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.)

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.

What can we do? What can we do about Meta and Xitter and Reddit? Just try to show people that there’s another side where the grass actually is greener and invite them to join.

Welcome to 2015 I guess?

Yeah especially when Teddit or discord flip the script but Reddit’s semi implosion could have led to a resurgence if their Admins hadn’t calmed down

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

In the USA, Section 230 protections are going away in 2027 so that should finish off any remaining forums.

I for one would want a more open source system where a single guy running a server doesn’t have all the power in the forum. It would be awesome if a fedi form of forums took over and one could replicate all the info as relays.

Not everything.

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

Discord 🤣🤣 is that even end to end encrypted?

Honestly reddit’s (and Lemmy’s) comment formatting structure is so much better than other forums that it’s been part of the reason why I don’t want to use the other ones.

I hate Reddit, and I hate discord.

I am using discord for a discussion thread of one thing which follows a serial webnovel and it’s infuriating because when something new happens there’s always a constant influx of people asking the same questions because there is no way to pin or highlight pertinent information and no one is going to go scrolling through a million messages searching for the first time the question was asked and answered.

Discussion threads! Not chat messages!

They’ve been dissapearing for a long time, if they were an animal, they’d be somewhere between Endangered, and Critically Endangered…

The eye-opener now has been that Reddit has turned into corpo/authortiarian boot licking trash, and Discord is planning on going publicly traded. (Read More Corpo bootlicking trash)

I agree with the previous comments: forums are hard to manage because of trolls, hackers and lack of dedicated resources … The main responsible being, before reddit and discord, the ugly social networks mainly facebook. I hope this company will crumble …