I think federation and decentralization work well for email and text-messaging platforms like XMPP and Matrix because those platforms inherently benefit from being decentralized. They work almost seamlessly with federation.
Forums, on the other hand, don’t really need a federated system. Just look at Lemmy and how many communities defederate from one another because of ideological disagreements. When there’s that much defederation, the entire concept starts to feel pointless. Suddenly, you can’t use your account across “Lemmy” because several instances have decided they don’t like each other anymore.
If this much fragmentation is going to happen naturally, how is federation supposed to be the sustainable future of forums?
I think this is a fair criticism of federated forums. You don’t see this same level of fragmentation with email or text messaging.
Centralized but well-moderated forums are what really matter. Federation doesn’t protect good or useful speech, quality moderation does. And by its nature, Lemmy lacks that.
I personally love the way the .Zip admins handled it, both for Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip. Defederate a very short number of instances (https://lemmy.zip/instances https://piefed.zip/instances?filters=blocked ), hide new joiners unfriendly instances by default for new users onboarding, but still allow people to unhide it.
https://lemmy.zip/post/50200106
That gives enough freedom to power users while still being welcoming for new joiners.
Also, is there any centralized forum that is more active than the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/Pylova/Mbin)?
It looks like there are on the order of maybe 20-30k total monthly active users of the threadiverse, though I had to cobble this together from a few sources, so if you have any solid numbers I’d love to see them.
As much drama as there is/was, the Something Awful Forums are a Web 1.0 old school centralized forum which has been around for over a quarter of a century and is still going. At their peak they had hundreds of thousands of users.
I don’t think the argument that in order to host a large forum, you need to be decentralized holds any water. I know you’re not directly making that argument but I’ve seen others make it in their replies.
Looks like the Threadiverse is ~45k. So, relatively stable and up year-over-year. Peak would have been 2023-07-17 at 76585 MAU (Lemmy + Mbin/Kbin; during the Reddit 3rd party exodus?).
In the current world where most of the forum discussion happen on Reddit, there is little space left for another active centralized forum.
The decentralized approach has at least the pro to offer something different (you can leave for another instance instead of depending on a single corporation for access).
Creating another centralize Reddit brings exactly the same issues current Reddit has (enshittification), and you don’t even have the userbase to make up for it. Digg 2.0 launch was messed up, but even if they managed better it would be very difficult for them to get enough traction to really compete.
Bluesky is better that Twitter in a lot of aspect, but it stills fails to replace it, and the network effect keep bringing people back to Twitter to see “what is happening”.
Vicinus replied in the other comment for numbers.
I strongly disagree, and there are tons of other centralized forums that are doing just fine. They’re not as big as Reddit but some have an order of magnitude (at least) more users than Lemmy does.
There are lots of ways to offer something different, and new upstarts have been able to gain traction by offering something different countless times in the past.
Especially if we’re talking about a forum for the masses with a high number of users, the vast majority of those users simply don’t care about centralization vs federation.
I was talking mostly about generalist forums. Indeed topic-specific forums are still active, but that’s not something OP’s forum, Reddit or the Threadiverse tries to do.
I just checked https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php , it shows 2,369 users logged in. A single instance like Lemmy.world has 4880 daily active users.
Fecesbook, Shitter, and LickedIn came to my mind first.
Then there are Reddit and Tumblr and a couple more.
But all of these are worse experiences than the Fediverse. And I believe that’s because the Fediverse is federated.
That’s unrelated. Correlation doesn’t prove causation. It’s fair to say you haven’t seen a high-quality centralized forum, but that doesn’t mean one can’t exist.
Either way, I’m pointing to a real issue with Lemmy that you seem to have overlooked: what happens when instances defederate over ideological or other differences?
Their users get a better user experience.
What are you talking about? What ‘better user experience’? If defederation means communities disappear from each other, why not just use regular forums? They’re already fragmented. Either way, you can’t use your account across defederated Lemmy instances, so you end up with the same thing as regular forums, just with extra steps.
The main reason I picked .zip was the lack of defederation. There’s definitely content here I don’t want to see and do hide, but I’m suprised how many people here (Lemmings? Piefeddies?) are happy to delegate that task to an instance admin.
It’s my role to determine what content I see, no one else’s.
No communities I want to see have ever disappeared. Just choose your instance wisely and all is okay.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn don’t follow the Reddit / Threadiverse structure based on communities
Fecesbook does. Over there, communities are called “groups”, but it’s the same thing. I’m surprised if LickedIn doesn’t do the same.
I’ll give it a look
topicle.com also active
It seems to have 1k subs on https://topicle.com/t/topicle/
Is there any benefit compared to something like https://discuit.org/ ?
Have (really) good app, have intuitive features, and everything is so polished as though it’s been operating for years and founder still really active to develop compared to discuit
Let’s see. I’m afraid it would go the same way than Discuit and Tildes: there’s motivation at first as the userbase grows, then after a while the motivation drops and the project gets stagnant.
Idk about tildes, but discuit since beginning the founder himself always moving too slow, this is why i abandoned it early
Tildes has recently announced they will not add any more features nor actively seek new members and will simply die if that’s where it’s headed.
Chad is an odd dude.
They really have potential when reddit exodus began and i really don’t mind tildes dont have image upload featured, but tildes refusal to open sign up made me realize tildes basically serves as deimos’s playground
Such a shame they guy that making rif app wasting his time developed app for that turd
I think that is not the reason. No mod logs, Chad as the sole admin and mod, and bans without reason.
If you delete Chad, make Tildes moderation open, and add actual moderation not banning because poor Chad got his feelings hurt you got a great app.
It is pretty easy to get in, I think adopting Lobsters’ user tree might be a better option though.
I can only think of Lobste.rs and Tildes.
I have a look at Tildes from time to time, it’s definitely less active than here. Same for discuit.org which has been stable at 200 weekly active users for quite a while.
Frankly Tildes was my favorite until I got banned. Which seems to be a trend for many Tildes users. You got to learn to love the fascist bomb or kick it.
Hacker news, something awful, tons of special interest forums for things like cooking, cars, travel, etc. I’m sure there are many more that I’m not aware of.