A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
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.
Discord and Reddit also had uniquely improved their UIs over the existing options.
Preach brother!
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.
yep. it's free and easy, and becoming the default. :|
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.
VC backed user experience
This is a fantastic read. I wasnt around for the prime days of forums but I did experience them a bit.
I'm becoming extremely concerned about the number of topics and projects that are migrating to Discord. My main issue is that it is not and never will be publically indexed, and among other problems, is itself a corporate walled garden we consider to be "one of the good ones".
I really hope we find and establish a "low executive cost" solution before the next time Discord fumbles (which is inevitable) and we can claw some of that activity back.
But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that's a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.
Matrix+elements is very easy to selfhost in any homelab. works well enough for goverments. Federated and easy end to end encryption. And one can easily set up a web archive bridge forvarchiveable rooms.
That beeing said i still think IRC is the best for pure text chat.
But neither have seamless voice chat/screen sharing, which is a staple of Discord that users are very used to.
What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.
Besides the expensive Matrix option the parent suggested, IRC covers text fine. Mumble handles low-latency, low-resource voice chat with positional audio for games. XMPP uses more resources that IRC (but can have encryption) but a ton less resources than Matrix which makes it suitable for self-hosting—my partner & I do voice/video calls over my home server fine & Movim is working on group calls with a Web UI (tho it should be noted both Zoom & Jitsi use XMPP under the hood).
Because we prefer to sign up to one thing that combines all our interests to signing up to dozens of different forums
This is why we have SSO (why on Earth are these always the proprietary ones by default) & decentralized identities such as those on ActivityPub
Millennials naively assumed that the following generations would just naturally be as computer literate as they are. We're dealing with people now who think that wi-fi is internet service.
The author of the article is specifically referring to bulletin board forums when describing forums. Link aggregators like reddit are not forums. They are comments sections.
I am the author. Heard you were talking shit...
I kid, I kid :D
I insist that in their current form, reddit (and lemmy) can serve as both forums and link aggregators with comment sections.
Well anyway I enjoyed the read.
I am only here actually because proper forums have yet to figure out federation. As soon as Discourse or Flarum or whatever figure out full federation, I'm gone (over to them).
Specifically, I prefer chronologically sorted posts and the absence of voting systems.
You can actually do that on lemmy already like so. Sorting by new doesn't use the voting. Hell you can even sort them like a forum by sorting by "new comments"
I get it, and thanks for the advice. But I dislike what voting does to spaces like this as a matter of principle. It is a social consensus reinforcement mechanism, even if it is implemented with the best of intentions.
People prefer centralization, and it makes sense. The Fediverse resolves most of the issues with decentralization, but so does centralization, which came way sooner, and arguably did it better.
Also, people seem to forget that Facebook was pretty cool back then. It had superior features, and was not the buggy mess it is today.
Power law
Anything big enough becomes a public restroom. Cooperation and syncronization between groups small enough not to devolve in that way seems to be an especially promising path forward.
Mostly FB wasn’t a trove of far right shit and it was before a lot of the scandals pointing out to what extent our data is sold.
Sure, when only the educated could join it.
I'm still trying to figure out why I left FidoNet.