What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
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.
Fuck Discord
I’m sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying “it’s worrying.”
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.
I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I’m very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.
Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I’m not arguing with them, I’ll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.
(It’s a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)
Never played the game and probably never will, but I wanted to say this anyways: stay awesome!
It’s people like you, who do stuff out of passion and not monetary gain, that made the internet so great.
Thank you! :) It’s definitely a passion project for me, because I love the game so much.
I appreciate the people who run the forum for the Emergency! Game series. It’s where I found the info on now to run multiplayer on Emergency! 3
i still play RA2, apperently there isnt a primary forum for it, but people still play the modded version.
I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago.
That’s cool!
People still keep using this trash!
Why? I mean if it can be destroyed on a whimp again should be reason enough to not use it again.
I’d say its mostly convenience. Discord is easier to use on mobile devices and provides voice chat.
I don’t mind Discord for smaller groups of friends I know in real life, but larger groups end up with so many notifications that I end up ignoring the app. A forum would feel a lot nicer, like it’s not a chore to keep up with things.
Yeah it’s really not fit for purpose, I have every server I’m in muted
Agreed. In general people seem to like centralised platforms. They don’t want to sign up on another site for a specific purpose. They stick to what they know unless there’s good reason to change (mostly peer/ad/social media pressure I feel like).
In a way Lemmy is similar in that it’s a single platform to access all types of content. Given most people don’t care about the technical “how”, I can see why they like Discord and Reddit.
Similar. I had a community from 2001 onward where I was variously an admin and a mod over the decades. A lot of us drifted apart from being kids exploring the internet to adults with families and careers.
But mainly the guy that took over the code maintenance became the sole admin in 2018 and he just chased everyone off the site debatebroing with increasingly racist and misogynistic rants. Dude I played games with and talked with online for 20 years started calling me a genocidal enslaver for trying to explain CRT and want solar power in America.
I kind of don’t ever want a family or a career because it seems like you lose out on the ability to do anything fun
I did a lot of the fun in my teens and twenties, and then realized I wanted a family and was lucky to find a career that fit.
It’s definitely a challenge to find a balance though so it can often feel like a trade-in. But if you’re honest with yourself it doesn’t have to be nor an unwanted change.
I feel like the way Society is built makes it impossible to have a family and have fun in your life, and careers are basically dead. We have to figure out how to make it work because I’m certainly in no hurry to make raising kids the only thing I do with the rest of my life
I get you. For me after my grandparents passed I realized I wanted to be a grandparent. So I gotta play by some of society’s stupid rules to see if I can see that through.
Careerwise: biggest thing for me was jumping into public service and working in local government–in America, no less. Now I work remotely and have a well-compensated union-represented government job with a pension that doesn’t require me to do management or have a medical or law degree.
I knew to steer clear of the Fed too, and that’s paid off in spades.
All in all though as a former kid and current parent: kids need their cool aunts and uncles, related or not, out there having fun not making them cousins. So there’s zero shame in having no rush or desire for trying to strike that balance.
I played the shit out of I-War 2 decades back now… Cracking game that was :D
I solute you for your “stubborness”
Forums are where I learned literally everything about technology I know now. Every hack, jailbreak, method of bypassing something, building, literally anything I’ve done around my tech hobbies. Pi hole, emulation in the late 90s, how to use Photoshop, how to run Linux from a USB, everything I’ve learned from forums. I’m sad to think that me joining certain discords help deliver the death knell to the concept of forums.
Subreddits were not a problem before since they were accessible on the web without needing an account. But now reddit is gradually locking them down behind authwalls and things like not letting search engines index (other than Google).
Lemmy communities dont have this problem and because lemmy is federated, its resistant to such enshittification (plus you can easily create your own lemmy instance for only your team). So imo they are a good alternative to forums (and reddit) and a good solution to this problem.
Reddit is shadow banning people in droves for bad upvotes
This is unironically on reddit right now. People lamenting a place like Lemmy doesn’t exist.
I’m less worried about Discord, honestly.
