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, forums were pretty cool!
Doesn’t that depend on the forums, though? For many organizations, those sites fit the needs perfectly fine. If you don’t care about archiving and you would not be totally screwed if the forum disappeared tomorrow, you’re going to opt for something simple like that.
No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they’re in the AI bed with them.
Your Favorite Forum still rules.
I’m sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying “it’s worrying.”
Perfectly said dude /cheers
Agreed, this article would have made sense in 2020 or earlier.
And now we have the fediverse, which is causing a resurgence of content that is independent of Reddit or Discord.
I’m tired of articles that just act like nothing else exists or has existed. It’s just so dishonest and not very intellectual. Right, Reddit and Discord, that’s all we have now right? Forget Facebook, Xanga, MySpace, Skype, the Messengers, IRC, ICQ, Twitter, WhatsApp, Kik, Telegram, Signal .etc it goes on and on.
But Reddit and Discord, that’s all we have!
indeed it is the clickbait, emotional guff
also lemmy is part of the problem
Is it? When was the last time you googled something and the first website that came up didn’t spit out some SEO or garbage content?
Like every day? Yeah it’s worse now but Google is still useful for a lot of things.
That being said, I do have AdBlock so it’s a different internet for me.
Have you ever tried DuckDuckGo or Qwant? They have better results in my opinion, as long as you don’t care about the business snippets.
DuckDuckGo is so much better than Google. Barely any ads, and results that are actually useful 9 times out of 10.
I’ve been using it for what seems like forever, but getting fewer and fewer relevant results over time for some reason. Switching to &udm=14 has been helpful, but I’m still uncertain about it: https://udm14.com/
It has been my experience that, yes, the user experience of DuckDuckGo is far superior to that of Google, but, DuckDuckGo doesn’t always provide the precise results. I’m looking for. I can still get the information, but it takes a little bit more work.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not shilling for Google. Their search engine has definitely gone to shit in the last 5 to 8 years. But DuckDuckGo simply doesn’t have the incredible precision that Google can if it’s properly used.
I use both
A couple dozen times yesterday.
Today. Among thousands of times.
I’m with OP. People have been screaming this for ages, and the collective societal reaction hasn’t even been apathy, but “We vote for Big Tech CEOs, full steam ahead.”
So… Yeah, I’m tired, too. Screw it all. Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
How about strengthening the Fediverse and Lemmy?
Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
So basically, let the world burn? Because that’s what it looks like we’re heading toward right now because of big tech.
Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
The big question is whether it will be us who do that.
let the world burn
That’s what’s gonna happen.
Maybe Europe and China will “isolate” themselves from much of the burning. I hope they do. But the rest of the world seems quite entrenched in Big Tech.
Maybe burning quickly is better, since more people will notice.
Better question would be “when the last time you googled something without prefixing it with ‘reddit’ to get good results” 🤭
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
How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
Or Matrix?
According to history:
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Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
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If it reaches a critical mass… You can’t. See: Facebook.
The Fediverse can adopt a few nice communities, but honestly bringing the larger population seems hopeless.
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable
Discord is going public soon, so start the timer…
RIP D&D campaign’s chat service 😬
Yeah, so many projects and companies using Discord for support seemed like such a bad idea.
Discord is scary popular though, like Facebook popular. I am really scared the enshittification will stick hard, like it has for Facebook.
they already forced ads on discord.
larger population seems hopeless.
But what is the barrier? We have a functioning infrastructure. We need to solve the last piece of the puzzle.
People need an easy way to join!
Mastodon has already shown that this works. Even if they aren’t as big as others yet, they still make up about two-thirds of the Fediverse. Now we need to replicate this for Lemmy, Pixelfed, and so on, and share our findings along the way.
You mean drag them from platforms that have a vested interest in keeping them locked in and squashing competitors like the Fediverse?
In platforms that spend billions on engagement optimization algorithms, with the sole purpose of keeping users addicted, basically with government and business landscape backing?
