I wish there were alternatives to Reddit. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know.
Lemmy think on it and get back to you.
How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?
Give me leftist infighting over Nazi content any day of the week!
Love Linux, but why be redundant about leftists?
Damn Leftists. They ruined Leftism!
The wrong kind of Leftist ruined Leftism, not the right kind.
/s (because this one really needs it)
Sail the high seas.
leftist infighting
There’s a place that doesn’t happen?
Nobody hates leftists like slightly different leftists.
You take that back 👊 💥
Truth social
Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft
It’s funny because Lemmygrad, .ml and hexbear are almost indistinguishable from truth social of outside of plain text
I feel like the tankie brand of leftism shouldn’t be called that. Their embracing of technocrat totalitarians kind of puts them out of the left field.
You know, for all the complaints I see of tankies, I have encountered 10x more people who incessantly complain about them.
The problem is that a lot of people, specially Americans, have interiorized “red scare” propaganda notions, even when they see themselves as Lefties.
If you don’t just mentally go “uuh, commies” at the mere wiff of communal solutions it’s a lot easier to actually look at certain ideas and judge them on their actual pros and cons, as is spotting authoritarianism for what it is (whether it claims to want to implement leftwing notions or rightwing ones) and tribalism (of the kind that supports Fascism whilst claiming to be leftwing, and I include both Putin supporting “communists” and Zionism supporting “liberals”)
I almost feel like there’s an answer there for you, but I can’t put my finger on it.
However, last night I had a vision about th singer of Motorhead. I think it means something…
I’m struggling to see the connection with Lemmy “Kbin” Kilmister.
Didn’t he tour with Mastodon?
Usenet
what is that?
Not sure if serious. 😑
Anyway, before forums, there was a network of servers hosting discussions and to some extent file sharing.
The modern version of Usenet is pretty focused on file sharing and mostly so on paid servers.
ICQ
recentlyis about to shut down so I got nothing for yaICQ
recentlyis about to shut down so I got nothing for yaUh-oh 😏
We could always go back to html chats. Hotelchat, Webmaze…
Habbo Hotel
Besides Lemmy, HackerNews is decent altho way less subject/community driven
Hackernews is just chock full of techbros who think that since they know how to code, that automatically makes them rational and more authoritative on a subject than most people. Every time I go there I’m surprised by how crappy it is lol
Edit: somehow misspelled “techbros” lol
Reddit does shitty stuff, but at least I’m able to find stuff on there. Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me. It’s not easily searchable, and search engines can’t index it. If people aren’t fastidious about replying to messages they’re responding to, it’s just a nonsense stream of consciousness from dozens of people.
That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.
I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent.
The funny thing about this is that it’s just plain old threading, which has been around since the 1980s or earlier, with the slight variation of showing message contents directly in the thread tree instead of beside it (thanks to today’s high-res displays).
Usenet readers did threading. Email apps could do it if the developers wanted to; the required information is there. I’ll bet there’s forum software that can do it if an admin enables it.
For some reason, most corporations seem to have decided that classic message threading has no place in their interfaces. They resort to piling things into stacks or serializing them into seemingly endless scrolls. It fails to represent the structure of group discussions, and sadly, has been going on for so long that many people might not have ever seen the better alternative outside of reddit.
That being said, I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent. It’s very easy to follow conversations.
You could set that up on a lot of forums, you just had to select threaded view in the settings 👍
discourse does this well. While not exactly reply chain based, it’s still fairly easy to follow imo.
discourse > discord
Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me
My theory is that it was used as the primary form of informal communication by groups doing something, then it felt like a community.
And since everyone was there…Why not put the documentation there? Sure, it’s not indexable, but the group is open-sign-up, right? Right?Then a few years down the line, someone suggests switching to another primary storage location…Then faces huge amounts of push-back from people comfy sitting on discord.
Discord didn’t replace forums imo, it replaced teamspeak, raidcall, mumble and Skype
Tell that to the people replacing their forums with a discord lol
I don’t hate those people but I do want to slap them and tell them NO.
I don’t understand why discord is so popular for communities. There is 0 permanence, and google does not index it so not even organic growth.
Discord is a black hole of knowledge except for the ai training companies.
Whoa, that’s a really fucking cool website, thank you for sharing with us
No problem! I’m a big fan.
It attracts a different audience, so in aggregate it seems like your community is suddenly bigger because 1+1=2 right? What you don’t realize is that you’ve divided your community into two separate groups with possibly different wants, needs and cultures.
Or that 50% of the users on the discord only went there to find one thing, and probably won’t ever interact again.
So it looks like a bigger community, while losing accessibility.
I like the idea of Reddit and it works much better than Lemmy. But the moderation and AI scraping make it a no-go site for me anymore which is a shame.
