Strange they don’t even mention Fediverse. It just felt too dated.
I can understand wanting to bring your discussion hub in house to avoid something like what’s happened. But bringing it into essentially an old school phpBB forum is certainly, ah, a choice.
There is nothing wrong with forums, they’ve existed (and continue to exist) for decades. They are a great way to have information easily searchable, as well as easily post and contribute.
Just because they aren’t carded like twitter or lemmy doesn’t mean they are dated. Everything has it’s place and every tool has a job. In this case, that place is a forum and the tool is phBB. Also, I wouldn’t call it “old school” as the most recent update is from May 21, 2023.
Not everything has to be federated, and nothing is stopping anyone from creating an instance for Jellyfin ( [email protected] ) . But for the official instance, having it hosted by them, on their hardware, that they control, it’s a great choice to use a forum.
It could be argued that web forums were an answer to older system that came before it and the problems with them. Systems like Usenet and Fidonet BBS’s were federated system, and web forums are actually newer than that.
Good for them. Hopefully this will make it much easier to consolidate guides and helpful info for Jellyfin.
I thought this was an announcement they were moving to the Fediverse.
Agreed. Lowkey disappointed.
Seriously, how about they stand up a lemmy instance? That way peeps could follow their forums without having to travel to a proprietary place.
According to the footer they’re running MyBB so although it is more centralised, I wouldn’t call it proprietary.
What advantages would Lemmy have over the traditional style of forum for their use case?
Yeah it’s not the end of the world. It’s slightly disappointing that you have to create yet another account unnecessarily.
You can log in to their forum with Discord, Github, Google, Reddit, Stack Exchange or Twitter accounts. It would be better for them to support logging in with any OpenID provider using OpenID Connect, but they do support some of the major ones at least (except for Facebook and Apple).
The only real advantage I can see is they would be another mass of users on the fediverse, which is what we want I suppose. I mean I do want it to be populated, and if more people migrate, it ensures survival of their community. I don’t like how we have all scattered to the wind, but it’s their choice where to go
I’d actually love if companies/products/software went back to forums and other specialized means to get support. I hate when they refer to Reddit or worse, Discord.
@narc0tic_bird @c1b0 a #phpBB -like #forum software that works with #ActivityPub would be pretty sweet. Surprised that doesn’t exist yet, as it’d be a perfect format to work with ActivityPub.
It does exist in a manner of speaking, closer to us than you think!
lemmyBB is Lemmy but with the UI of phpBB!
MyBB is a weird choice in 2023
MyBB is great for niche/specific content. Great moderator tools and everyone knows how to navigate a freakin’ forum.
It’s great that they’re going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don’t miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse’s “anyone can post there” system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, “one login to access everything” systems.
Federated logins are a thing! The challenge is finding one that’s open and privacy-friendly. Unfortunately the widest-used ones come from entities like Google or Facebook with a marked interest in preying on user data. Mozilla used to maintain a federated system (Persona) but they discontinued it. I know Ubuntu offers one for all their services (bug trackers, forums etc.) but not sure if it’s open to third party systems. Perhaps there are others worth using.
Since I’m now using a password manager I’ve been having less issue with creating as many accounts as needed.
But I do agree it’d be great to have a single sign on.But then you have the same centralization issue - and it’s even worse, if the central authority has a fit for some reason about you, now you’re locked out of many completely unrelated sites.
You mean the password manager as the central authority? You can self host a password manager using, eg, Vaultwarden.
Even if you use a trusted, paid commercial service, I think the risk of that happening is lower than on Reddit. Their business model is simpler and more transparent. They want to keep you as a customer so you will keep paying them. And there is less opportunity for them to ban you for political reasons when you’re not expressing yourself on their platform.
If you are looking for a little bit of “extra” to go with your password manager, check out firefox relay. You can create emails that forward to your real email without exposing it. They allow you to block emails entirely, or just promotions. Their paid option is like $12/year (USD) and allows unlimited masks, and allowing you to create your own relay subdomain (like (whatever I decide)@dusty.mozmail.com). It’s definitely worth the relatively tiny charge for the paid version.
There is also a relay service with Cloudflare but I’ve not tried it out yet. But having an email like [email protected] saved to my password manager is no big deal.