The worst is Discord. It doesn’t show up in search engines and somehow you have to know that is where you are “supposed” to go for help. Privacy issues aside, I am fine with discord for playing games with friends or big conventions/LAN parties, but I don’t understand why anyone would use it as a forum.
What are we going to do about it?
Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they’ve showed up starting in the early 90s. They don’t want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.
If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there’s enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.
The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don’t fit into a box. It’s that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can’t hold the castle once it’s being assaulted by the normies.
So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It’s for the best.
100% agreed.
Every time I bring this up I get accused for gatekeeping or something.
I’m not averse to new users coming to lemmy, that’s great, no problem.
I am resistant however to the idea that lemmy needs more users and that those users should come from reddit.
Lemmy could do with more content, but a huge influx of users probably wouldn’t be great.
oh this is a good take
I disagree. Email is still perfectly usable and helpful because we simply filter out the commercial stuff. The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad. Luigi Luigi Luigi. I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.
The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad.
Many people, including a large chunk of Lemmy, are perfectly fine with censored discussions. They honestly want it that way…as long as the discussion is censored such that it agrees with their opinion.
I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.
It’s extremely difficult to free people from things that they want.
It’s frustrating but true.
To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed. The rhetoric makes the space becomes completely unserious; just not a good environment.
The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.
I am not going to argue in terms of right/wrong because I’m just not equipped to. But in terms of platform result, I do not want to participate on a 4Chan clone - because it always leads to unserious discussion, bad faith, and death.
To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed.
In the forum days those users would get attacked and / or blocked by other users. If they caused enough havoc for long enough then the mods / admins would step in. The expectation NOW is that the mods / admins will actively monitor every post and comment in order to remove disagreeable content before it can be seen. That’s quite the change over the last 20 years!
The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.
“Mirror” is probably more apt than you realize. IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave. I’m not blaming you or saying that you’re wrong, I’m just pointing out the difference.
I agree that all forums require some level of moderation in order to keep from turning into total troll-fests however there’s a wide chasm between moderating someone because they won’t stop posting racial slurs and moderating someone because they’re going against the grain / hivemind.
There’s a lot of nuance to be had here, but it’s a conversation for another time.
You bring up something interesting though
IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave.
I wonder if this is because people view these spaces as a home or a “third place”. Like if someone did something offensive in your home, you would indeed ask (or force) them to leave.
People also find it insanely difficult to “leave” because all of their friends are on the platform. Since it’s almost never open-protocol, that means being locked to said space - so you can only get people you don’t like to leave.
We generally agree the moderation has become overbearing. I would argue most of it is straight up ineffective and performative. We need actual data and science backing moderation policies, not just “this feels good”.
Email is a poor analogy because that’s direct communication.
As an aside, I work as a consultant and clients are getting scammed via email all the time. Email is responsible for a lot of heart ache and heavy losses.
Regardless, you might be able to filter newsletters from bills in your email inbox but how do you filter out Russian disinformation farms from reddit?
I think the idea that the internet might usher in a new information age is dead. Long dead. The internet solved the problem of access to information but now we just produce lots of bad information.
I have been questioning in the last few month what can i do, i agree, the old internet is not the way, but for me tech and the internet has become a dirty word and somewhere i no longer want to be.
I have become quite conscious of my where my money goes, i also probs need to be more conscious of where my internet traffic goes and where i can support grassroots (online) communities.
Yup. I loved Mastodon when it was niche. Then people wanted out of Twitter when Musk bought it. A lot turned up on my Mastodon and it turned to shit fast - they did not know how to communicate normally. It was all junk postings for likes, as if they could game algorithms to be popular and then monetise it. They did not know how to just share stuff for its own sake instead of as a product. I still have my Mastodon account but I never use it. Now Bluesky is drawing these people, maybe Mastodon is pleasant again - it is like living in a tourism hotspot, during tourist season life is shit but its great in the off-season.
