What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @[email protected] 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
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!)
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.
How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.
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?
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.
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 Discord…
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 small subsection of the playerbase that was very active and prominent on Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large portions 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
Gamers are so confidently stupid.
Also before anyone says “well it is a good tool for communicating with friends in a DnD group or something” … yes I know it is good for that, you know why I know that it is good for that? Because that is the easiest usecase for any communication and organizational tool to tackle, Discord isn’t good at this usecase, it is just a laughably easy usecase compared to how mindbendingly difficult it is to wrangle larger communities of… not necessarily friends.
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.
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.
What can we do to get more people to switch over to Lemmy from Reddit?
I guess once more and more content is posted here, naturally more people will come. And also any further steps of reddit enthitiffication will move people over.
Can we actively do something to help this process?
The main thing is post more. Lack of content is the main reason people don’t use Lemmy more, and the only way to fix this is to share/produce more.
Its a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think even (transparent, community-relevant) bots are a good idea at this point, given that 99% of interests have little to no activity currently. For example, if we had bots that post game update changelogs to their relevant communities, it would at least provide a baseline amount of content and make it easier to discuss for fans of those games.
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.
I actually just launched a PHPBB forum for specific interests in regards to the indie web, building websites, and sharing random banter (among a few other things). I find Reddit and Lemmy to be useful for seeing what’s going on in the world overall, and Discord has mostly just been annoying ever since its launch, and forums seem like a good answer to recreating actual communities. And if there are more people who feel this way, maybe they’ll make a comeback (because they definitely haven’t just started to be affected by corporations attempting to centralize everyone to one thing).
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.)
What are we going to do about it?
Quit whining about it and make a good community outside of those.
Be a good community member yourself.
I see myself coming less and less to Lemmy due to how monotopic this place is. And how aggressively stupid people here can be.
Consider joining a different server, .ml is blocked by a lot of other servers.
Is there an easy way to see the relationships of lemmy servers of the known federation? Who defederated who?
If you check your-instance-name/instances it will show the blocked ones. ie, lemmy.world/instances there is also https://defed.xyz/
I hate Discord.
The interface is clunky. They always try to sell you useless (at least for me) options. What with the users posting so many gifs?This is unironically on reddit right now. People lamenting a place like Lemmy doesn’t exist.
I’m less worried about Discord, honestly.
Discord was never ‘user-friendly’. It always gave me nerd, incel, neurodiverse, or weirdo vibes so not something I would miss much although I probably qualify as nerd, neurodiverse, and weirdo (but not incel, never that).
It definitely let people create insulated pockets. Is there a chat app that doesn’t do that? Telegram?
Discord is far worse in this context, though. Much of reddit is still publicly visible and is still indexed by some search engines, even if it could be better. Discussions from years ago are still visible and provide useful information to many (this is part of the reason “search term + reddit” became such a popular query template). When communities move to Discord, many of their conversations become completely private to anyone who isn’t a member. The conversations move quickly and there is no easy way for people to reference past information. I get that people on Lemmy hate reddit and it’s popular to circlejerk about it, but forums being replaced by things like Discord and Telegram that aren’t equivalents at all has been much more damaging.
You make a really good point here. However, is that same anti-indexed nature a boon in the era of Ai site scraping.
I think this is an XY problem.
People keep trying to bring back the old internet ; This is an broken and outdated solution.
The root problem (in my opinion) is that we need to share critical information to the masses, but the masses introduce “tyranny of the majority”. It’s a really tricky problem to figure out, and I really really really want mathematicians working on this.
If you live in the states, the Electoral College exists because they were looking for a practical solution to this problem. Considering the outcomes, it did not work - but there is no shame in this, as I think this is actually a really hard problem to solve.
The only known solution is to not share information to the masses (a.k.a keeping the normies out). In essence, this is what the old internet was - and a large part of what made it great. But this is not correct as it does not meet the criteria of the problem. Nor does it translate well, since your neighbors are apart of the masses.
If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share. If you do math for a living, please gather your friends and make an open-thesis about this.
EDIT
After some discussion in the comments, I have a general hypothesis:
- One platform, one name.
People must be able to distinguish the resource they are accessing - highly recommended this process be easy. This provides consistent “edges”.
- Open protocols only.
Looking at “tyranny of the majority” from a different perspective, one answer is to standardize how people communicate. This means no closed ecosystems nor convoluted protocols. This provides “standard weight” while preventing “infinite weight”.
- Server-wide censorship cannot be allowed.