I love internet forums and have been a mod at some and very high poster at other. But the snowball effect gets them. If there’s no traffic, there’s no posts, so there’s no traffic. You need to have a good community to make it work. One area reddit really shines, small communities exist on a huge platform. Great idea before the enshittification.
I hate discord and the fact that anyone replaces customer support or fan support pages with it, is just fundamentally broken. The idea of a forum is that the question is asked and archived. 20 years later someone else googles the question and sees the answer and all the replies that lead up to it. That’s what forums are for. In discord you ask a question and 30 seconds later it’s gone forever eaten by useless drivel. Never to be searched or found again. Idiotic.
Yep. A traditional forum ages and grows old. And as they get older and older, it becomes harder to draw new members because of the clique of the core membership. I’ve seen a few traditional forums die that death over the years.
And some forums, and I belong to several, the members are literally dying from old age. We are all mostly old and retired. And we lose members every year due to death. Several times a year there is an obituary post for some long time member.
Maybe I’m too young or just had bad luck, but ALL the interactions I’ve ever had with Internet forums have been unbelievably awful. Whenever I asked a question, I was asked why I wanted to know that and was lectured that my reasons were stupid, bad, or wrong (how is that even possible?). People hijacked my post and talked about anything else, and I received NO answer whatsoever! This kind of thing happened way too often, regardless of the type of forum. This occurred in Skyrim forums, Coh2 forums, PC forums, aquarium forums, … I hate forums. It’s good that they are dying, and I, for one, will not miss them at all.
Ugh… This was already mentioned before in another channel. Did you even read the rules? Modding you down and banned.
(These actions haven’t been better, in fact they tend to be worse. I’ll take PC forums over this ego tripping mod actions).
You do you, but apparently more people tend to dislike forums as time goes on.
I’d call Reddit and the Threadiverse and Usenet and such forums. They’re just broad, with many different categories, or “meta-forums”, as compared to a site with a dedicated-to-a-single-topic forum.
Some other drawbacks of having many independent forums:
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You have to create and maintain a ton of accounts.
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Different, incompatible markup syntax.
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Often missing features (e.g. Markdown has tables; few forums let one create tables)
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Some forum systems ordered comments by time rather than parent comment, which was awful to browse.
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Often insane requirements to get an account. I can think of a few forums that were very difficult to get access to, either because the “new user” system was incompatible with some email system or just had other problems.
I mean, there are a lot of websites with “comment” sections, which is kind of a lightweight forum attached to a webpage, and they’re almost invariably awful.
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Cmon reddit is worse than almost any forum. You have to really carefully choose your words and add a lot of word sugar so that no one jumps at you saying you are a worthless pos for even having some opinion with their throwaway trolling account enjoying the anonymity. Or worse some genuine crazy person.
Whereas on mature forums users know each other more closely and it wards off the most freaky behaviour and attack.
They won’t usually say stuff like you are a racist pos for idk getting a white phone the dumbest of things. Because they will just be ostracised out of the platform.
You kind of worry about your reputation. You don’t want ppl to see your avatar/nick and immediately write you off.
Lemmy is only better than Reddit because it is smaller but if it was the size of aforementioned we would have it even worse than r.
I’m kind of wondering what forums you visited.
What however is a recurrent issue with young people on forums is them asking questions that have already been answered a million times. On sites like reddit & discord, that’s the norm, we need new content all the time, the 526th person asking just keeps the social media going.
On forums however the etiquette is that you do some effort yourself, and something that gets asked that often is either a sticky, or a long running thread with all the information you could possibly want (but you’ll need to invest some of your own time to get the information from there). And if you then arrive on the forum, read nothing, and ask the same question… again… yeah… you won’t be welcomed with open arms.
I wish I would just have gotten a Link to a Post where the Answer to my Question is, but I just got this BS.
Without actual examples it’s really hard to tell if the forum was just a toxic environment, or you were the newbie not reading the room. I’ve seen both happen.
Could be, but I found my place in the Fediverse and I’m happy here.
Oh a long running thread, my least favorite thing on the entire internet.
“Hey do you have an answer to my question”
Yeah bro, its in this 700 page forum thread. Here’s a tent and some supplies, godspeed."
Fuck that.
Once it becomes too big the forum admin should realize it’s time to make a subsection regarding that topic XD.
Forums for sure aren’t perfect, but a 20 page forum thread that does a deep dive into a topic with a lot of good contributors beats anything i expect to find on discord or lemmy.
I’m gonna keep posting on Lemmy and hope that helps. Our collective communities should not be in the hands of mega corporations.
I tried running a forum… With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn… And I followed best practices to set it up.
I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I’m old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.
It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren’t many forum software projects).
But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.
1998 | 6686 1999 | 40528 2000 | 70379 2001 | 41129 2002 | 171294 2003 | 203642 2004 | 204685 2005 | 173659 2006 | 150000 2007 | 135936 2008 | 126283 2009 | 94894 2010 | 70333 2011 | 48691 2012 | 31197 2013 | 30606 2014 | 30227 2015 | 29334 2016 | 25472 2017 | 27505 2018 | 28551 2019 | 22366 2020 | 17250 2021 | 12794 2022 | 10135 2023 | 7151If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.
