cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28930199
A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
The same way you moved from reddit to here. Dissatisfaction and momentum.
I still post on Wil Wheaton’s old phpBB forum from time to time. Nobody else does, though. :(
Does he post on there? Lol
No. He’s on Tumblr.
Share the link, I’ll post on it!
I don’t know, but every fucking group’s reliance on Discord pisses me off. I’m very much into modding my games, the problem is that every damn mod author wants to do support only on Discord, which means probably more than half of my 200 servers are just for that.
Man you said it. I despise discord. My gaming group will post things in the chat, and if you ever want to look at something again it’s a pain in the ass to find it
Discord is a terrible platform for communities and for support, because it’s one giant group chat and the messages scroll by. You really need a forum type environment for these types of things and while discord does have a forum format option, it’s still really sucks and also gets little use on the count of how the rest of Discord is structured.
yep. it’s free and easy, and becoming the default. :|
Seriously. I don’t mind it as a platform for socialising, but it’s terrible as a support platform, and it goes against the idea of open and accessible information.
I really don’t get how one is supposed to use more than one server. As in, how to spread one’s attention to feel like one is present in so many places. It’s a total non-starter for me.
We trusted corporations.
I’d like to think we’ve collectively learned our lessons, but watching people migrate from Reddit to fucking Discord makes me think that we really have not and probably never will.
Corpos are spending countless resources to infiltrate anything with as much as a iota of traction so that they can bleed the cow cash dry and sell its carcass for money.
Even if you distrust the corpos and want them to die, the majority of the population has so much trouble just surviving that its hard to raise up against that bullshit
Yeah. Federating forums seem like a useful feature to keep them going. The forum style has it benefits that the discord and reddit style lacks. Sadly a forum I used a lot for my community is now in its final days, even if it managed to last a lot longer than others
Maybe ask if they’re willing to switched over to lemmy? You can sort like a forum does. Long shot but hey…
true. I didn’t consider that. That would could work. Lemmy is a lot more advanced in that regard. Currently the best ideas are Discord and give up, and the original owners are done with the idea, but I could try and create a spiritual successor on here. Lemmy suffers a bit from the same isues as Forums with lack of people, but I only need to convince the OGs. I need to think about that, and a forum from 2004 whose software is a decade out of date is easy to beat in that regard
Also thanks for creating this awesome instance.
Also tools like Lemmy Federate can help broaden the reach and allow more people on Lemmy to discover your communities, since communities and their content doesn’t get federated until someone is subscribed to them.
I was going to bring up this post, but it’s actually yours
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28227815?scrollToComments=true
Yeah it seems not a lot of people are aware of this tool anymore. I guess since it’s no longer advertised on lemy.lol’s sidebar people just sort of forgot about it.
This is a fantastic read. I wasnt around for the prime days of forums but I did experience them a bit.
I’m becoming extremely concerned about the number of topics and projects that are migrating to Discord. My main issue is that it is not and never will be publically indexed, and among other problems, is itself a corporate walled garden we consider to be “one of the good ones”.
I really hope we find and establish a “low executive cost” solution before the next time Discord fumbles (which is inevitable) and we can claw some of that activity back.
But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.
But people are so used to seamless voice and video chat nowadays - and that’s a technical hurdle that AFAIK, no open-source self-hostable projects have come close to solving.
this is unironically such a big problem, there are great voice chatting solutions, mumble, and the handful of other ones that exist out there.
There are basically 0 good usable video conferencing/sharing softwares out there. The same goes for desktop streaming. If we just focused like, a little bit more of our energy on these two things, i think the world would unironically get better. It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?
The ones that do exist are likely to be web based, and thus, webRTC, the dreaded behemoth of both web support and also, generally poor implementation. I just want mumble but with support for video streaming, how hard is it >:(
It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?
It’s not about the hardware. (Not like it’s that ubiquitous anyway; I’m daily driving a machine from 2017)
I’m going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like “seamless screen sharing” or “video conference” doesnt really matter.