This is great, I’m honestly glad they have their own forum on their own page as opposed to something like Discord.
I know people will be disappointed it’s not on lemmy or similar, but it’s for the best to be honest. Since it’s a product, it’s much easier to have something they fully control and can have ownership over (including who and what can be posted there). It’s a great decision by them.
As much time passes I still find forums really easy to navigate through with how categorized everything is, and I do like activity bumping up threads. Although searching through like 100+ page long threads on like xda can be a pain. Still so much better than discord for being a source of information.
Still so much better than discord for being a source of information.
Discord is atrocious as an info repository. It’s useful to chat and to have a way to search what’s been said, but it’s horrible having to search there for that one useful message amidst all the other replies if you haven’t participated. And the nature of a chat makes searching blindly very time consuming.
Ah, yes. Nothing like bumping a five year old thread for whatever reason.
Legit funniest necro I saw recently was on one of the forums in a private tracker I’m a member of.
There were about three pages of discussion. One dude is talking back and forth with another.
Thread died down as they all do.
A few weeks ago, five years after the last post, that same dude just randomly pops in to reply to the previous post with the most casual of responses.
He wasn’t even inactive on the forums. Somehow he just left that specific thread for five years.
On the topic of forums, I do like them, but I find they can often feel less “casual” than reddit/Lemmy. Different etiquette, I think.
Discord goes the complete opposite direction. It’s basically IRC with some more modern features. In other words, there is nothing but the chaos of a conversation that’s lasted maybe an hour or so.
How people rely on it for long term stuff, I don’t know.
Discord has forums for long form discussions. Slow mode can be enabled so that it doesn’t turn into a “chat”.
Round peg, square hole IMO. Discord is designed as a chat application with an afterthought of threading and forums (I guess?). It’s not a reddit replacement, and it’s not designed as a forum.
I think forum mode has the same limitations as regular Discord - posts aren’t indexed in Google, search is kinda… meh, you have to sign up to see anything, and overall it’s still not a platform built for long-form discussions.
I feel that a lot of people are missing the point that discord has done something that other software has not. It makes it easy to centralize communication. It is invaluable for small developers.
And while yes the information is not available via general searching, the searching within discord is actually pretty good.
I keep seeing people mention matrix as a viable alternative to discord but my experience with matrix has me calling bs.
On the topic of forums, I do like them, but I find they can often feel less “casual” than reddit/Lemmy. Different etiquette, I think.
I agree and it’s what I like about forums. to someone like me they’re more approachable. discord works best for me with friends, but it’s awkward with people I don’t know well
Although searching through like 100+ page long threads on like xda can be a pain.
Until recently, one of the official ways to get support for the email app I use (FairEmail) was to post in a 1,200-page XDA Developers thread containing 24,000 posts. https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/closed-app-5-0-fairemail-fully-featured-open-source-privacy-oriented-email-app.3824168/page-1203
I’m a big proponent of people reading the whole thread before making a new post in forums, but in this case. I’m not so sure anymore lol.
hahaha that one thread is larger than some entire forums I’ve moderated in the past.
I wonder why those chose mybb over discourse. I definitely prefer the latter.
I find discourse incredibly unfriendly to use. Ardour use it for their forum and it puts me off visiting.
I personally find it very easy to use, but to each their own! Is there any forum software you prefer?
Discourse is impossible once it gets to a certain size. Four groups trying to have four different conversations on top of each other.
Here I am wishing they had chosen VBulletin or Invision, lol. I think it’s just a case of what I’m more familiar with in terms of forums though.
I get their decision, forum software is stable, has plugins and tools to help with moderation, has been around a long time and they don’t have to worry about things like LemmyNSFW or other instances they don’t want the hassle of because they control all the content that shows up in a forum space.
I’m just glad it’s not a fucking Discord thing.
I think vBulletin is - at best - dormant these days. I spent about 10 years on a vBulletin-powered forum before I went over to reddit… 12 years ago.
deleted by creator
It has been superceded by XenForo
Finally. I’m happy to see them moving from the subreddit. It wasn’t terrible, but a forum will be better I think in the long run.
And they announce it on Twitter? 🙄
They announced it on their website. Why OP chose to link the tweet instead is beyond me.
I welcome the return of forums. What a simpler time.