Look, I’m optimistic about the Fediverse, this is a great refuge in the hellscape that is the internet. But you can’t make people want to change. I’ve learned this IRL, but see it with (for example) persecuted people continuing to use Twitter even though its owner basically has a gun to their heads. There’s a big gulf between being a fantastic refuge and taking the internet from Facebook and Google. Even if every phone on the planet had an easy button to switch to Fediverse alternatives in one click… many would not take it, and that’s an utter fantasy.
This pretty much. At some point one has to accept that the people who want to be saved can be saved, and those who don’t, can’t. We shouldn’t (reasonably or not) waste ourselves for the latter in spite of the former.
Or Matrix?
Element is a Matrix client
Matrix/Element has shitty usability and reliability compared to Discord.
For lots of communities, they could use modern forum software like Discourse with better results.
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Rant
I don’t think you can for most people that is what is so infuriating right? In my experience people who are entrenched in Discord are completely and utterly entrenched in it, to the point that I have lost contact with a lot of these people effectively since I don’t use Discord.
The important choice was with all the community leaders who decided to make the move to discord at crucial moments where they could have NOT done that.
I think any shift off of Discord is also going to have to come from community leaders of organizations, projects, game development communities etc… deciding to move off the platform at crucial decision points.
However, and this is something people who happily pushed their entire lives onto Discord would confidently tell me we could easily do if Discord got bad, everyone isn’t just going to straight up leave once they have built their entire digital communication around it…
Now I frequently see game developers complain that they can’t accurately get a picture of their playerbase because large categories of players aren’t on their discord!! and I have to keep my palm from blowing a hole through my face when the two loudly meet.
The brainworms are so bad that these developers will conclude the issue is with their playerbase not wanting to use Discord instead of it being an issue with DEVELOPERS DECIDING TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR PLAYERBASE WITH A SHITTY, EXCLUSIONARY TOOL THAT HAS AWFUL SEARCH.
I can’t express how much this gets under my skin, it is like this assumption that if you are even slightly a gamer than you are on Discord all the damn time has become rheified and cemented into place so rigidly that developers are literally tossing away large swaths of their playerbase feedback because they refuse to use a different tool to get feedback and communicate with their community. No forum, no custom website, nothing, Discord or bust.
I have seen the effects in games like Battlebit where it is clear that the developers were catering to only a very small subsection of the playerbase that is very active and prominent on the Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large sections of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers.
I have watched this problem, stewing in my frustration, evolve from a minor personal annoyance to being a serious systematic issue causing community organization to become dysfunctional and broken because Discord is clearly a shitty tool for that community (that clearly a lot of people refuse to use or check regularly)… and YET everybody in those communities behaves like it was always a foregone conclusion that the community would have to move to Discord, that is just the way it is.
screams into void
This is so true! I always hated the Slack/Discord format and will always do. It’s just a mess.
Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.
I think your argument relates closely to something I’ve noticed happening over and over with more than just game developers. Far too often I see people expressing frustration that the Internet doesn’t give them more accurate information about the real world. Way too many people, apparently including many of the richest and most powerful people alive, have come to see the Internet as a magical machine that will do anything they want it to do… if only people would use it differently! Like, they legitimately seem to expect the entire population to post their entire lives online, unfiltered, so they can be used as automatons by people they’ve never even met.
XMPP / Jabber is better.
Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.
Element is the name of the official Matrix client, but there are many others.
It’s a secure messenger
What are its pros and cons? What does it offer that telegram or similar don’t offer? Is it good for group chat? Is it available on multiple platforms?
Telegram is not a secure messenger.
Yes to multiple platforms, groups etc.
So, I’m going to say that I don’t use telegram and only know it as being presented as a secure messenger platform. As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable. And this is no different because I feel like this is exactly the problem lemmy and other platforms like it have. There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Matrix is a decentralized platform with the same level of security/encryption as Signal. Being decentralized you can run your own server, and chat with others on other servers.