And IMO, that’s good if we want to Recover the Web.
The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.
In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can’t really “push to talk” three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won’t want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time. For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.
In the end, something like a simple jabber-like chatroom is far easier and more productive to work on, even before we get to the coding part.
Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on “debt”, which is what “Foo has to have ‘screen sharing’ because Discord has it” ultimately boils down to.
I’m going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like “seamless screen sharing” or “video conference” doesnt really matter.
this definitely makes sense in the OSS community, but i feel like someone should’ve already done it as a semi pet project already. I know i would’ve done it.
And IMO, that’s good if we want to Recover the Web.
that’s an interesting take, but personally i think the web should stick to pretty much static web pages, the browser is turning into a secondary operating system, which is being run on an operating system, which is just, stupid.
Personally i don’t think any of this stuff should be done over the web, period.
The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.
yeah, my main complaint though is that we do have things like jabber, this is already incredibly accessible, there is almost no need for expanding the current landscape because it’s been around for like 30 years now.
In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can’t really “push to talk” three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won’t want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time.
no but that’s not the immediate use case either, something like mumble is really nice if you’re playing games with other people and just want to VOIP so you don’t have to use a text chat, you can talk and play video games at the same time pretty easily. It’s also nice if you just want to casually hang around other people without having to be physically near them, or at a keyboard typing on it constantly.
For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.
i mean, you don’t need a camera, maybe in a professional setting, but in a casual setting, screensharing something to show someone else for example, you don’t even need a camera.
Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on “debt”, which is what “Foo has to have ‘screen sharing’ because Discord has it” ultimately boils down to.
this is fair, and tbh i don’t even really want a discord clone, you could very easily just adapt one of the many existing text chat protocols IRC being the most obvious, and VOIP is basically a solved problem, that’s not hard either. Mumble has a pretty good low latency implementation of it, but you don’t always need low latency. Video sharing/video conferencing is harder, but we have things like youtube and netflix, so the actual video streaming part isn’t the hard thing. We have entire video manipulation libraries like FFMPEG as well, which will do everything you need it to do.
Mumble i think is the perfect example of a “minimalist” application, it does VOIP and it does it really well. I pretty much just want mumble but for video sharing and i’d be happy.
this definitely makes sense in the OSS community, but i feel like someone should’ve already done it as a semi pet project already. I know i would’ve done it.
Pet project, yes; production-ready, that’s a whole 'nother story.
Ultimately some things are too complex to deliver out on tem “just because”. Such as web browsers, hence ATM there only exist about 2.
Pet project, yes; production-ready, that’s a whole 'nother story.
to be fair, linux was also a pet project, until it wasn’t. I’m not expecting people to drop zoom2 electric boogaloo over this or anything.
Ultimately some things are too complex to deliver out on tem “just because”. Such as web browsers, hence ATM there only exist about 2.
web browsers i could see, because they fucking suck, though there are a few alt browser projects currently going on, so there is that.
but something like VOIP and video sharing i would imagine is probably going to be magnitudes easier than something like a web browser.
Matrix+elements is very easy to selfhost in any homelab. works well enough for goverments. Federated and easy end to end encryption. And one can easily set up a web archive bridge forvarchiveable rooms.
That beeing said i still think IRC is the best for pure text chat.
But neither have seamless voice chat/screen sharing, which is a staple of Discord that users are very used to.
I do not know what you talk about. I use screen sharing and voice chat daily on elements with our own hosted matrix server.
Edit: i felt wrong saying “voice chat” what even is that. I make regular calls and video calls with screen sharing in elements ;)
That is interesting, the last time i tried Element/matrix it did not have these features. Can I ask, is your screen sharing of a quality that you can stream videos and games at equivilant frame rates?
