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.
Stopped using Discord a few months ago. Not for any specific reason, just felt like I wasn’t using my time effectively. Anyone important added me on Signal, and then I deleted the apps from my phone and computer.
I can’t put words to how much better my mental health has gotten.
This doesn’t really relate to your comment, I guess, but just thought I would mention it in case anyone else is considering taking a break from the platform.
Google doesn’t index Discord, which means the billion dollar ad industry makes little effort to push their ads on Discord.
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 to 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.
Because its very easy to use and does stuff no other platform does (make it extremely easy to voice/video chat with multiple people streaming screen and essentially make a forum in 2 clicks)
Also their role system is badass. It’s incredibly fine grained and makes it possible to manage large communities with plenty of different user levels.
That’s all good but those features are not what makes a good discussion forum. This, what we’re typing on, is an example of a good forum.
Because it shouldn’t be used as a discussion forum. It’s more similar to an irc and teamspeak
You can actually make forums inside of channels now if you are a community discord. But search is still shit lol
People who use discord don’t want to use it like a forum. They want instant interaction.
If you think about it a lot of forum banter is just that, just because it’s slower and persistent doesn’t guarantee a higher signal to noise ratio.
If Discord were to add wikis so people can add persistent FAQs and guides it would cover 99% of its user needs.
Some communities don’t need a good discussion forum, they need voice chat with a little text chat. Originally, discord was for gaming groups and it worked amazingly for that. Now, more communities are on it than should be, but its still a good feature set for gaming groups.
It’s s great fit for people with goldfish memory span.
Sooooooo… anyone born before 2005
Your goldfish lived for 20 years?!
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.
I spent a lot of time in a few forums in the 00s. Many of them still exist but they are shells of what they used to be. One that I check into once a year or so has about one post per year - and it’s normally a post asking if anyone is still there. The owner keeps it running as a memorial to one of the mods who has passed.
Distro-specific forums are alive and kicking.
I used to love Something Awful, which I think is still doing pretty well at a glance. So many good book recommendations.
yeah, I feel this. Currently it is mainly nostalgia and memorial why we keep it running.
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/
Thanks for sharing and for doing a big part in keeping the free internet we all love alive.
Thanks.
I guess I need to learn German now.
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.
Ooooh. Data. Nice.
Yeah, was gonna say: it’s not just the competition, spams, scams, and trolls are a real issue.
And I followed best practices to set it up.
Including email confirmation for registering accounts, post limits for new accounts, initially being allowed only to the entry area where one has to post and introduce themselves to be allowed elsewhere?
In my childhood these were the basics.
Was it any good?
I haven’t run a BB forum for probably well over 15 years but in my experience the best thing was to just limit the ability to post for 24 hours after the account is being created (that makes getting caught and banned a bit more of a pain point because they have to wait 24 hours before they can do anything again) combined with just blocking Russian and Chinese IP addresses.
It’s surprising how much rubbish that stops.
Well that’s still better than the weird Indian witch doctor spam I see on a couple of forums I visit.
Oh no, that’s really sad and disgusting. Please share the link so that we know to avoid it.
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.
Related Meme: Me and the person who had the same problem 14 years ago (Meme Image: Knight 🛡️ sits next to a skeleton 💀)
With the mass adaption of discord these kind of “nice search engine finds 🔍” will become rare again.
And I heard that reddit also has a special search engine deal with google while blocking others?
I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.
A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.
You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.
I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.
I’ve used OCLP, and I didn’t even realize they largely switched to Discord. That explains why finding some info was such a PITA when I was playing around with it.
I will never understand why people choose to use Discord as a forum replacement. It’s just such an awful platform for that.
Discord is awful for everything that’s not live audio chatting. And even in that case, I think Telegram groups work better.
Oh, and to add something that’s just occurred to me…
If you had a problem and couldn’t find a solution while the support was on Reddit, you could easily start a new thread that might bring you the help you needed. Now, with Discord, you have to hope that someone who knows how to help just happens to be browsing the feed at that moment, otherwise your post is getting lost in the ether, because who the fuck is searching for problems in order to offer assistance?
Also how obsessive forum moderators are over petty things like closing old threads and necro posting.
It’s like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.
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
Good to know, thank you! I’ll have to look closer when I visit a forum next.
The transience and non-indexability is a feature, it’s easier to manage a community if any problem can be solved by just ignoring it for a few days. Just have to hope the issue stays within Discord, sure you could search within discord, but no one is going to and on any large discord the results are likely to be so numerous that it’s worthless. Worst case you lock down a chat channel, mark it as private due to ‘spam’ and create a new one to serve the same purpose as the old to cover it up the rest of the way.
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.
The worst is when you’re trying to look for something but one of the discord bots has said a word similar ten billion times so that’s all that comes up. You’ll try to ban the bot to see other comments but then you just get like blank space or some shit where the bots comments would be
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.
Forums were awesome until the ads took over. Then apps like Tapatalk made reading them easier. Then Tapatalk went to shit and power users migrated to reddit (mainly for the easy to use wepage and awesome independent apps.).
Then reddit shit the bed so now Lemmy is filling the gaps.
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.
1000x this
I wish there were alternatives to Reddit. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know.
How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?
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 don’t incessantly complain, but my Lemmy experience had improved massively by banning the most notorious instances.
Sail the high seas.
leftist infighting
There’s a place that doesn’t happen?