It supports groups, voice, streams etc - similar to Discord/Slack/Teams etc.
Open source. Multiple different server and client implementations. Mobile platforms, “all” operating systems, and with bridges so you can have your IRC, Telegram, Slack, FB Messenger etc channels go to your Matrix account/server.
As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable.
If you are against a change in the first place you won’t switch, anyway.
There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
Please, ask.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Simple. It’s fully free and open source. The server as well as the apps. Therefore, you can trust it as a privacy friendly solution a heck of a lot more, than any other solution like WhatsApp.
Signal is secure as well, but the server is centralized.
And Telegram is not considered secure because of their implementation and shady practices.
Matrix sucks. It barely has usable apps and it lacks basic moderation tools
You don’t…you go back to forums. They’re searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public, even if privacy is a illusion there.
We have to accept that and provide a solution for both.
You can lock down forums to were they’re un searchable unless you have a login. Tons of forums are like this.
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public
This isn’t true at all. Most people do not care about privacy; those that do are an extreme minority. You (presumably) and I are part of that minority yet even we still comment here, in a public space. The issue with forums has never been about privacy because most are content with pseudonymity. It is a big mistake to think we need to cater to the extreme minority in the privacy space when tackling big issues that involve a majority who do not care.
For forums: Yeah spaces are pretty great (have a look at Mozilla for example) and it can be an alternative IME.
For gaming which even if unasked about, is the majority of the users: When we can have push to talk option (client side, which can be done relatively easy) and proper 30+ FPS Screen share for gaming features, I think it’ll be much easier to convince people to try it. Everything else IMO is QOL features that I don’t mind about. We also tried to use mumble, but the lack of Screen share moved us straight back to discord eventually…
Element needs to be better. Discord is awesome with the way it auto-plays looping videos/gifs and has animated emojis.
Seriously: That’s all they’d need to do. The element devs need to focus on fun.
Fun is always great to capture the masses!
thats why I want misskey the emoji reactions to anything are always more fun than just likes
Isn’t that a client side issue though? Element is just one Matrix client. I haven’t used it myself but heard from others that Fluffychat (another Matrix client) is more like Discord.
Yeah it’s probably just a client side issue but the OP mentioned Element, specifically 🤷
I just wanted to point out that Element is no fun! No fun at all!
It works and it works great for what it does. Even voice and streaming are great with Element. It’s just got a terrible, no-fun interface and pointless limitations on things like looping videos. You can’t even configure it to make them play properly (as in, automatic and endlessly, the way they were meant to be played! 😤).
Looping videos and animated emojis are super fun ways to chat with people. Even in professional settings! It really breaks up the humdrum and can motivate people to chat and share more.
Element is all serious all the time and going into a chat channel there feels like a chore.
If I’m talking with people about the topical thing which is why I joined a room in the first place, the last thing I want is a looping autoloops fruityloops annoyance. Plus, not autoplaying and autolooping them saves battery.
I hate to break this to you but that means you’re not normal. If all you ever do in chat is talk about serious things that are of such earth-shattering importance that it would be incredibly rude and obnoxious for someone to post a silent looping video you’re not normal, and no fun at all.
The way Element currently works, it’s made for people like you… A strange minority that probably only thinks about “chat” in terms of communicating for an end goal and not for the pleasure of conversation.
Plus all this stuff can be disabled in discord too, if you want to be that serious. There are per-role and per-channel settings that let you disable images, link embedding, external emojis, etc.
It gives you choice. I have no choice in Element, it’s always unfun all the time.
Oh, do cry me a river while you’re at it. Pretty much every community everywhere has a
generalormemesroom, those are for the meme gifs (or wait, these are webp these days…).
It is, but Element is still the “Gold standard” Matrix client and the most popular. And if you’re going to create a brand new chat protocol, you should make sure that your flagship client measures up to the competition.