This eliminates every platform I know of. Servers should not be given any tools to prevent incoming nor outgoing data. People should handle moderation individually - sane UI can of course be made available (BlueSky block filters could be inspiration?). Blocking should only be handled by the “nodes”, this also prevents “infinite weight”.
I find it really funny that this conclusion kind of alludes to the early internet in a lot of ways. Maybe it wasn’t the internet-forums, but the internet itself that has changed.
I don’t think this is a maths problem. It’s a social problem. Monkey brain combined with internet communications is still not a solved problem.
I think part of this is figuring out the values you want to express in the format of any given service (Marshal McLuhan style). You need to figure out what it is you’re trying to build for, and then build systems and tools that optimise towards that. (Corporate social media is failing because it’s only optimised towards profit, and that approach eats itself in the long run).
I posted an issue for mastodon on this recently. I think Lemmy should be asking the same questions.
First off, agreed that monkey brain + internet = unsolved.
Second, I think that this overall is a math problem and what you’re describing is metadata. Before I continue, there are many ways to solve and interpret problems - this is just how I see it.
If you think about this as a graph, it makes a lot more sense as a math problem. People want to communicate and the message has to reach each of them once through the shortest route. In essence, this becomes the “Traveling Salesman Problem”.
Next, imagine the distance between points on the graph become longer (when people group together) and shorter (when people split apart) - we now have described tyranny of the majority.
What you are describing (from my perspective) is the cost of going from one part of the graph to the other. This indeed is a very important part of the problem and directly relates to the tyranny, but does not solve it. Instead to solve this problem, we would have to find a way to standardize the distance between any two points in the graph (i.e it cannot take more than 30 feet to reach any given destination).
I cannot begin to describe how difficult this would be, but my brain is telling me it’s solvable.
The comments (and your github post) helped me think about this a bit deeper. This is why discussion is helpful.
I have a maths major, and think in networks, same as you. I agree that that’s a good start to thinking about the problem. It’s basically similar approach to Jay Forrester’s World model, that used system dynamics to model the global economy.
But what you’re doing is building a model, and then proposing using it to make decisions about how to run the world. This would be sensible, except that any model is necessarily a simplification of the real world, and that simplification process is subjective. What you value and care about and think is important defines what you put in the model, and also what you optimise for, and how you interpret the outputs. So your decisions ultimately end up being subjective too.
There are other issues too, such as the fact that any dynamic model like this exhibits complexity, which makes it analytically unsolveable; and chaos, which means numerical predictions will suffer from unpredictability due to the Butterfly effect, and the Hawkmoth effect.
If you want to get a deeper understanding of this stuff, systems thinking is where you need to head. I would recommend this paper as an excellent introduction to the field as a whole: https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.54120%2Fjost.000051 (Open access, about 50 pages)
For the first wave/system dynamics approach, this article is worth a read too (IMO it presents far to simple a picture though): https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
You make great points, and I will not necessarily refute any of them. This is why I said prior that I wanted a bunch of mathematicians to work towards a solution to this. There are many small and careful considerations that have to be made.
I think a heuristic (simplified model) may work better than trying to flat out solve it. As I said, this is not to refute, just a thought.
First, the problem is fundamentally chaotic (as you’ve said) there is no point in trying to accurately predict (solve) the outcome. Choosing “properties” that tend to be consistent, and then basing “success” off of those may be the more practical option. What these “properties” are would depend on consensus - models have elements you deem important, which may not actually be (as you’ve said). This is just something that needs RFC - hence needing a group of mathies.
Secondly, whatever the solution turns out to be needs to actually be do-able for the average joe. If there is a straight up solution, and it turns out to complex, I think it would be less valuable than a simple-to-do heuristic. If people don’t follow up it’s just worthless - and seeing how long it takes people to do very simple things, we’ll be waiting hundreds of years.
I’ll read the two articles you linked (I’ve read the abstracts) but it’ll be a slow burn.
Internet forums will come back when AI overtakes Reddit and Discord goes awry because they go public.
I’ve been saying it for years. People should have stuck with usenet.
lemmy is similar to usenet, in a way.
If anyone is looking for a pretty good list of forums-
https://aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today?ueid=6310597850b065b278e2b143b21b73b5
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!
I believe this is what they call “preaching to the choir”.
For real I’m here to sing songs.
I’m looking for a study group for a specific maths textbook I’m reading
Discord math forum is too big and my queries get swamped so I don’t use it
I’d appreciate some advice on this and also how to develop my federated use of the internet
Let us know if you find something!
Maybe [email protected] ?
Cheers I’ll check it out and revert back
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