Capitalism is the problem, not social media per se. And when capitalism infects stuff, I move on. That is not a new problem. Every innovation in modernity gets appropriated by capitalism (capitalists even claim that capitalism invented it but often they do not invent, they only commercially exploit something and conflate ‘marketing a product’ with ‘inventing a technology’). To stop this appropriation, you need laws and regulations, and enforcement to see the rules are kept. That means governments pushing back on predatory capitalism. EU is starting to do this. UK is not. Not sure about other countries around globe. It feels like governments are decades overdue in defending society from these parasites but better late than never?
Back in mid 00s I created a forum for fellow classmates to share notes, info on exams and whatever. It was active for a year or a bit more, then someone set up a Facebook page for our group and the forum died in about a month. I could not understand why people migrated so quickly, Facebook group was atrocious when it comes to search functions, any files, notes or anything you didn’t download immediatelly were lost to time never to be seen again. If the forum is still up I’m sure I’d still be able to easily download exam schedules and all notes from all the classes there, with Facebook it was a pain even a week after someone posted. There is something fundamentally wrong with society if an inferior product can sweep the board so easily. People do not care about quality or usefulness of anything, all that matters is marketing and trends.
People are lazy. Getting people to sign up for a forum has a much MUCH higher inertia than just clicking join in a group on a platform they already have an account for.
People will subsequently evidently just “deal” with it’s inadequacies.
Reddit has the same advantage, you have one account and subsequently have access to a billion and then some communities. Ditto for Discord versus self hosted solutions like Teamspeak.
Lemmy kind of adresses all of this, but actual forum software I think is still mostly the same as it was in the early to mid 2000’s when I used it. It’s demise is a shame but not a surprise.
The people who made phpBB didn’t, so far as I know, have teams of behavioural psychologists gaming out how best to sell us ads and waste infinite amounts of our time.
I was a ‘early adopter’ for technology most of my life. I tried Facebook when it was new. As soon as I signed up for an account, I saw how it was abusive - taking away my choices, treating me like a farmed animal being milked for data. I signed up. And immediately started the process to cancel my account. They tried every trick to stop me closing my account. I do not know if it ever was closed! I did the same with everything else that was new and closed all of it very quickly as it was almost always abusive or time-wasting in some way.
The only stuff I stick with is stuff I consider ethical - which is why I am using Mastodon and Lemmy not commercialised social media. And I tend to use that episodically and then get frustrated and stop using it for months before another flurry of use. Why do I use social media? I guess I use it when I am scared and need reassurance from others. Why do I stop? When I do not get the community care I need. We talk about ‘loneliness epidemic’ in contemporary society. I am not sure its ‘loneliness’ - I live alone and like it. What I feel is fear. Maybe we are ashamed to admit it. I am not ashamed to say it - the prospect of fascism, WW3, loss of a ‘safety net’ does frighten me. It is rational to be afraid! When afraid, you look for others who also feel threatened and you test to see ‘do they have my back?’ If there’s a sense of safety, mutual support, you stay. If there is not, you move on.
Social media ‘works’ if it solves real life problems, if it does not help you stop using it. Sure, kids with no real worries because they are protected by adults can post rubbish online for ‘shits and giggles’ but anyone aged 14 or older quickly loses that privilege as they move into adult life and then they use social media differently - for fun, yes, but also it must help you survive by giving you ideas, comfort, information, encouragement, escape for a bit etc. If it only adds abuse to a hard life, who has the energy for it?
Great comment, I don’t have anything to add just wanted to say so.
You are right, but as I sit here and use Lemmy, I can’t help but think while being a perfectly functional forum, it lacks aesthetics. What I’m looking at is Windows 1997 High contrast text editor. It tickles my nostalgia, but I can see why Reddit has a broader appeal. People like gimmicks, as much as they like aesthetics and simplicity.