Not in this day and age where me and my grandma have our own.
There are so many, you can’t keep up to date with your hobbies unless you are willing to follow 50 platforms with 60 different UIs and community rules.
I prefer the aggregation of data like fediverse where we can follow topics and not platforms.
I don’t-
I don’t miss having to register accounts on each one, answer a bunch of questions, give a birthday, give an email, do a capta… etc…
Just for that forum to popup on haveibeenpwned.com a few months later.
Knock on wood, password managers are a thing now, and its easy to give each forum a very unique password. But- still. Don’t really miss those.
Yeah but that’s the old way. Today you’d sign in with one of the big accounts, or, even better, a passkey that seamlessly moves around with you.
Thank you! I feel like I’m the only person who lived through that time. Having everything on one site is way simpler, reddit sucks but that doesn’t mean the concept does.
I do not miss having to sign up for a specific forum, wait for the email, no email, check spam folder, no email, 15 mins later email shows up in spam, go to post, “sorry you can’t make a post without interacting with at least 5 other posts”, post random shit on 5 other posts, finally get to post, "this question has been answered. Post archived "
I still see a legacy of that when a forum for game modding requires you create an account to download.
Another factor, is…
Well, Especially for users in large communities, or those with lots of interests, they will end up on LOTS of forums.
And, that turns into either, a lot of notifications, or a lot of ignored interactions due to the number of notifications.
The last thing people don’t seem to remember, half of the damn forums wanting to put damn ads everywhere.
Not only do we have password managers now, we also have OIDC. I can see a situation where a service pops up with no offering other than identity management/verification, and forum-like software can accept log-ins from that service.
I’m so excited for forums to come back, just need to make sure there is a great mobile app to handle them.
It felt so much better to engage on forums. felt a bit slower and more intentional. And signatures, the signatures! Love their choice here.
a indie game i support refuses to use a forum, only discord. i hate searching thru threads in discord when a forum would be easier.
i wish people wouldn’t shun the idea of a forum just because it’s a “old idea.” good on the jellyfin folks for doing this.
Yep unpopular opinion I hate hate hate discord for anything but normal chat. The threads they added recently are neat and I hope they keep going in that direction.
I hate Discord full stop, because it’s a centralised proprietary platform just like Reddit and is going to hit the exact same issues one day, and it’s going to be even harder to recover all the conversations that have gone on there.
Sadly this is very common for small game developers (and even large ones) to move entirely to Discord to avoid paying or managing a dedicated forum
I miss forums too. Discord has kind of taking over that role for my friends and I, but Discord makes it feel like you are posting something with everyone staring at you through a window. I hate that it notifies that you are actively typing.
And my questions got lost in a flood of messages… Even Discord now has to implement forums feature to prevent this problem.
Discord sucks for what forums are good for. Forums are great for durable discussions that can be indexed, searched, discovered, and referenced. Discord? It’s only good at real time conversations
Discord sucks for what forums are good for. Forums are great for durable discussions that can be indexed, searched, discovered, and referenced. Discord? It’s only good at real time conversations
TIL about Jellyfin. Is it like Plex? Better? I assume it’s solid since everyone knows about it?
Way better!
Imho, it is better. Being free is an extra bonus
It’s great software but for me it’s missing at least 1 must-have feature, being intro detection & skipping.
If you want to get into them you can run them both on the same library and just compare which you like best
There is a plugin you can install for that, but it is a bit finicky:
It’s plex but open source and without any sort of subscription. I have been using it for a couple of years and never had a problem
Does it work outside of the home network as well as plex does? Also, do you think it is worth switching if I already bought the lifetime plex pass?
It should work, but I use tailscale so I can’t personally vouch for it. I don’t think it differs that much from plex tho, so if you are fine with it and you have already the pass, you aren’t losing out anything major
Now all they need to do is move away from twitter.
I’ve been using Plex forever. Got the lifetime subscription a million years ago.
Is there anything I’m missing out on by not using Jellyfin? Anything I’d miss on Plex moving to it?
Also a Plex lifetime user. I tried jellyfin not too long ago to see what the fuss was all about. I had heard that they handled her tonemapping better.
