Yeah, forums were pretty cool!

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I’m getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.

First the centralized (I prefer to say “urbanized”) nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.

However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who’s hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by “last comment” which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it’s not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won’t bother.

I get to know people on traditional forums, even miss them if they leave, but on Reddit, comments are just disembodied thoughts manifesting in the ether. That may be due to the size of the community rather than the format, though.

Funny thing…an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed

“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.

plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.

No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they’re in the AI bed with them.

Your Favorite Forum still rules.

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Maybe Lemmy is a 2020s version of phpBB (the forum software, which is open source like Lemmy is). Lemmy and phpBB can both be hosted by anyone, but of course the interesting thing about Lemmy is that Lemmy servers can share their content with each other.

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).

Here is a chrome extension that copies all messeges and media from a discord server you’re a part of.

In case the stuff on a server is what keeps you coming back.

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

Every forum i joined for my hobbies are always been full of shills in disguise.

It’s why I went to the Chime.In app. It’s not perfect, but it’s not Reddit

Let’s hope the resurrection of Digg starts to fill this void.