Yeah, while aesthetics is typically considered a side-effect of your choice of client, i think Lemmy should offer prettier aesthetics to choose from. In the menu:
You always gotta think about use lazy users too. Settings are great but you actually need to draw people into a level they want to customize. I’m almost there thanks for the heads up! I’m coming from the lemmy.world url. It’s not bad it’s just not good. It’s great for us older folks but I can see where it would create an age gap. The trend of people who enjoy windows 97 UI is declining.
check https://alexandrite.app/ and https://phtn.app/
There’s also https://vger.app/ for mobile.
omg totally, I hate that people do that. I don’t see a way out without introducing digital literacy classes at schools
Every forum I used before Reddit even existed is still active (hell, PHPBB was updated as recently as November!) and new platforms, like Lemmy, pop up all the time . IDK what the fuck these articles are talking about. Maybe they just don’t know how to actually find anything on the web? 🤷🏻♂️
I think it’s more about the scale. 80% or more of the content gets created on Reddit or alike, probably.
Barely any content is created on Reddit. It’s an aggregate site where 90% of the posts are links to other sites, just like Lemmy. Even most of the memes/image macros are unoriginal and taken from somewhere else.
I have to disagree. I have seen a lot of helpful question/answer Style content there which was only there.
well maybe on certain (mainstream?) subs, but tech subs like those that do something with selfhosting have a lot of discussions. including in the comments of posts that point to external content!
its a shame that there’s no lemmy instance thats basically a mirror of a few reddit subs (or is there?)
I’m not sure if it’s a Lemmy feature or voyager feature. But under the settings, there’s a migrate subreddits. It pulls across the subreddits you are subscribed to and matches them to ones on Lemmy.
afaik that just auto-subscribes you to a popular lemmy-alternatives of your communities
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I for one would want a more open source system where a single guy running a server doesn’t have all the power in the forum. It would be awesome if a fedi form of forums took over and one could replicate all the info as relays.
So you basically mean something like Lemmy but for forums?
But isn’t Lemmy already a forum-like (i guess) platform? Like there are boards (or whatever they are called here, i don’t remember, “subreddits”) about discussing some topic and you can make threads discussing said topic. Bam, a forum, right?
Or do forums have something that Lemmy (or at this point Reddit) don’t?
I’d also call it a forum format. Btw subreddits are simply called communities here :)
Content aggregators are not forums. Just having categories doesn’t really cover it. CAs are designed so that old posts fall away quickly, so that people will keep posting new top level content and keep people emgaged in the constant scroll, much like Twitter or Facebook. They are largely unstructured, with different “categories” behaving quasi-independently from one another.
Forums are structured spaces where the same people post stuff to the same categories, that are mostly offshoots of the forum’s core theme.
People interact with and behave rather differently in these different contexts.
Yup. But also note that Lemmy is not redundant. You can bring back this channel but without our conversation. We need redundancy and replication.
Isn’t NodeBB compatible with the Fediverse by now?
Haven’t heard about NodeBB yet but it looks awesome! Also, yes it looks like it’s supporting federation.
Message Boards are fundamentally different and I don’t see a lot of value in federating them considering the big message board platform (phpBB) has 25 years of development and is GPL.
Message Boards are more elaborate versions of subreddits/communities. In all of those instances there is still a single entity that has “all the power in the forum”. You can join another lemmy server, but the admin of that community is still the admin, and the entity controlling the server that community is on likewise, controls the community.
I guess you could have a universal account that could be used across different message boards, but Personally I’d hate that.
I see this going further underground as fascism takes over. The corporate influence was bad enough before but with the Nazis in coming to power again, many of us are going to have to dive underground.
Imagine such absurdity. The Internet. The land of “forbidden knowledge.”
Like lemmy?
Anyway, there’s nodebb.
It sounds good in principle but would be hard to do in practice because everyone would have to do a lot of work negotiating ‘standards’ (technical stuff and editorial principles like how to handle NSFW content etc) that would apply universally across the federation of forums and as this is all voluntary work it is asking a lot of people.
If anyone is looking for a pretty good list of forums-
https://aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today?ueid=6310597850b065b278e2b143b21b73b5
You’ve just positively changed my life and that of my friends by posting this link. Thank you so much!!
That is really helpful. Thank you for posting!
Dunno why he didn’t link sex forums. I am sure there are some nice ones out there!
There’s other places with lists for those.
Excellent list.