From your stats, it’s clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.
Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.
But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.
Why don’t you share it here, I for one would be interesting in checking it out.
It’s a german language forum. I guessed that it is not very interesting to most people reading here because of the language barrier. But I’m happy to share the link: https://forum.selfhtml.org/
Selfhtml is how I made my first webpages! Didn’t think its still alive. Godspeed!
I believe most of DACH learned writing web pages with SELFHTML. Those were the times :-)
Oh no, that’s really sad and disgusting. Please share the link so that we know to avoid it.
There was a story recently about a depressing number of web domains disappearing. Everybody just gravitates to the big corporate sites now, and it makes the internet ecosystem boring and less diverse.
It’s the equivalent of Walmarts running every mom & pop store out of town.
Maybe for the generic cat/dog image sharing boards but niche topics like machining are still thriving.
Welcome to the new era of enshittification where you’ll eventually have to subscribe to access or make posts, and none of it will be searchable on any search engines.
At least Reddit is searchable, while Discord is not. Not trying to defend Reddit though.
At least Reddit is searchable
How long until they restrict viewing the full contents of posts without logging in?
They already did for mobile browsers.
if anyone here used to go on kongregate a lot, go check it out now. it is depressing. they dont even have chat rooms anymore
Yeah everyone like “AI content flood oh noooo, AI AI AI” yet very few mention this much much bigger issue of centralized algorithmically controlled walled gardens where everyone is. That’s kinda like WeChat in China. It is hard to have real democracy or freedom of information (or privacy of any sort) when only a few big corporations have the social networks all locked down. The bad thing is because of the social network effect it’s extremely hard to get people to switch even if the alternatives are even better! So much momentum. We need to find out a way to be able to help distribute users because the software isn’t the problem anymore and neither is infrastructure or any of the other stuff that is given the big guys advantage really. The biggest problem aside from the social network effect is monetization I suppose. Still, it’s hard to even start any kind of method of monetization for alternative platforms or decentralized platforms when you can’t get anybody to switch in the first place or can’t get critical mass.
if you have a thread you like, make sure to archive.is or archive.org it
You can also request all of your posts on Reddit in a neat little csv. Takes about a month to get though.
And then you can go through and delete all your comments, lessening the value of Reddit as a platform.
You can also edit all your high scoring comments with bizarre misinformation so the next AI scrape gets dumber.
Even better, use an AI to generate the misinformation to save you time (and get even dumber misinformation).
I use the “nuke Reddit history” extension
Honestly who uses discord nowadays? its completely unbearable
I’ve never gotten really into it. It’s such a mess, you don’t find shit so you ask around in channels hoping someone says something relevant. After one or two replies the next person wants to talk about something else and your question disappears into the void
People who use it (for forum type chatting) are probably trying to avoid non enshittified platforms. Ironically they don’t realize discord is heading towards the same path. Free screen sharing, high quality voice calls, image and video sharing and file sharing for FREE is not sustainable. Eventually they are going to crackdown on its users, which is unfortunate but predictable.
Matrix is the way to replace discord everyone! It is very rough around the edges, but it’s (AFAIK) all self hosted. I even read about discord “bridges” that copy’s your discord channel content into matrix!
its completely unbearable
How so?
Discord is OK for real-time chat or VC, but is awful for forum-like discussions. Comment-specific context is lost in the single-threaded noise and search is borderline useless. The true forum-designed format of Lemmy, Reddit, and predecessors is far and away better. In my opinion Twitter - the legacy, ubiquity and tech - would be a better forum than Discord. That was hard to type and I need to quickly bleach my fingers.
Tooo much bloated after I revisted after 2ish years
I feel like it’s all the ppl who unironically use “kitten”
discord isn’t a single group lol, it’ll be the type of people that are there for the group you’re getting into lol. If your discord is for a hobby with creeps, then yeah they’ll be creeps. All the hobbies I use discord for don’t have that issue, what kinds of discords are you going into?
I used to think it was great that I could find forums for so many different things in one place. Now I regret it.
Unless that “one place” is an open, federated standard that allows anyone to participate with their own self-hosted server - i.e. “one place” = the fediverse, then it’s fine!
it seemed truly cozy and community-based for the first decade or so. you could buy gold to directly pay for servers and that was it, no greedy monetization or shittification. then awards came out with the same transparency, and it was fun to reward people for good posts (i gave gold partially to bookmark excellent comments for myself, as well). then spez got into coke (probably, i dunno, or hit his head very hard on something) and we have modern day reddit, a trash heap. i like how they deleted all the old awards and gold records, pure spit in the face to anyone that still believed in anything they were doing.
