Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.

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?

Never played the game and probably never will, but I wanted to say this anyways: stay awesome!

It's people like you, who do stuff out of passion and not monetary gain, that made the internet so great.

I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago.

That's cool!

People still keep using this trash!

Why? I mean if it can be destroyed on a whimp again should be reason enough to not use it again.

I appreciate the people who run the forum for the Emergency! Game series. It's where I found the info on now to run multiplayer on Emergency! 3

Similar. I had a community from 2001 onward where I was variously an admin and a mod over the decades. A lot of us drifted apart from being kids exploring the internet to adults with families and careers.

But mainly the guy that took over the code maintenance became the sole admin in 2018 and he just chased everyone off the site debatebroing with increasingly racist and misogynistic rants. Dude I played games with and talked with online for 20 years started calling me a genocidal enslaver for trying to explain CRT and want solar power in America.

why anyone would use it as a forum

That's what I also would like to know. It's such a bad platform for it.

It’s because they are blocking off their communities through paywalls or a means to feed them advertising. Everyone is an idiot for using discord for support. Imagine being a company and thinking answering the same stupid questions 100x a day instead of having a damn FAQ on a website is efficient and makes sense. Lost their damned minds. I’ll die on the hill that discord is stupid to use for anything but gaming and casual conversations and the people funneling their fan base or userbase to discord are assholes.

I disagree. Email is still perfectly usable and helpful because we simply filter out the commercial stuff. The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad. Luigi Luigi Luigi. I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.

People are lazy. Getting people to sign up for a forum has a much MUCH higher inertia than just clicking join in a group on a platform they already have an account for.

People will subsequently evidently just "deal" with it's inadequacies.

Reddit has the same advantage, you have one account and subsequently have access to a billion and then some communities. Ditto for Discord versus self hosted solutions like Teamspeak.

Lemmy kind of adresses all of this, but actual forum software I think is still mostly the same as it was in the early to mid 2000's when I used it. It's demise is a shame but not a surprise.

I was a 'early adopter' for technology most of my life. I tried Facebook when it was new. As soon as I signed up for an account, I saw how it was abusive - taking away my choices, treating me like a farmed animal being milked for data. I signed up. And immediately started the process to cancel my account. They tried every trick to stop me closing my account. I do not know if it ever was closed! I did the same with everything else that was new and closed all of it very quickly as it was almost always abusive or time-wasting in some way.

The only stuff I stick with is stuff I consider ethical - which is why I am using Mastodon and Lemmy not commercialised social media. And I tend to use that episodically and then get frustrated and stop using it for months before another flurry of use. Why do I use social media? I guess I use it when I am scared and need reassurance from others. Why do I stop? When I do not get the community care I need. We talk about 'loneliness epidemic' in contemporary society. I am not sure its 'loneliness' - I live alone and like it. What I feel is fear. Maybe we are ashamed to admit it. I am not ashamed to say it - the prospect of fascism, WW3, loss of a 'safety net' does frighten me. It is rational to be afraid! When afraid, you look for others who also feel threatened and you test to see 'do they have my back?' If there's a sense of safety, mutual support, you stay. If there is not, you move on.

Social media 'works' if it solves real life problems, if it does not help you stop using it. Sure, kids with no real worries because they are protected by adults can post rubbish online for 'shits and giggles' but anyone aged 14 or older quickly loses that privilege as they move into adult life and then they use social media differently - for fun, yes, but also it must help you survive by giving you ideas, comfort, information, encouragement, escape for a bit etc. If it only adds abuse to a hard life, who has the energy for it?

You are right, but as I sit here and use Lemmy, I can't help but think while being a perfectly functional forum, it lacks aesthetics. What I'm looking at is Windows 1997 High contrast text editor. It tickles my nostalgia, but I can see why Reddit has a broader appeal. People like gimmicks, as much as they like aesthetics and simplicity.

I think it's more about the scale. 80% or more of the content gets created on Reddit or alike, probably.

So you basically mean something like Lemmy but for forums?

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!

Reddit removed a picture of 3 people standing around a cybertruck from the front page today because it "went against community guidelines"

Interesting you mention this. I guess it's more common than I realized.