Also, people forget that Discord’s streaming capability is, unfortunately, absolutely top-notch; no other community-screensharing platform has fewer issues, and my friends and I like to watch each other play games often.
What would likely help a lot if it was easier to get set up, particularly on a VPS or something like that. Small businesses and or larger community projects would be more likely to jump on possibly.
Another thing is ability to easily join, a lot of the above just have an easy link to join their discord server, not sure how easy matrix on boarding is currently as I still haven’t gotten my instance functional yet (not even half done with synapse configuration seemingly)
I mean, there are quite a few such providers: https://etke.cc/
Fair enough, I do mean moreso for self host in a way, like I’ve seen some game hosting servers, they have a VPS they already paid for and use Pelican or Pterodactyl to host it all, being able to throw matrix into the mix easily would be great in those cases. Seems like this would be a separate situation, which is definitely fine, just not exactly what I meant.
Well if you have a VPS then installing the dockerized Synapse just takes a few minutes.
I’ll have to take a look, I have synapse running but I can’t actually connect to my server at all, need to set up the database and sign-ups and all that shit.
Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn’t a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.
Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.
Isn’t there any solution for that yet?
Companies putting their stuff into discord is like all the businesses that ditched a dedicated website and moved to facebook however many years ago. Yay, now it is on a format that doesn’t work well for presenting static information and will inevitably require account registration!
Newest iteration of “this meeting could have been an email” has become “this Discord could have been a wiki”.
And someone (on the Far-Right) is always trying to buy Wikipedia, monetise it, X-ify it, or take it down. I think Wikipedia is abusive - exploits volunteer unpaid labour - should have been created by an NGO like UN and kept safe for mankind like our Library of Alexandria. But it is what it is. Preppers download the whole site regularly in order to have that knowledge under their control in case is ever gets taken down or spoilt and they are rebuilding civilisation post-Armageddon. I keep meaning to download it myself (note to self: do that soon you lazy b. no more excuses!)
Take a look at Kiwix. Makes it super easy plus some ideas for a good Raspberry Pi project.
wiki + ai search = discord except ppl are the ai remembering stuff said in the chat lol, reddit + google was once good, nowadays I click on the other results since the reddit reply is its already been answered use google
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.
Because there hasn’t been a single proper alternative until very recently, and even then they’re not as user friendly.
Excuse me, Jabber / XMPP is about as old as I am!
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.
Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…
What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.
Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects
Terrible how, though? That’s exactly what it gets right. You have easy-to-setup roles and channel accesses, onboarding experiences for people joining a larger server, a huge ecosystem of bots for various purposes, etc.
okay, it is bad for not being indexable, but it’s good at what it does and it’s popular for a reason.
It’s searchable but information doesn’t stay pinned and available. It’s meant to be a chatroom style place for gaming and as that it’s fine but when you want to build a community for something like a video game or a. Product, what ends up happening is you end up making a channel for every single announcement etc. say you have a channel for FAQ? You either lock it so only moderators and admins can use it or you end up with a constantly ballooning channel where everyone can contribute. There’s no in-between and because each post isn’t really collated the way it would be here or on a forum the information is hard to navigate without search which often only gives a truncated section that you can’t even navigate to. There’s no context more often than not when you use the search function and it’s a very poor substitute for a forum as a result.
I don’t think discord is a good substitute for a website and I don’t think it’s a good substitute for a forum but it’s being used as both fairly frequently.
online communities seemed to be going to discord
That can also be seen as “nature healing itself” in context of giant AI botnets scraping the whole internet every second. It’s only natural to go private nowadays.
No, it isn’t.
Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.
By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to people.
Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.
Discord may offer to sell chat histories in certain communities (after “anonymizing” the data, yeah right like they will do that effectively) directly to AI companies.
Discord is only private in the sense that you are advocating for only a private for-profit corporation being able to enjoy the benefit of scraping and collecting our conversations.
