What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Fuck Discord
Companies putting their stuff into discord is like all the businesses that ditched a dedicated website and moved to facebook however many years ago. Yay, now it is on a format that doesn’t work well for presenting static information and will inevitably require account registration!
Newest iteration of “this meeting could have been an email” has become “this Discord could have been a wiki”.
I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!
I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.
In that regard, fuck Discord.
Yeah anything ephemeral is fine like chats and what not. But this idea of using it as support platform is just dumb. You end up with people asking the same question over and over and it either doesn’t get answered because no one is around to answer it or likely because they’re annoyed at the same questions over and over. There is no organization and no institutional knowledge. It’s like it ends up being set up by people who think it’s what the cool kids want. And these giant communities just exacerbate this issue. Everything ends up being noise. It’s the reason I usually ended up turning off the world or general channels in WoW. It just ended up being annoying and distracting.
When I’m trying resolve a situation that I need some sort of support I wanna be able to search if others have had the same issue and see discussion around that topic. I don’t need synchronous communication for that. I don’t care if it was 3 months ago someone had the problem if they figured out how to fix it. The way to do that is forums, Reddit (well before the enshittification), or even Lemmy.
I despise discord from a user interface and business practice perspective. What a piece of shit
Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.
Because there hasn’t been a single proper alternative until very recently, and even then they’re not as user friendly.
Excuse me, Jabber / XMPP is about as old as I am!
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.
Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…
What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.
Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.
Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects
Terrible how, though? That’s exactly what it gets right. You have easy-to-setup roles and channel accesses, onboarding experiences for people joining a larger server, a huge ecosystem of bots for various purposes, etc.
okay, it is bad for not being indexable, but it’s good at what it does and it’s popular for a reason.
It’s searchable but information doesn’t stay pinned and available. It’s meant to be a chatroom style place for gaming and as that it’s fine but when you want to build a community for something like a video game or a. Product, what ends up happening is you end up making a channel for every single announcement etc. say you have a channel for FAQ? You either lock it so only moderators and admins can use it or you end up with a constantly ballooning channel where everyone can contribute. There’s no in-between and because each post isn’t really collated the way it would be here or on a forum the information is hard to navigate without search which often only gives a truncated section that you can’t even navigate to. There’s no context more often than not when you use the search function and it’s a very poor substitute for a forum as a result.
I don’t think discord is a good substitute for a website and I don’t think it’s a good substitute for a forum but it’s being used as both fairly frequently.
How do we get them to switch to something like Element?
Or Matrix?
According to history:
-
Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable, or…
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If it reaches a critical mass… You can’t. See: Facebook.
The Fediverse can adopt a few nice communities, but honestly bringing the larger population seems hopeless.
-
Element needs to be better. Discord is awesome with the way it auto-plays looping videos/gifs and has animated emojis.
Seriously: That’s all they’d need to do. The element devs need to focus on fun.
Isn’t that a client side issue though? Element is just one Matrix client. I haven’t used it myself but heard from others that Fluffychat (another Matrix client) is more like Discord.
Yeah it’s probably just a client side issue but the OP mentioned Element, specifically 🤷
I just wanted to point out that Element is no fun! No fun at all!
It works and it works great for what it does. Even voice and streaming are great with Element. It’s just got a terrible, no-fun interface and pointless limitations on things like looping videos. You can’t even configure it to make them play properly (as in, automatic and endlessly, the way they were meant to be played! 😤).
Looping videos and animated emojis are super fun ways to chat with people. Even in professional settings! It really breaks up the humdrum and can motivate people to chat and share more.
Element is all serious all the time and going into a chat channel there feels like a chore.
If I’m talking with people about the topical thing which is why I joined a room in the first place, the last thing I want is a looping autoloops fruityloops annoyance. Plus, not autoplaying and autolooping them saves battery.
I hate to break this to you but that means you’re not normal. If all you ever do in chat is talk about serious things that are of such earth-shattering importance that it would be incredibly rude and obnoxious for someone to post a silent looping video you’re not normal, and no fun at all.
The way Element currently works, it’s made for people like you… A strange minority that probably only thinks about “chat” in terms of communicating for an end goal and not for the pleasure of conversation.
Plus all this stuff can be disabled in discord too, if you want to be that serious. There are per-role and per-channel settings that let you disable images, link embedding, external emojis, etc.
It gives you choice. I have no choice in Element, it’s always unfun all the time.