The literal reason I looked around and came here a few days ago is because of exactly this.

Someone posted a picture of a blue hat that said "Is he dead yet" with the caption that is crazy the whole planet knows who is referring to.

I commented that the planet will be a better place when it happens.

Instant ban for a week.

The bot banning me stated "Threats and violence" as the rule.

So ya...I'm not going back to that.

Do you have ideas to get more people to move over from Reddit to Lemmy?

there’s no point commenting or interacting cause pretty much everything gets you banned

Holy hyperbole, Batman! If you're not posting like an edgy teenager then reddit is decently usable.

The insane reactionary takes against reddit on Lemmy are getting really tiring. Come on, guys.

This is an broken and outdated solution.

Only from the perspective of being able to monetize and control communications among large numbers of people.

For more than just angry X type reactions, the standard forum format is really a solved problem and has worked well for a long time. It's only when these companies want to control what you see and sell the ability to do that do we get the news feeds. Even Reddit limits your direct message counts until you pay money for it.

The old internet was so much better

I would have thought this is already a solved problem.

If you model social networks like a graph, then you can measure certain properties. One property that's very important for social networks is the "small world index". The small world index is a ratio of (how many of your friends know about each other(clustering coefficient))/(how many people on average to connect with anyone in the world (average path length)). Basically, in tribal communities, it used to be that everyone knew one another, AND if you really needed to send a message to another community then it would take only a few intermediate people. The former gives you a sense of safety, and the latter gives you the sense of being able to change the world.

With the advent of social media and other things, the small world index has gone way down. The amount of your friends that your friends know on average is gone down, aka, everyone is very fragmented and the clustering index has gone down. This number has gone down faster than the average path length, because the average path length was surprisingly low to begin with. The net effect is that people feel less like they are part of a community.

Social networks always try to tune their algorithms to encourage interactions to raise the small world index in this direction, but it's very hard. For one, only few percent of users actually generate any content, the rest are lurkers. You can't have a high clustering if your "potential friends" never talk to each other, if you can call them that.

Another reason is that enabling small worlds inside social networks is sometimes at odds with revenue generation. In general, consuming content/having para-social interactions online is much easier than before the modern social networks. Thus, people have gotten much more picky with their time and interactions, and now the type of content that people expect to see online now must be of the highest quality. High quality content is easier to monetize, but it's also harder to create. So this puts an artificial floor on who creates content (only people who are in it for the money), and thus we have fewer people who spread/share ideas. This decreases the clustering coefficient. Thus, paid social networks are against small worlds.

Follow me for more crazy ramblings.

Reddit was a decent solution, till it enshitified to make money. Before then, it was already flooded by the masses. Clearly their method worked fine. Not perfect, but at least fine. So I don't see why the masses are the problem. I personaly put all the blame on the need to make money of a vital piece of digital infrastructure.

The tricky part, is that we also cannot put it in the hands of a government, since it can become a tool for propaganda. So the EU hosting something like reddit, would also create a conflict of interrests. I'm curious if we can find a good solution to this problem.

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.

I think that we need to provide actual alternatives based on constructive discussion and learning instead of based on corporate profits. Institutions like the EU could develop and run something like that, especially with all the federated platforms.

Server-wide censorship cannot be allowed. / This eliminates every platform I know of.

Within the I2P anonymous mix network there was an attempt, at some point around 2015, to build a system named Syndie where everyone would have to be their own censor, and servers would host content without the server operator really knowing or caring about what they host.

It failed to take off, but I'm not convinced if the reason was architecture or the main developer leaving.

It is, though the numbers are depressing.

A site like Reddit grows in its daily active users more than 15x (!!!) entire MAU base of Lemmy. "Reddit migrations" are barely a margin of error for them.

This is excluding, liberal, assumption of bot counts.

You dont want 90% of the shitheads on reddit.

defederated

do you mean federated? Defederation is when a server blocks another.

I think in that regard, Lemmy is a forum software just like vBulletin or Discourse is. However, I would really like to see a flat forum with federation.

Yeah, those old forum threads really were great. Many forums had threads that were discussing topics for years, all in one place. There were people posting how they were building something and they would just reply to their thread with an update. It's a great way to collect information and better than we are doing it here