The interface is different but more or less just as good as Plex. It’s definitely more for the person that likes to dive in the details of the config of their server. For example, you need to setup your own domain for external users to connect to. It’s not done automatically like on Plex.
The focus on your content vs the “free” content Plex shoves in our face is nice I must admit.
Just a question of preference. In the end I stuck it out with Plex… For now.
It mostly comes down to personal preference honestly.
Jellyfin is open-source and more focused on your own selfhosted media. I, too, bought a Plex pass years ago and have enjoyed Plex but they’ve been adding a bunch of crap to their interface.
I’m big on free open-source software but I won’t be biased and say that Jellyfin has some rough edges, but it works well enough for me to watch movies with my wife. Plex is a bit smoother and more production-ready for those power users that host Plex for several others.
I’d encourage you to try it out if for nothing more than exposing yourself to alternatives.
The main reason I use jellyfin over plex is just because they only host my media, nothing else. None of the plex pass bs cluttering it up
For a second I thought they were launching their federated lemmy/kbin instance. With different communities, like “support”, “bugs”, “news”…
Would have been freaking awesome and a great use case for Lemmy and federarion.
Good for them anyway.
The return of phpbb, who had that on their 2023 bingo card?
They evaluated it and decided against it in favor of MyBB.
I’m a little surprised they didn’t pick Discourse.
I think Flarum and NodeBB are better that Discourse. Discourse is a Ruby app which makes it a pain to deploy.
I used to be a developer on SMF, but these days I see the older forum systems like phpBB, SMF, etc. as “previous generation”.
deleted by creator
At the same time, it might not fit them. Lemmy is a link aggregator, which seems like extra functionality that they don’t really need, not when existing forum software will do what they need, while also being more stable/mature.
I hope mods can restrict the types of content users can post in communities in fututure.
Of course they can, what else would moderators be doing? Not entirely sure how this is even a question…
Maybe they mean automated moderation tools that will just do that?
I think they mean turning off the ability to submit non-text posts entirely. It’s much better that a user can’t do something that isn’t allowed than to have a bot fix up the situation after the fact.
Add in the fact they’d end up having to defederate a lot of instances due to trolls and whatnot, and it’s much better that they run it on their own site. It’s much better from a moderation viewpoint for them. I know people will be all upset here, but it’s honestly for the best.
Not good enough of an excuse, IMO. Link aggregation is essentially a normal post with just a link to somewhere else, which you can totally do in any forum… and it is no bloat at all.
I believe the reasoning was more like “we don’t want to do any federation, because the barrier of having to create a new account will free us from trolls/bots/etc”.
They made their announcement on their own site, they are the somewhere else, and the link has found it’s way here so what’s the problem?
We call websites like this one link aggregators but they are just platforms, it’s the users who are the aggregators collecting the links that we are interested in. We don’t need a system of top down promotion and don’t need to have our platforms serve those who want to promote. Likewise projects like Jellyfin don’t owe us a presence and this post itself proves they don’t need one. The idea that everyone must maintain a brand identity and that our social media should be polluted with advertising is something that the fediverse has and I hope will continue to stand against.
Nah, dude, chill, 😅.
They just built a nice independent forum, but I would have liked to be able to participate in their forum with this account (federation) instead of having to create a new account.
That’s it, this is not going to keep me awake at night, in fact, I am happy they are finding independence from Reddit. The world keeps turning, have a nice week!
I wonder if Lemmy could do single sign-on support like how you can log in some places with your Google or Facebook account.
Yeah, definitely. Lemmy could implement an OpenID identity provider, then accounts could be used to log in to anything that supports OpenID Connect.
AskHistorians, AkScience, AMA, AskReddit, Ask*, and the myriad of semi-official support subreddits for services, games, eyc. all would like to disagree that Reddit/Lemmy is a link aggregator exclusively.
The tree-like comment structure is just overall better for large-crowd engagement. Phpbb forum type is just going to get flooded with many posts and hard to follow when thousands answer
I’m not sure that the Jellyfin community is that big or active enough that that will be much of an issue at all. Looking at their sub, the highest rated posts are under 1k, so number of people active on the sub is probably somewhere between 100k - 1M.
Your average post maybe has about 10 - 20 people interacting with it at most. Expecting thousands seems… optimistic, especially when the forum numbers puts them at under 300 people.