Most of these communuties using Discord are better served by something that isn’t a chatroom. So, so, so confusingly many of them use them as a store of permanent information. Like a website+forum.
Many times the benefit of Discord is the ability to paywall parts of it with Patreon integration. We need more foss and federated options that do this.
Tell me about Element. This is the first I’m hearing about it.
It’s a secure messenger
What are its pros and cons? What does it offer that telegram or similar don’t offer? Is it good for group chat? Is it available on multiple platforms?
Telegram is not a secure messenger.
Yes to multiple platforms, groups etc.
So, I’m going to say that I don’t use telegram and only know it as being presented as a secure messenger platform. As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable. And this is no different because I feel like this is exactly the problem lemmy and other platforms like it have. There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Matrix is a decentralized platform with the same level of security/encryption as Signal. Being decentralized you can run your own server, and chat with others on other servers.
It supports groups, voice, streams etc - similar to Discord/Slack/Teams etc.
Open source. Multiple different server and client implementations. Mobile platforms, “all” operating systems, and with bridges so you can have your IRC, Telegram, Slack, FB Messenger etc channels go to your Matrix account/server.
As a result, I am just asking follow-on questions to further discern what makes Element preferable.
If you are against a change in the first place you won’t switch, anyway.
There are people who love them, but when people ask about them, they don’t offer any really informative data to support why they like them.
Please, ask.
What makes Element (matrix) a secure platform, and how does that differ from telegram or signal or whatever. Like. What is matrix good at? That’s what I’m asking. Why suggest it over something else?
Simple. It’s fully free and open source. The server as well as the apps. Therefore, you can trust it as a privacy friendly solution a heck of a lot more, than any other solution like WhatsApp.
Signal is secure as well, but the server is centralized.
And Telegram is not considered secure because of their implementation and shady practices.
Rant
I don’t think you can for most people that is what is so infuriating right? In my experience people who are entrenched in Discord are completely and utterly entrenched in it, to the point that I have lost contact with a lot of these people effectively since I don’t use Discord.
The important choice was with all the community leaders who decided to make the move to Discord at crucial moments where they could have NOT done that.
I think any shift off of Discord is also going to have to come from community leaders of organizations, projects, game development communities etc… deciding to move off the platform at crucial decision points.
However, and this is something people who happily pushed their entire lives onto Discord would confidently tell me we could easily do if Discord got bad, everyone isn’t just going to straight up leave once they have built their entire digital communication around Discord…
Now I frequently see game developers complain that they can’t accurately get a picture of their playerbase because large categories of players aren’t on their discord!! and I have to keep my palm from blowing a hole through my face when the two loudly meet.
The brainworms are so bad that these developers will conclude the issue is with their playerbase not wanting to use Discord instead of it being an issue with DEVELOPERS DECIDING TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR PLAYERBASE WITH A SHITTY, EXCLUSIONARY TOOL THAT HAS AWFUL SEARCH.
I can’t express how much this gets under my skin, it is like this assumption that if you are even slightly a gamer than you are on Discord all the damn time has become rheified and cemented into place so rigidly that developers are literally tossing away large swaths of their playerbase feedback because they refuse to use a different tool to get feedback and communicate with their community. No forum, no custom website, nothing, Discord or bust.
I have seen the effects in games like Battlebit where it is clear that the developers were catering to only a small subsection of the playerbase that was very active and prominent on Discord and it ended up torpedoing the game because changes kept happening that clearly signalled to large portions of the playerbase that they were basically invisible to the developers.
I have watched this problem, stewing in my frustration, evolve from a minor personal annoyance to being a serious systematic issue causing community organization to become dysfunctional and broken because Discord is clearly a shitty tool for that community (that clearly a lot of people refuse to use or check regularly)… and YET everybody in those communities behaves like it was always a foregone conclusion that the community would have to move to Discord, that is just the way it is.
screams into void
Gamers are so confidently stupid.
Also before anyone says “well it is a good tool for communicating with friends in a DnD group or something” … yes I know it is good for that, you know why I know that it is good for that? Because that is the easiest usecase for any communication and organizational tool to tackle, Discord isn’t good at this usecase, it is just a laughably easy usecase compared to how mindbendingly difficult it is to wrangle larger communities of… not necessarily friends.
I think your argument relates closely to something I’ve noticed happening over and over with more than just game developers. Far too often I see people expressing frustration that the Internet doesn’t give them more accurate information about the real world. Way too many people, apparently including many of the richest and most powerful people alive, have come to see the Internet as a magical machine that will do anything they want it to do… if only people would use it differently! Like, they legitimately seem to expect the entire population to post their entire lives online, unfiltered, so they can be used as automatons by people they’ve never even met.
