cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930199
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
Well written, interesting article.
Really getting momentum from Reddit will be tough though. Our main advantage is that we have the rest of the Fediverse as a potential user base, and existing forum apps that also activate apub; reducing network effects. If the Fediverse has momentum, so has the threadiverse.
tl;dr the internet didn’t used to be about making money, it was a place where people created all kinds of content, for almost no reason at all, and almost nobody was making any money, except AOL which blew all their money on CDs probably
the other users forced me to do it by moving
How did we move from usenet to forums?
Browsers and the internet protocols are were pretty sweet, man
Didn’t usenet also have a lot of spam problems associated with it?
Everything had spam problems 😅
Hosting a forum costs money, and we ain’t got that
There were plenty of free forum hosts back in the day. (edit: just did a search and there are still free forum hosts)
But then social media came out, and everyone got addicted to the gamified dopamine mechanics like upvotes and shit. So now everything has to have upvotes, or likes, or whatever other stupid bullshit shit that has absolutely ruined human interaction and discourse and is single handedly to blame for the extremity in modern discourse, because the need to drive clicks and upvotes leads to extreme polarization where no common sense, honest discussion can be held.
because you either 100% agree with me (upvote) or you are a baby killing bastard who disagrees with me (downvote), and there can be no middle ground! /s
Even with a free forum host, it’s difficult to keep things running for a long time.
Awhile back I was unsatisfied with how quickly my (new) furniture was degrading, and found a furniture forum run by a guy in the biz. So much knowledge on there about different furniture and how to actually find quality stuff that will last decades.
The owner retired this week, and he had been paying for an IT contract to do basic maintenance / upgrades on the forum (I think he started on a free host, but as it got bigger he eventually had to move it). He needed IT help basically to apply security patches and do upgrades. He’s stated that he no longer plans to pay for the maintenance contract. I’m guessing the forum will disappear soon.
Have you suggested them to move to Lemmy?
Great post!
boomers figured out the other mediums.
No, boomers invented forums (and the internet itself). Millenials invented Web 2.0 (as they called it), the corporate takeover of the internet.
The same way you moved from reddit to here. Dissatisfaction and momentum.
I still post on Wil Wheaton’s old phpBB forum from time to time. Nobody else does, though. :(
Does he post on there? Lol
No. He’s on Tumblr.
Yeah. Federating forums seem like a useful feature to keep them going. The forum style has it benefits that the discord and reddit style lacks. Sadly a forum I used a lot for my community is now in its final days, even if it managed to last a lot longer than others
Maybe ask if they’re willing to switched over to lemmy? You can sort like a forum does. Long shot but hey…
true. I didn’t consider that. That would could work. Lemmy is a lot more advanced in that regard. Currently the best ideas are Discord and give up, and the original owners are done with the idea, but I could try and create a spiritual successor on here. Lemmy suffers a bit from the same isues as Forums with lack of people, but I only need to convince the OGs. I need to think about that, and a forum from 2004 whose software is a decade out of date is easy to beat in that regard
Also thanks for creating this awesome instance.
Also tools like Lemmy Federate can help broaden the reach and allow more people on Lemmy to discover your communities, since communities and their content doesn’t get federated until someone is subscribed to them.
I was going to bring up this post, but it’s actually yours
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28227815?scrollToComments=true
Usenet and bbs erasure.
Usenet is still useful for… other things 🏴☠️
carrier pigeon erasue.
I was considering mentioning that GenX stuff, but I felt it was too obscure and would only serve to posture my creds :)
Your creds could be diminished based on which usenet forums you frequented. I had a little while in my 90s youth obsessed with researching marihuana, libertarian ideals, and discrediting Scientology in the alt.scientology groups. Not great, kind of normal for usenet, but there were much darker places to inhabit there. Worst of all was posting from my university account with my real name.
Usenet is where I discovered slack.
Forums still exist, there only for extremely niche things though…Like high powered flashlights
Here in Germany the forum culture is still somewhat alive, social media did take a big cut though.
I wish retro gaming was niche enough for nintendoage and assemblergames to still be around…
Somethingawful is still going strong, even after Lowtax died.
Out of all the things, Reddit is probably still the best for flashlight purchasing advice.
ah yes, the age old tale of “the internet sucks and people are stupid”
If you’ve ever tried hosting a web based solution you’ll know exactly what i mean. The entirety of web hosting is a disaster. The entire mountain of web code is a nightmare, and the collection of website based frameworks do nothing more than burn electricity and man hours to create a fucking button on a screen.
as for discord, i haven’t puzzled that one out yet, i don’t understand. Probably lazy developers and the community aspect, it’s a forum, but free, and worse. And now you can shitpost with random people you don’t even know!
Personally, i believe that enshittifcation is an inevitability. You put somebody in a room with something, and when you take them out, that thing will somehow have gotten more complex, and thus probably worse.
Isn’t discord just shittier, proprietary IRC? I’m only on it because my Linux distro’s dev uses it for communication for some reason, but from what I can tell, it’s just a locked-down IRC client you can buy emojis and shit on.
Discord, at one point, was better than a lot of other app on the market, and they were one of the first where you could just create an account and join any group, for free.
It became the standard, and now we’re stuck with that shit
eventually people are going to have to wisen up to the VC funding strategy. It’s not going to last forever, i hope.
In an ideal world yes, but we’ve learned nothing from the Dotcom bubble, or the 2008 housing bubble.
If there is money to be made, history will repeat itself.
Don’t hold your breath on the whole “wisening up to the VC funding” thing. People today still believe the moon landing was somehow faked to own the libs or something silly like that.
Much easier access.
You make a reddit account or a discors account and you have limited access to thousands of forums.
Imagine giving your email address and making a password and solving a captcha hundreds of times instead. Who would choose to?
And don’t even get me started on the ease of operating these subreddits and discord channels instead of building and hosting websites.
I’m on 3 active forums and 2 lemmies and 2 mastos and I just leave myself logged in. It’s nothing like that. Somehow that’s still a better user experience than discord
Discord and Reddit also had uniquely improved their UIs over the existing options.
Until that API nonsense I was always using old.reddit because the redesign was ass.
Discord is cool tho, better than skype gui for sure.
I don’t know, but every fucking group’s reliance on Discord pisses me off. I’m very much into modding my games, the problem is that every damn mod author wants to do support only on Discord, which means probably more than half of my 200 servers are just for that.
Man you said it. I despise discord. My gaming group will post things in the chat, and if you ever want to look at something again it’s a pain in the ass to find it
yep. it’s free and easy, and becoming the default. :|
I really don’t get how one is supposed to use more than one server. As in, how to spread one’s attention to feel like one is present in so many places. It’s a total non-starter for me.
Seriously. I don’t mind it as a platform for socialising, but it’s terrible as a support platform, and it goes against the idea of open and accessible information.
We trusted corporations.
I’d like to think we’ve collectively learned our lessons, but watching people migrate from Reddit to fucking Discord makes me think that we really have not and probably never will.
Corpos are spending countless resources to infiltrate anything with as much as a iota of traction so that they can bleed the cow cash dry and sell its carcass for money.
Even if you distrust the corpos and want them to die, the majority of the population has so much trouble just surviving that its hard to raise up against that bullshit
VC backed user experience