This is not healing, this is the vision of the internet as a truly open shared space that benefits all… dying because people like gamers were too foolish to see the coming catastrophe from putting EVERY community under the control of a single company struggling to make a profit.
I agree that Discord shouldn’t be trusted and might turn out to be a bad actor some day. Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing. So it’s best to do the same as with Discord but without Discord. In the upcoming era of AI hiding knowledge is a good thing to do, and I’m personally not used to this yet.
Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing.
Let me emphatically say that NO it isn’t.
If you need to anonymize or disguise your identity because you feel threatened, I never want to make you feel like you shouldn’t take whatever steps of protecting your privacy that you feel you need to.
That being said, no, I fundamentally consider societal progress to be roughly equatable to how open the systems are in a society both in the material and ideological realm. Public forums/the fediverse are progress because they allow anybody with an internet connection to read through conversations, learn and eventually participate and add to a general collective benefit and community. This is the power of the internet.
I think your point of view would be more relatable before AI happened. I don’t see how it addresses AI problem anyhow. “Societal progress” isn’t something that has self-worth. I see that as a tool of improving QoL, but if it’s not only stopped improving QoL but actually started making it worse, than it’s not something to pursue, and actually something to actively sabotage.
Well let me state this explicitly then, I don’t consider AI to be some kind of existential threat in terms of becoming sentient, or stealing all of our information and hoarding it away.
LLMs are powerful and have lots of use cases, but right now we are going through a really tiresome scifi novel delusion about mistaking the current wave of LLM innovations as being somehow able to transport us to the singularity or whatever boring tech bros are calling it these days.
yawn
longish response, no pressure to read
What scares me is the massive energy use of AI, it also doesn’t make money.
If some AI scrapes all my stuff on the fediverse, ok that sucks but honestly that LLM they train off my posts is going to constantly complaining about corporations, AI bullshit hype and centralization of corporate power… yeah you can sanitize the data, they can profile me… yeah I know.
I feel like that is already a threat enough and there is a tsunami like power that comes from reaching a public consensus through discussing things in public forums and putting our beliefs out there as a form of vulnerability. The more of us that do this, the more that people who disagree or agree can learn, the more we can establish conensus of shared values, the more we can build trust.
The metaphor for our current late stage capitalist society on the afterburners of surveillance capitalism/mass dragnet surveillane and censorhsip is clearly the panopitcon
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
If you suspect you are in a panopticon, or in an environment that is threatening to collapse into an authoritarian panopticon type situation, than the best defense, because lets be honest if you are in this position you don’t have much power realistically do you? is to publically have conversations, share opinions, discuss honestly with people in a way that floods whatever commons that are left, whatever equivalent of yelling chants out of the prison bars to other prisoners… however you want to map the metaphor here…
That is how we defend ourselves.
The relevant question is whether you are in a situation where you can safely do that, if you can’t than take care of yourself, hide. Adopt good digital hygeine and help others out in an unjudgemental way how to do so themselves.
If you feel at all that you can safely speak out, or honestly, if you feel like realistically you don’t have much to lose (because at the end of the day that is the position we are all existentially in, it is just a matter of who will suffer first and thus who has the right to want to delay that suffering the most) then the best defense here is to make as much as you can public through art, through any kind of discussion, because no matter how sophisticated and supercharged the methods of the oppressors are and no matter how overbearing the mazes of false-consensus become…
…they still can’t ever really win in a moment to moment interaction with any half decent artist, any half decent person who knows their worth, any person willing to be vulnerable and say it how it is, and indeed really anyone that is willing to extend solidarity to strangers not because of some emotional need or ideological sense of superiority, but because it is something they try to do out of principle (and of course are imperfect at, so what, society shouldn’t be reliant on people being ethically perfect in the same way safety regulations in society shouldn’t assume people aren’t going to behave like idiots, as frustrating as that is ).