I have never tried that. We use it to share powerpoints in meetings or do troubleshooting together. Or I use it to do family video calls with the kids. Fps are never an issue. There are times where there are compression artifacts tho. Especially if someone have a bad or variable connection. On a buss or a train or similar.
What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.
Besides the expensive Matrix option the parent suggested, IRC covers text fine. Mumble handles low-latency, low-resource voice chat with positional audio for games. XMPP uses more resources that IRC (but can have encryption) but a ton less resources than Matrix which makes it suitable for self-hosting—my partner & I do voice/video calls over my home server fine & Movim is working on group calls with a Web UI (tho it should be noted both Zoom & Jitsi use XMPP under the hood).
In what way are matrix expencive? You do not have to self host it. You can just make an account on any public matrix server.
Matrix servers chew up an order of magnitude more CPU/RAM which limits the places you can deploy it. The eventual consistency model makes storage balloon as every message, attachment, metadata must be copied to all nodes in a conversation which is resilient, but wasteful in duplicated content in practices which has historically caused many medium & larger servers to shut down due to the explosive just of storage (similar issues with Mastodon). That same model is why it takes on the order of minutes to just join a room or come back to a client that hasn’t been opened recently. Element X & new servers have to work so damn hard to work around asynchronously than fundamental decision to attempt to hide it from the sluggish UX but behind the scenes still too expensive. & since it is expensive to run in many vectors this causes folks to then move to the biggest servers that can handle the load which means the Matrix network is in actuality a small number of massive servers (most of which managed by Matrix.org) & a small number of tiny hobbyists running nodes of <10 users is practice. With so many users on Matrix.org-controlled instances (& again with eventual consistency), almost all data gets synced to their nodes make subpoenas a breeze.
A healthier network would have many fewer massive centralized nodes, medium-sized nodes, & the resource requirements would be low enough that more folks would be encouraged more often to run their own nodes they control so they aren’t required to trust an unknown serves operator. Meaning “just making an account on any public server” isn’t a great mode of operation for privacy—especially as with Matrix joining a medium-sized server will put them under a lot of strain causing them to throw in the tower & joining the few massive servers further exacerbating the centralization issue.
Copying the UX of Slack/Telegram/Discord in a decentralized manner is a fool’s errand. Keeping the chat history for eternity is already a questionable call over using forums, but trying to distribute that out like a blockchain is so wasteful.
https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/ https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/xmpp-matrix/ https://www.process-one.net/blog/matrix-and-xmpp-thoughts-on-improving-messaging-protocols-part-1/
Thank you for a detailed answer. We probably do not notice much of this problem yet, since we are in the low user count of 30-40 with mostly local channels.
It’s once you start federating do the prices start to soar, & most things can hold local channels fine… but that’s kind of the point if you are hitching your cart to say something is decentralized as a bullet point for privacy. But if it’s mostly local channels, wouldn’t IRCv3 cut it?
What do you need screen sharing for? This comes up so, so rarely for me.
it’s convenient, also it’d be nice if it had the feature capability.
Mumble is great, but if there was something like mumble, that implemented video sharing, that would be miles better, though a lot of people would probably still use mumble, as it’s fine.
From what i’ve dug into, basically every video sharing capable setup is based on web technology, and i simply refuse to go near web technology unless i WANT to use a web browser. It’s just, worse, in so many ways.
Well Discord, Slack, & others are web tech too so it’s not like avoiding it is easy. If I have to use these services, I would prefer it be in the browser’s sandbox.
Even still, almost all debug, troubleshoot, pairing session I have done in the last 4 years have been done over Upterm or Tmate, which is much, much lighter on bandwidth & not crushed by video compression.
yeah, and discord slack and basically everything based on electron is a fresh hell.
I love having three separate instances of chrome running the background while just using my computer, such that they all consume an entire gigabyte of ram for no particular reason.
TBF i wouldn’t do much if any troubleshooting over RDP or anything similar, i use SSH for all that stuff lol. I’m just confused that nobody has put together a “relatively” functional version of this yet, it seems like it would be prime realestate.