You don’t…you go back to forums. They’re searchable. Discord and Facebook and well anything self hosted isnt via search engines
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public, even if privacy is a illusion there.
We have to accept that and provide a solution for both.
But many people don’t want to have everything completely public
This isn’t true at all. Most people do not care about privacy; those that do are an extreme minority. You (presumably) and I are part of that minority yet even we still comment here, in a public space. The issue with forums has never been about privacy because most are content with pseudonymity. It is a big mistake to think we need to cater to the extreme minority in the privacy space when tackling big issues that involve a majority who do not care.
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.)
Similar. I had a community from 2001 onward where I was variously an admin and a mod over the decades. A lot of us drifted apart from being kids exploring the internet to adults with families and careers.
But mainly the guy that took over the code maintenance became the sole admin in 2018 and he just chased everyone off the site debatebroing with increasingly racist and misogynistic rants. Dude I played games with and talked with online for 20 years started calling me a genocidal enslaver for trying to explain CRT and want solar power in America.
I kind of don’t ever want a family or a career because it seems like you lose out on the ability to do anything fun
Never played the game and probably never will, but I wanted to say this anyways: stay awesome!
It’s people like you, who do stuff out of passion and not monetary gain, that made the internet so great.
I appreciate the people who run the forum for the Emergency! Game series. It’s where I found the info on now to run multiplayer on Emergency! 3
I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago.
That’s cool!
People still keep using this trash!
Why? I mean if it can be destroyed on a whimp again should be reason enough to not use it again.
I’d say its mostly convenience. Discord is easier to use on mobile devices and provides voice chat.
Agreed. In general people seem to like centralised platforms. They don’t want to sign up on another site for a specific purpose. They stick to what they know unless there’s good reason to change (mostly peer/ad/social media pressure I feel like).
In a way Lemmy is similar in that it’s a single platform to access all types of content. Given most people don’t care about the technical “how”, I can see why they like Discord and Reddit.
I don’t mind Discord for smaller groups of friends I know in real life, but larger groups end up with so many notifications that I end up ignoring the app. A forum would feel a lot nicer, like it’s not a chore to keep up with things.
Yeah it’s really not fit for purpose, I have every server I’m in muted
Ugh, Discord is an information black hole. I despise how so many of my niches have fled there.
Reddit seems to be trying to destroy that “role” of theirs as hard as they can though. A few very niche subs I follow are drying from some kind of “bug” that deprioritizes their discoverability.
It’s not a bug. It’s absolutely a feature for making Reddit more generic, farmable garbage and noise.
“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Users will search for new places. The fact that we are here is proof.
Build it, and they will come.
Yeah, well, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok are not the net, they are siloes. Discord too. Even Reddit is trying as hard as it can to be insular.
Much of my family doesn’t even know how to use a browser, at least not beyond the bare minimum for work. They probably never will.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
With all sincerity this is fine. Seriously, let’s leave it this way.
As someone who was already around when Eternal September happened the Internet was never for normies and inviting them into the space has destroyed it. Everything that attracts the attention of normies ends up ruined; MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Slashdot and so very many more…they are all trashed because when they attracted enough users the commercialization started.
So maybe lets just leave the Fediverse for those “in the know” as long as we can.
I’m sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying “it’s worrying.”
Is it? When was the last time you googled something and the first website that came up didn’t spit out some SEO or garbage content?
Like every day? Yeah it’s worse now but Google is still useful for a lot of things.
That being said, I do have AdBlock so it’s a different internet for me.
Have you ever tried DuckDuckGo or Qwant? They have better results in my opinion, as long as you don’t care about the business snippets.
DuckDuckGo is so much better than Google. Barely any ads, and results that are actually useful 9 times out of 10.
Today. Among thousands of times.
I’m with OP. People have been screaming this for ages, and the collective societal reaction hasn’t even been apathy, but “We vote for Big Tech CEOs, full steam ahead.”
So… Yeah, I’m tired, too. Screw it all. Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
How about strengthening the Fediverse and Lemmy?
Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
So basically, let the world burn? Because that’s what it looks like we’re heading toward right now because of big tech.
Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
The big question is whether it will be us who do that.