The nice thing is, we are talking about snowball effects here. One of the best drugs in life is doing a small good thing that ripples into a slightly bigger good thing all by itself, that takes a little life of its own. I don’t claim to be any kind of altruist, or someone who constantly does selfless acts but that isn’t the point. Most people feel a basic pleasure when it is easy to help, to help so long as it is simple and direct how to do so. Some don’t, so what.
The power of computers, of software and of social media is that it allows us to help, share, educate, illimunate and reinforce one another in small, tiny ways with barely any effort, barely any energy usage, and we can reach across basically ever barrier humans can be thrust behind by the cruelty of chance to start a conversation.
Hell yes, keep yelling out of those bars, keep telling it is, keep being you if you can
While I agree with many of these takes, I believe there is more to this. For example, your point about defense from falling into panopticon by speaking publicly about things doesn’t actually require publicly speaking about anything other than politics. I mean, you can still hide all professional, creative or fun talk and still have the benefits you listed covered by only ever publicly talking about political issues. Another issue, is that publicity and interconnectedness of all discourses we have nowadays, increases a homogenuity of thinking patterns, in other words it hurts the diversity of the ways of thinking, that is also something that can be improved by more people going private and having closed interest groups in chats invisible to public web.
I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
This is exactly what I was gonna say: I’m amazed that so many millions of people can tolerate its atrocious UI. Even now, the amount of notifications I get from the constant text channels across “servers” (which is such a misnomer for merely “communities”) is so ridiculous that I ignore 99.9% of it.
I think that naming was fully on purpose. People argumented with me that they had their own “servers” so that was good, right?
Grrr.
I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!
I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.
In that regard, fuck Discord.
Yeah anything ephemeral is fine like chats and what not. But this idea of using it as support platform is just dumb. You end up with people asking the same question over and over and it either doesn’t get answered because no one is around to answer it or likely because they’re annoyed at the same questions over and over. There is no organization and no institutional knowledge. It’s like it ends up being set up by people who think it’s what the cool kids want. And these giant communities just exacerbate this issue. Everything ends up being noise. It’s the reason I usually ended up turning off the world or general channels in WoW. It just ended up being annoying and distracting.
When I’m trying resolve a situation that I need some sort of support I wanna be able to search if others have had the same issue and see discussion around that topic. I don’t need synchronous communication for that. I don’t care if it was 3 months ago someone had the problem if they figured out how to fix it. The way to do that is forums, Reddit (well before the enshittification), or even Lemmy.
yep its horrible really should start suggesting discord servers move to lemmy, self host their own, a lot of them would be better off with a forum like structure, but lemmy isnt easily crawlable either, everyone hates being searchable
Ie. The equivalent of sending the output of your wiki to /dev/null
Yeah that’s a good analogy.
In my head Discord = toxicity. Not sure how it got that rep for me but it has gotten it. Thus, wont lose sleep if it dies out. Perhaps I am wrong. Reviewing rationality of this prejudice is on my ToDo List after a million other things…
I once had my account banned because I was a member of a server that was banned in that hugely discouraged me from using it for that purpose. I might be in the half dozen servers at the moment none of which I’ve looked at save for two in the last year and I primarily use it for offsite DMs and even then I strongly prefer signal for people I know.
Forums lifespans weren’t all that much anyways. Most sites that were hosted before 2010 are gone now.
The real downside to everything being on StackOverflow, Reddit, Discord, etc is that it has made it easier for big tech to run their shady data collection and analysis schemes including AI Training.
Forums lifespans weren’t all that much anyways.
Couldn’t this be much different if “web 2.0” hadn’t taken over?
Most sites that were hosted before 2010 are gone now.
Many of them are still alive but don’t get the exposure they deserve because of centralized networks.
The real downside to everything being on StackOverflow, Reddit, Discord, etc is that it has made it easier for big tech to run their shady data collection and analysis schemes including AI Training.