That is why upterm & tmate exist… ephemeral shared SSH sessions. Biggest missing feature would be some sort of scoping since someone could raw dog your system—catting SSH keys, deleting config, force pushing a repo if unlocked keys are in memory.
Usenet and bbs erasure.
Usenet is still useful for… other things 🏴☠️
I was considering mentioning that GenX stuff, but I felt it was too obscure and would only serve to posture my creds :)
Your creds could be diminished based on which usenet forums you frequented. I had a little while in my 90s youth obsessed with researching marihuana, libertarian ideals, and discrediting Scientology in the alt.scientology groups. Not great, kind of normal for usenet, but there were much darker places to inhabit there. Worst of all was posting from my university account with my real name.
Usenet is where I discovered slack.
carrier pigeon erasue.
While I do agree with the problems identified, I can’t help but think they also made forums a lot better. Due to the lower discoverability and higher effort to actually join communities felt more personal. You interacted with smaller groups and came to know specific people. I still have friends from back then.
On larger platforms, I never had that. Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.
That’s a double-edged knife. yes it feels closer and personal, but it also breeds inside groups and cliques. I’ve been turned away from multiple forums because I was too ASD to fit in with their culture but there was no other space to discuss it. And this can go much much worse than just a culture-fit. Not to mention that if that forum becomes too popular, that culture is anyway lost.
However using lemmy there’s the best of both worlds. You can still keep your instance small enough so that you know your local users, but also be able to interact with the larger community without the extra effort I explained. For example there’s instances out there like beehaw and hexbear which through have managed to retain their own culture and standards even while federated.
Hard agree. I would also like to add that I think a lot of people remember forums a lot better than they were. Federation keeps admins and mods in check, these features act as checks and balances on instances
*Nothing personal ofc db0 you run an awesome instance.
*Nothing personal ofc db0 you run an awesome instance.
Insult acknowledged! Benned for life!
Uncle Benned, or Obi Wan Kenobi Benned? 🤔
Benned and Jerrys!
I had so many good times on forums back in the day.
The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.
When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It’s like living in a small village versus living in a city.
The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn’t as VPNs were barely a thing) you’d lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.
Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.
I have a different experience but I’m on a very smaller instance than .world. Your instance is big, generalist but their is lots of them that are location- or topic-oriented. Such instances are not only smaller with a more personnalised local thread but the people on it share already identified common points with you.
Unfortunately, there is no instance matching my interests. There are a number of communities across different instances, but it seems like several people tried to make their own, didn’t interact with each other and all of them are long dead.
Once I find such an instance, I’ll switch over. I’ve been meaning to leave .world anyways.
What are your interests?
Back on reddit, I mostly interacted with communities relating to JRPGs. There are some communities over here, but at most they post some trailers every now and then. There are also some more focussd communities about Dragon Quest, Xenoblade or SMT - all of them practically dead. I don’t think there is an instance.
I could go over to a programming related one, the german instance or even one of the vegan instances for secondary ‘interests’, but those aren’t things I often find myself posting about online to be honest. They seem to be mostly about memes anyways.
https://lemmy.zip/ could be a good fit for you. It’s reliable, transparent (https://lemmy.zip/post/22004722?scrollToComments=true) and hosts communities about gaming and technology.
The main jrpg community is actually hosted there ([email protected] )
On the other hand, wherever the communities are, you can just subscribe to them whatever instance you are using, so it’s not that big of a deal.
Perhaps find like-minded folks and start one?
How did we move from usenet to forums?
Browsers and the internet protocols were pretty sweet, man
Didn’t usenet also have a lot of spam problems associated with it?
Everything had spam problems 😅
Good point, spam always has been and always will be an issue.
Forums still exist, there only for extremely niche things though…Like high powered flashlights
Here in Germany the forum culture is still somewhat alive, social media did take a big cut though.