Indeed, forums are almost gone. In particular, I miss one forum about science fiction, one about aeromodelism, one about electric vehicles (another still exists) and one about anarchism. An interesting hold-out in the country where I live, is a military forum, where rules say that respectful discussion is the only kind of discussion accepted - ironically, the military forum has a peaceful atmosphere. But it could come crashing down much easier than a social media company.
As for why forums disappeared - I think that people became too convenient. They wanted zero expense (hosting a forum incurs some expenses and needs a bit of time and attention), and wanted all their discussion in one place. Advertisers wanted a place where masses could be manipulated. Social media companies wanted people to interact more (read: pick more heated arguments) and see more ads - and built their environments accordingly. Not for the public good.
I think the most urgent job is getting rid of algorithmically steered social media - sites where one can’t know why something appears on one’s feed.
Subreddits were not a problem before since they were accessible on the web without needing an account. But now reddit is gradually locking them down behind authwalls and things like not letting search engines index (other than Google).
Lemmy communities dont have this problem and because lemmy is federated, its resistant to such enshittification (plus you can easily create your own lemmy instance for only your team). So imo they are a good alternative to forums (and reddit) and a good solution to this problem.
I’d like to see fedi software evolve past just cloning twitter and reddit into more diverse offerings, like forums
What can we do to get more people to switch over to Lemmy from Reddit?
Some forum software is starting to support activitypub with plugins. If they add the plugin then you can follow and interact with the forum from Lemmy. The best option for everyone is to start pestering forum admins to add those plugins so they get users and Lemmy gets more content.
Long term creating migration scripts for popular forum software like phpBB, so content, users, etc, can be moved to a custom Lemmy instance would be an option.
I guess once more and more content is posted here, naturally more people will come. And also any further steps of reddit enthitiffication will move people over.
Can we actively do something to help this process?
The main thing is post more. Lack of content is the main reason people don’t use Lemmy more, and the only way to fix this is to share/produce more.
Its a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think even (transparent, community-relevant) bots are a good idea at this point, given that 99% of interests have little to no activity currently. For example, if we had bots that post game update changelogs to their relevant communities, it would at least provide a baseline amount of content and make it easier to discuss for fans of those games.
Reddit is literally unusable now. I use old.reddit to browse certain subs but there’s no point commenting or interacting cause pretty much everything gets you banned
Reddit removed a picture of 3 people standing around a cybertruck from the front page today because it “went against community guidelines”
What was the picture?
Maybe we need a shitRedditBans community here to repost all the stuff that get banned for bad reasons there? Could be risky, I guess, but could be great with some good moderation.
Interesting you mention this. I guess it’s more common than I realized.
The literal reason I looked around and came here a few days ago is because of exactly this.
Someone posted a picture of a blue hat that said “Is he dead yet” with the caption that is crazy the whole planet knows who is referring to.
I commented that the planet will be a better place when it happens.
Instant ban for a week.
The bot banning me stated “Threats and violence” as the rule.
So ya…I’m not going back to that.
Do you have ideas to get more people to move over from Reddit to Lemmy?
A lot of people use reddit in Google searches because it has high quality information. Ie solving technical problems etc. This sort of information needs to be hosted here. If Lemmy wants to be the new reddit, it needs to host this sort of helpful, high quality information that other users upvote
whatisthisthing, and whatisthisplant were very interesting niche subs. it will be hard for people to come here, as there are also adjacent subs. also medical conditions too they are found on a ton of forums.
Make 1 to 1 copies of existing subreddits and maybe some kind of automation tool to take the subreddits someone is currently part of and subscribe the Lemmy versions of them automatically. That plus for now some people could repost content from these subreddits to Lemmy, so the feed isn’t so empty and also I don’t know how Google crawlers work exactly but searching for Reddit posts through Google is a big benefit of Reddit for me, if Lemmy could also show up in Google results or if Lemmy builds it’s own internal search to a level that’s equal to or better than Google that would also help
automation tool
I’m currently plan something like this. But I don’t think just posting everything would be a good idea. I thought about a few uprising posts a day at most per community.
Google
Lemmy already gets indexed by search engines.
I’ve started Europe Pub about 10 days ago and Google has already indexed hundreds of pages: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aeurope.pub
I think mapping existing subreddits to Fediverse equivalents is a great idea and would be very helpful to have as a resource. Sub.Rehab did something to that nature, although I don’t think it’s being maintained anymore sadly.
Forums are where I learned literally everything about technology I know now. Every hack, jailbreak, method of bypassing something, building, literally anything I’ve done around my tech hobbies. Pi hole, emulation in the late 90s, how to use Photoshop, how to run Linux from a USB, everything I’ve learned from forums. I’m sad to think that me joining certain discords help deliver the death knell to the concept of forums.
