Fediverse

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.

I just closed my The Guardian UK version account. I used to comment on the news stories. I can no longer be arsed because of the stress it causes - 99% of comments are so damn stupid and adrift from reality. Most of the comments are from people who (1) voted Labour in order to get change despite being warned by Labour itself, as well as everyone on the Left, that it was not offering change and (2) are now belly-aching because Labour is too Rightwing for them and no better than Tories. Starmer says he 'likes and respects Trump' - what the fuck!?! Leopards are eating Labour voters' faces and they are lacting shocked? If you say so, your comment gets deleted by the moderators because we are not allowed to be truthful or challenge MSM's imaginary version of the world which is carefully curated to be cosy and profitable. Fuck 'em all.

I only want to hear from people willing to face reality. I need to find a community that is living in the real world not in some self-indulgent fantasy in their head like most British voters seem to be. I reckon that the age of social media is dead because the age of comfort is over. It was fine wasting time on posting nonsense when you were not watching a coup or seeing WW3 developing in real time or could still believe that whatever happened online, offline life was ticking over normally and you could still feed yourself, access housing, get healthcare, rely on benefits if you were sick or old. All of that safety in real life is gone - so to survive this shock we bunker-down and that means finding your village to shelter with because who wants to bunk with Nazis or cultists?

There will still be social media going forward but it will be fragmented because in times of war, you take a side and you do not fraternise with the enemy. Anyone lamenting this is pretending we still live in the past when you could get along with others and 'two side' debates because actually you agreed on 90% of stuff and were disputing details. Now we dispute the nature of reality and fundamental morality and there is no two sides to such existential matters. I mean it has been brewing for almost a decade (i.e. in the west, started much longer ago in places like Russia and 'untruth no reality stop-think' probably infected the west from those places) - ever since the rise of 4chan and bizarre conspiracy theorists started undermining reason, was turbo-charged by the pandemic, and started to infect reality via stuff like brexit and MAGA. There is no excuse to be surprised that we are here, it was clearly signposted for years.

I know it is the Far-Right who brought us to this crisis but as a radical Leftist I say 'bring it on!' You started this conflict, I am determined people like me will win it. I just need to find my comrades and unite in push-back. I get my inspiration from democracy protests like those currently happening in Serbia, Greece, Turkiye. Why is there nothing like that scale of reaction in USA or UK? Because most people in those places are still feeling comfortable and do not grasp the reality of the crisis they are in. They will not react until it is too late. They frustrate me past expression!

I needed to vent.

I proudly still use a super specialised old school online forum and it works great for those purposes.

Indeed, especially since both (Reddit more than Discord admittedly) give out blanket bans on a whim and that means being blocked off from the modern internet, the stakes are too damn high.

Though what do they mean "Disappearing", isn't this like pulling the alarm because you just learned "There's not that many dinosaurs left"

Indeed, forums are almost gone. In particular, I miss one forum about science fiction, one about aeromodelism, one about electric vehicles (another still exists) and one about anarchism. An interesting hold-out in the country where I live, is a military forum, where rules say that respectful discussion is the only kind of discussion accepted - ironically, the military forum has a peaceful atmosphere. But it could come crashing down much easier than a social media company.

As for why forums disappeared - I think that people became too convenient. They wanted zero expense (hosting a forum incurs some expenses and needs a bit of time and attention), and wanted all their discussion in one place. Advertisers wanted a place where masses could be manipulated. Social media companies wanted people to interact more (read: pick more heated arguments) and see more ads - and built their environments accordingly. Not for the public good.

I think the most urgent job is getting rid of algorithmically steered social media - sites where one can't know why something appears on one's feed.

I believe this is what they call "preaching to the choir".

Fuck discord and fuck reddit.

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?

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.

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.

https://tad-lispy.com/club/

To be clear, I'm advertising the idea, not membership.

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.

Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.

Firefox can translate websites locally now.

Make Lemmy great again!

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

What can we do? What can we do about Meta and Xitter and Reddit? Just try to show people that there's another side where the grass actually is greener and invite them to join.

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

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.