I wish retro gaming was niche enough for nintendoage and assemblergames to still be around…
Plenty of console Homebrew and general gaming forums are still around. Like GBAtemp and ResetEra. I think all forms have really been about niche things for the most part. There were some general purpose forms but most of them focused around some Central subject that is core to their identity.
Truly general purpose platforms that attempt to be about everything weren’t really a thing until social media, with digg and Reddit.
Somethingawful is still going strong, even after Lowtax died.
Out of all the things, Reddit is probably still the best for flashlight purchasing advice.
tl;dr the internet didn’t used to be about making money, it was a place where people created all kinds of content, for almost no reason at all, and almost nobody was making any money, except AOL which blew all their money on CDs probably
Hosting a forum costs money, and we ain’t got that
There were plenty of free forum hosts back in the day. (edit: just did a search and there are still free forum hosts)
But then social media came out, and everyone got addicted to the gamified dopamine mechanics like upvotes and shit. So now everything has to have upvotes, or likes, or whatever other stupid bullshit shit that has absolutely ruined human interaction and discourse and is single handedly to blame for the extremity in modern discourse, because the need to drive clicks and upvotes leads to extreme polarization where no common sense, honest discussion can be held.
because you either 100% agree with me (upvote) or you are a baby killing bastard who disagrees with me (downvote), and there can be no middle ground! /s
Even with a free forum host, it’s difficult to keep things running for a long time.
Awhile back I was unsatisfied with how quickly my (new) furniture was degrading, and found a furniture forum run by a guy in the biz. So much knowledge on there about different furniture and how to actually find quality stuff that will last decades.
The owner retired this week, and he had been paying for an IT contract to do basic maintenance / upgrades on the forum (I think he started on a free host, but as it got bigger he eventually had to move it). He needed IT help basically to apply security patches and do upgrades. He’s stated that he no longer plans to pay for the maintenance contract. I’m guessing the forum will disappear soon.
Have you suggested them to move to Lemmy?
Good material for [email protected]
Much easier access.
You make a reddit account or a discors account and you have limited access to thousands of forums.
Imagine giving your email address and making a password and solving a captcha hundreds of times instead. Who would choose to?
And don’t even get me started on the ease of operating these subreddits and discord channels instead of building and hosting websites.
Discord and Reddit also had uniquely improved their UIs over the existing options.
Until that API nonsense I was always using old.reddit because the redesign was ass.
Discord is cool tho, better than skype gui for sure.
I’m on 3 active forums and 2 lemmies and 2 mastos and I just leave myself logged in. It’s nothing like that. Somehow that’s still a better user experience than discord
the other users forced me to do it by moving
Well written, interesting article.
Really getting momentum from Reddit will be tough though. Our main advantage is that we have the rest of the Fediverse as a potential user base, and existing forum apps that also activate apub; reducing network effects. If the Fediverse has momentum, so has the threadiverse.
Millennials naively assumed that the following generations would just naturally be as computer literate as they are. We’re dealing with people now who think that wi-fi is internet service.
The author of the article is specifically referring to bulletin board forums when describing forums. Link aggregators like reddit are not forums. They are comments sections.
I am the author. Heard you were talking shit…
I kid, I kid :D
I insist that in their current form, reddit (and lemmy) can serve as both forums and link aggregators with comment sections.
Well anyway I enjoyed the read.
I am only here actually because proper forums have yet to figure out federation. As soon as Discourse or Flarum or whatever figure out full federation, I’m gone (over to them).
Specifically, I prefer chronologically sorted posts and the absence of voting systems.
You can actually do that on lemmy already like so. Sorting by new doesn’t use the voting. Hell you can even sort them like a forum by sorting by “new comments”
I get it, and thanks for the advice. But I dislike what voting does to spaces like this as a matter of principle. It is a social consensus reinforcement mechanism, even if it is implemented with the best of intentions.
