledge just tucked away in Facebook’s data vault and essentially useless to anybody but Facebook, which makes it less than useless.
Looks like Lemmy has great indexabiliy: www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aeurope.pub
europe.pub is only about two weeks old and hundreds of pages have already been indexed. Currently setting up the Google Search Console to get more details.
Lemmy is as indexable as Reddit.
Not only that, the ongoing discussion format means all knowledge is in the same place and people don’t need to keep asking the same question over and over by creating new posts and you don’t end up with the same conversation happening in three different branches of the same post like on Reddit/Lemmy.
Funny thing…an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed
which one?
Its a private one that spun off from the Cakewalk user forums in 2003
Hopefully /misc… Any other refugees here? Bruh.
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Firefox can translate websites locally now.
Sadly it’s not possible to provide links using Firefox Translate. People would have to translate it themselves (i.e. opening in a browser and clicking translate). Depending on the device they likely wouldn’t bother.
Yes.
But you could also leave a link to the source. :-)
Not all languages
It has spanish to english though, at least on my machine.
Recently I’ve created a private forum and so far I’m very happy with it. It’s nice that our discussions are private, keeping data gobblers, programmatic advertisers, grifters and other schmucks like this out in the cold.
To be clear, I’m advertising the idea, not membership.
That’s cool! Was it hard to set it up?
Technically? Not very much, but I’m handy with NixOS. The hardest part was the configuration of a mail server. I should probably blog about the setup process. But of course the real work is attracting people and keeping them engaged.
What can we do? What can we do about Meta and Xitter? Just try to show people that there’s another side where the grass actually is greener and invite them to join.
Yeah, except most people suck.
Last time I mentioned lemmy I was almost banned.
Have your friends on your own website
I’ve asked them several times and they have declined.
Always a great idea!
Everytime I want to look for modern solutions to newer projects online it’s always in the damn discord. I have like 20 discords in folders just because I feel like I’ll need them to troubleshoot eventually.
That’s really unfortunate
I’m not the best “tech writeup” person, but I might start posting my random issues on Lemmy just so it can be found later just in case Discord goes away too.
On the “up-side” now Console gamers can all be in the voice chat together regardless of platforms
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
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.
I’ve never went further than tracking issue releases for comic geeks but it would be great to talk comics
Forgot about BGG! That one is amazing, too
How do you discover these nowadays? Feels like finding new websites on the net has gotten so tedious.
I just stumble upon them using Kagi search and phind.com
Search in your favorite search engine: “<specific topic> forum”
plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.
The Reddit style voting/threading is superior of forums though.
An unfederated Lemmy instance for example would actually be really good.
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.
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
You could force latest comment sort on the posts, but leave the comments sorting to the user.
Why does it need to be unfederated?
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.
“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.
No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they’re in the AI bed with them.
Your Favorite Forum still rules.
How do we create more forums?
Lemmy communities are basically forums. So let’s post and interact more here. :)
No they’re not. This is just more reddit but federated
most of them, but alot of them for niche subjects are still there. theres one i go to where people were banned from reddit (tons of accounts used for linking, OF and advert) basiclaly they are reporting thier experiences the same way here as right there. medical forums is still alive though, as are "joining the military"ones.
DSLReports is gone NotebookReview is gone, and more are disappearing each year. It’s sad to see.
im in a forum that specifically for social media , how to get around bans or how to “make money” using those ban evasion methods.
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.
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”?
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
quit whining tho?
Consider joining a different server, .ml is blocked by a lot of other servers.
Is there an easy way to see the relationships of lemmy servers of the known federation? Who defederated who?
Internet forums will come back when AI overtakes Reddit and Discord goes awry because they go public.
I’ve been saying it for years. People should have stuck with usenet.
lemmy is similar to usenet, in a way.
Let’s hope so
Met my wife on a little internet forum called 9chat. Right before it disappeared.
These little spaces on the internet were quite nice to be. Always seeing the same people. It has a different feeling.
Decentralising social media will have its positives. When one tries to control public opinion, people can flee to another one for example.
That’s why we have to make sure the Fediverse is the future!
It’s been 1 week since I found out about Lemmy, liking it quite a bit.
I wonder, is there an area on this social media that are extremist pro free speech?
Such as, okay you’re being a total shithead, I still won’t ban you.
I’m just curious if spaces such as that even exist, and if they do, what they lead to.
Then my so called “friend” calls me a manbaby for freaking out about this. They are going to be policing the entire internet soon!
That’s why we have to strengthen the fediverse!
To be fair, both you and your friend can be correct 🤷
Yeah, it’s why my new approach to problems is “Don’t tell anyone, find a quiet place to blow your head off instead”.
My first real social experience on the internet was on php forums. There are still such forums around and I am still part of a few.
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.
There’s gotta be federated bulletin boards around
It’s called lemmybb github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
nodebb does this, discourse is working on AP.
Don’t forget random Telegram groups!
Was this article written 10 years ago?
without forums or decentralized social services i wouldn’t have met my husband
That not all, search engine too are killing internet. They become worst ad time pass. You can’t even found again some piece of info which is still here on a forum or something. Google prefer to send you to a reddit which doesn’t answer you question than on a forum which has the specific answer and that you found some years ago. It fell like search engine are purposely killing old plateforme even if they are still up.
Not everything.
I hate that Discord id being used as a forum replacement because it’s fucking terrible for it. There’s pretty much no way to collate and archive information in a way that is actually useful.
Push Lemmy out there. Help Lemmy grow. Lemmy has a few issues that need addressed;
The Name needs changed, you see who shows up when you search Lemmy. The easiest thing to do is switch it to “Lemme” (Sounds like “Let Me”, like just lemme post this) or Lemy.
Lemmy needs an app that is just as easy as Reddit to sign up for. It needs to drop on the person’s computer desktop and sign them into a default federation that auto accepts everyone. The initial signup process is confusing to people, with the website listing different federation and having to apply and wait. Some auto accept, people need to be pointed to those.
europeanfan122@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Make Lemmy great again!