Sure but they are mostly Nazi bars and Klan rallies.
Nobody hates leftists like slightly different leftists.
You take that back 👊 💥
Truth social
Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft
It’s funny because Lemmygrad, .ml and hexbear are alsmoat indistinguishable from truth social of out in plain text
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)
Lemmy think on it and get back to you.
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IIRC there is an open source project for forums communities.
It’s called SMF I think.
Nice avatar lol
Simple machine forums (smf)
phpbb
Mybb
paid - ipboards, vBulletin
But that’s all software to run on your own server
I’ve heard good things about Lemmy
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?
I have been hearing really good things about this new service called X. Very small and friendly community. You just need to register an account and do 12 easy installments of 420.69 yearly
Individual websites for niches instead of amalgamation websites
Usenet
alt.atheism
what is that?
Nice
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
Damn, really?
Digg
Besides Lemmy, HackerNews is decent altho way less subject/community driven
Lobste.rs is pretty active too for tech focused topics
But getting membership is next to impossible. I tried maling them and contacting them on their IRC channel, but to no avail.
Love hackernews but if it gained huge traction outside of the programmer community, it’d be corpinated and enshittified in the blink of an eye by a team of MBAs.
Hackernews is just chock full of techntos 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
Hacker News might be the most insufferable and childishly naive place on the internet.
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That’s how they git ya.
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.
I’m gonna keep posting on Lemmy and hope that helps. Our collective communities should not be in the hands of mega corporations.
Can someone tell me what happens if my Lemmy instance host shuts down 💀? Will my posts be deleted?
Yes, we just have to collectively make Lemmy grow until it’s a true and complete replacement for classical monolith websites such as Reddit and Facebook groups.
You should keep posting on Usenet too…rec.+
So much this.
But where? How?
I read many MBs on Usenet everyday 😉
What is a good usenet server for reading MBs of discussion every day?
Farm and eweka.
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.
That, and hosting & domains got expensive. It used to be a trivial cost to have a website, now the prices are all “introductory offers” with asterisks.
Really? I’m paying $2 a month for hosting. Maybe you have bigger needs then
I use a free subdomain because I don’t have professional needs
$2?! I hope that you’re paying for a server as well. My domain only charges me €8 a year!
I’d say yes but it also really depends where you go. I used to host Feddit.dk at DigitalOcean, it was expensive af for like no hardware at all. Now I use Hetzner instead and it feels reasonable, especially their server auction.
I’m just renewing a domain I don’t want used for something else at this point. I’m not even paying for hosting.
Oh so YOU’RE the owner of ObsessedWithPlasticExistence.com
I’m flattered!
Change domain provider perhaps?
You nailed it, it’s just like the Walmart effect making small businesses fizzle out. We’ll call it the EnWalmartication of the Internet
I’m kinda split on it tbh.
On one hand, we have a literal ip spacing crisis - mainly because there’s bajillions of arguably repetitive content among other non scrupulous stuff.
On the other hand, having a niche community has its pros.
Totally agree with your analogy of Walmart though - but then there’s also things like FediNet which basically let people use a standard framework to hve their niches.
It’ll be interesting to see what the future brings
The IP space consideration is nonsense. You can put many small sites behind a single IP. Bigger sites end up needing tons of their own+cdns, etc.
That and IPv6 is a thing.
On one hand, we have a literal ip spacing crisis
I’ve been hearing about the IPv4 shortage for ages… hasn’t happened yet.
Gamblers fallacy exists, but yes ipv6 exists. Now getting archaic systems to use ipv6…
And IPv6 exists. If even a portion of large orgs switch to IPv6 for their internet exposed interfaces, the “problem” goes away.
(I’ve been hearing about the shortage since 1995…and it hasn’t happened. Large orgs will always find a way to resolve issues like this that affect them).
AWS lightsail just increased prices for ipv4 instances, while ipv6 only is the old price
No, it’s happened. You basically can’t buy IPv4 addresses any more. Want to start up a hosting company or ISP? Better hope you know someone willing to sell, or you’re going to be paying through the nose to a broker.
Mods all over the Internet killed forums with their bullshit. The users too. You can’t tame the mob and the users drag their shit on the carpet like a dog doing the scuttle.
Take a look at the shit show of the Neogaf/Resetera split as an example.
I run an internet forum for a very specific topic. I have to manually register people, because before I did that, spammers would come in and crap all over everything. (Fortunately it’s not a very popular topic, so I only have to register new accounts a few times each month.) I run the forum on my own dime, no advertising or anything, as a side hobby.
There’s also a very active Facebook group. The Facebook group is great for general conversation, but often when a technical question comes up, please just link to the forum where the info is stored.
The Something Awful Forums still exist, and I go there a lot more than I go here or Reddit these days.
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.
There was a while where as a fighting game player the best play to learn obscure tech or situational high damage combos was to sift through discords looking for info and it was BALLS. Lately I feel like everyone more committed to the fan wikis and maybe twitter for that stuff but oh man.
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.
I was very happy to find when I was getting involved in a project that it was mostly organised/discussed on their forum, it makes it so much nicer and more accessible
You missed when the web KILLED BBSs!!!
That was the end! We’re already dead!!!
umm, Hoomin, that was in the 1900’s!
: P
I think the thing to worry about is these corporations centrally controlling this data. With one fell swoop, they can do whatever they want with it. With forums, at least they weren’t controlled by one company.