Right. But what can we do to get people to switch to the Fediverse and put an end to this?
Couldn’t this be much different if “web 2.0” hadn’t taken over?
Probably not, even if you have time to maintain your site by updating it occasionally then it still falls upon individuals to fund the hosting services and hold the domain name. Even Hexbear’s domain wound up for auction a little while back because they forgot to pay their bills.
Many of them are still alive but don’t get the exposure they deserve because of centralized networks.
Since Net Neutrality has been off and on enforced, it’s generally been considered illegal to block, hide, or throttle traffic, but I agree those small sites didn’t get as much search indexing unless they paid for ads.
Net neutrality
To my knowledge net neutrality only covers internet providers and not search engines or other platforms.
Your precise wording was “centralized networks” which I interpreted as the ISP providing traffic between you and other services.
Most sites that were hosted before 2010 are gone now.
I hosted a forum for guilds in several games I played over the years. I had mine up from 2005-2019 but my board’s php version got way behind the host‘a and it no longer works. Someday I will find someone to help me fix it, or start a new one.
Most sites that were hosted before 2010 are gone now.
yeah, because virtually all communities moved to Discord or Reddit.
I hope someone is archiving that data. Lots of great small communities with great info/help.
There’s a shared theme with like all of humanity’s woes: people don’t care that much.
From pollution to injustice to shitty websites, if people cared just a little more the problem would be dramatically reduced or even eliminated.
But so many people are just apathetic. Overwhelmed and checked out.
Something I was hopeful for but seems to have died is lemmyBB. A phpBB-style front-end to Lemmy. I’d like the accessibility of being able to use an existing account that federation brings but the forum-style approach that phpBB has.
Mostly though I’ve been disappointed in the teens and twenty-somethings. They seem to have, in distressingly large numbers, just opted to go along with whatever they’re encouraged to use by large platform holders. There doesn’t seem to be an appetite to create communities and define spaces that they control. Perhaps that’s just me getting old though…
NodeBB implements ActivityPub !nodebb-development@community.nodebb.org
I think a lot of them have never known that it was possible, and things up until recently where at least tolerable. But as interest rates stay up of zero and things continue to degrade eventually more and more people will leave. The people with the most technical skills are going first and the cool people will follow and then they average people follow the cool people
Agree. It’s easy to feel disheartened by the lack of action. It’s easy to say get out and do ABC, however since smartphones and apps it’s been so easy to just hop on and scroll/consume. Plus the monetisation of content creation has captured a whole generation looking to build a career (fuelled by more apps to help them). Sharing and creating is big money now. It’s not just about saying hey look I did this just incase anyone else wanted to try it, and share there thoughts on the matter. I have concerns that even if forums popped up in a new shape they would just get scalped by those looking to repackage and sell the info.
What do you think Lemmy is missing that phpBB had aside from strong user communities built over years where many of the users knew each other IRL?
Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).
Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model
Hmmm, you’re probably on to something there. I think Lemmy could do that but no one cares to set it up.
and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).
I’m honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I’m in a hurry to get back to that!
One of my favorite forums has been around since 1999 and is currently running on XenoForo which is very phpBB-esque. Anytime I get a nostalgia hankering I drop in for a few minutes. It’s not always as good as you may remember. :)
I’m honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I’m in a hurry to get back to that!
Honestly, no, none of the forums I ever used allowed that sort of things for, well, for obvious reasons!
Anyway, my reasoning for this is to help make it easier to mentally anchor a given interaction to a user. On things like Lemmy and Reddit I feel like it’s a constant sea of random usernames - there’s no persistence or community. I could well have spoken to the same person multiple times but I don’t notice because they’re so anonymous.
there’s no persistence or community.
That’s it right there, that’s what you are missing. The older forum communities were small enough that you could keep track of whose who, something that isn’t possible when the user counts are in the tens of thousands to tens of millions. I think a lot of us olds would like to go back to that but its impossible; our monkey brains can’t handle communities of that size.
XenoForo
Just looked it up. $60/mo is the “starter” price!? Are forums normally so expensive to run?
XenoForo is a bit spendy but they’re providing the software, hosting and data storage. IIRC the forum I’m talking about is on the “Business” plan due to how busy it is.
Reddit (and Lemmy/Mbin) is just a kind of forum.
Am I mistaken in saying that the new Reddit/Lemmy format of forum is to message boards, as message boards was to BBS?
it’s worrying because all that knowledge will be lost instead of living somewhere in a forum indexed by a search engine.
But in the same time, I see more people fleeing from traditional search engines to AI … I don’t know where we’re heading at
What do you think is the reason why not a lot more people are joining the fediverse?
Little awareness
I think there are more reasons, but the most prominent ones are
- the fediverse is not that aggressively publicized
- if by any luck your average bob joins, he’ll be confused because a) the UI/UX is less appealing b) he doesn’t know where to go and what’s the difference between Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc.
the fediverse is not that aggressively publicized
For sure.
doesn’t know where to go and what’s the difference between Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc.
They also know the difference between Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. Why shouldn’t they get it here?
No idea, but I tried inviting some my friends which are not tech-aficionados — they couldn’t understand it.
I’d love to see more money thrown on Ads for promoting the fediverse on YouTube, Twitch and all other platforms and get this shit more viral, but I don’t understand why it’s not happening.
but I don’t understand why it’s not happening.
Because there is not much money to make in the process. I think we need to lobby politicians to step in.
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.
They are both trash. How can we get more people to join Lemmy and the Fediverse?
Keep talking about it abroad
“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Users will search for new places. The fact that we are here is proof.
Build it, and they will come.
Yeah, well, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok are not the net, they are siloes. Discord too. Even Reddit is trying as hard as it can to be insular.
Much of my family doesn’t even know how to use a browser, at least not beyond the bare minimum for work. They probably never will.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
With all sincerity this is fine. Seriously, let’s leave it this way.
As someone who was already around when Eternal September happened the Internet was never for normies and inviting them into the space has destroyed it. Everything that attracts the attention of normies ends up ruined; MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Slashdot and so very many more…they are all trashed because when they attracted enough users the commercialization started.
So maybe lets just leave the Fediverse for those “in the know” as long as we can.
Thing is it’s kinda too late, and the, uh, “commercial net” has all but taken over society.
Whatever happens, it would be nice if that part burns down. And I think yanking the techies from the space with the Fediverse will help.
R.I.P the original Xbox Scene forums 💔
Then my so called “friend” calls me a manbaby for freaking out about this. They are going to be policing the entire internet soon!
That’s why we have to strengthen the fediverse!
To be fair, both you and your friend can be correct 🤷
Yeah, it’s why my new approach to problems is “Don’t tell anyone, find a quiet place to blow your head off instead”.
I meant it as: You can be a man baby and still be correct. The two are not mutually exclusive.
…but don’t let me stop you from overreacting to random, silly comments said in jest like a man baby 👍
Are there good alternatives?
I feel like forums really fell behind the times, with shitty threading systems and awkward text formatting interfaces and the horror that is bbcode.
Meanwhile discord handles image embedding gracefully, with markdown formatting and previews.
What’s the next-gen forum system that’s keeping up with modern times? Is there a part of the fediverse that meets this?
Discourse seems the most modern, but not sure if it is open, let alone federated.
Lemmy almost fills it but tends to be too ephemeral and doesn’t handle multiple forums/channels for one broad topic.
Discourse seems the most modern, but not sure if it is open
It’s fully open source.
let alone federated.
It’s still experimental but they are working on it.
Awesome. That seems like the way to go then!
Especially considering reddit is publicly traded and discord is having an IPO soon, and reddit has gone full 1984 censorship.