How about crossposting forum post links on Lemmy? This would help to get them exposure.
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Firefox can translate websites locally now.
Sadly it’s not possible to provide links using Firefox Translate. People would have to translate it themselves (i.e. opening in a browser and clicking translate). Depending on the device they likely wouldn’t bother.
Not all languages
It has spanish to english though, at least on my machine.
I was just commenting as an asterisk
This is unironically on reddit right now. People lamenting a place like Lemmy doesn’t exist.
I’m less worried about Discord, honestly.
IRC is literally right there.
The protocol itself could use a little modernizing (namely around privacy concerns), but it’s still very relevant.
Discord is far worse in this context, though. Much of reddit is still publicly visible and is still indexed by some search engines, even if it could be better. Discussions from years ago are still visible and provide useful information to many (this is part of the reason “search term + reddit” became such a popular query template). When communities move to Discord, many of their conversations become completely private to anyone who isn’t a member. The conversations move quickly and there is no easy way for people to reference past information. I get that people on Lemmy hate reddit and it’s popular to circlejerk about it, but forums being replaced by things like Discord and Telegram that aren’t equivalents at all has been much more damaging.
Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a “community tool”.
It’s because of this bullshit.
Take a guess how many members this server/example community serves:
500? 2000? 10,000+?
Surely, a group of 50,000 needs a ticket system, age verification, moderation, and rules/TOS+registration?
There are twelve users in that chat/server. Three of the 12 are moderators. One is the “owner”.
Discord became a “community tool” because Discord moderators/“creators” are a special class of human being who realized their dream model train set could be upgraded with Internet connectivity.
Medium-to-large-scale-enterprise tooling is available to spin up for anyone, without having to pay for anything. In fact, Discord incentivizes donations through “boosts” where the users of a community pay for server costs rather than the hosts/maintainers themselves.
As a result, people go ham and never invest in proper training, role division or infrastructure. They cosplay at running a pseudo-corporation and Discord adds their requested features, at a price/donation premium.
P.S: I run a Discord channel of 223 users with no moderation, we have one text channel and two voice channels. We use the service like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak for a Steam Clan. I’ve literally had these busybodies from disparate communities join just to tell me I was “doing it wrong”.
P.S.S: I also hate HOAs.
I’m reminded of forums that would have a million subforums and as a result never build up any critical mass. Have one big bucket, maybe two, and if something comes up often enough organically then, and only then, consider a separate subforum for it.
a server I was a part of a while ago had maybe 30 people, but with a ton of topic based channels. the ‘owner’ would CONSTANTLY bitch about conversations being too specific for general and reprimand people.
even in one server I’m currently in, which has ~2500 members, there’s really only 50 people active on it. one of the mods still does this all the time (“tAkE iT tO #PoLiTiCs”) and it inevitably only ends the conversation every time. nice “community”.
Whenever anyone tells me a discussion should be moved I am done. The spell is broken and the social interaction concluded because I’m no longer interested. Discord channels are fucking social poison.
Yeah, but it shouldn’t replace forums.
Indeed, especially since both (Reddit more than Discord admittedly) give out blanket bans on a whim and that means being blocked off from the modern internet, the stakes are too damn high.
Though what do they mean “Disappearing”, isn’t this like pulling the alarm because you just learned “There’s not that many dinosaurs left”
The funny thing about dinosaurs is, some of them evolved into something what that could withstand the climate. It’s just a matter of time before more alternatives come about. Some will be better, but my bet is the majority that people will flock to will have just as much censorship and they’ll just accept it. If you give people the illusion of freedom but restrict them they’ll have no idea.
Fuck discord and fuck reddit.
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.
Have your friends on your own website
I’ve asked them several times and they have declined.
What are we going to do about it?
Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they’ve showed up starting in the early 90s. They don’t want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.
If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there’s enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.
The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don’t fit into a box. It’s that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can’t hold the castle once it’s being assaulted by the normies.
So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It’s for the best.
I have been questioning in the last few month what can i do, i agree, the old internet is not the way, but for me tech and the internet has become a dirty word and somewhere i no longer want to be.
I have become quite conscious of my where my money goes, i also probs need to be more conscious of where my internet traffic goes and where i can support grassroots (online) communities.
I disagree. Email is still perfectly usable and helpful because we simply filter out the commercial stuff. The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad. Luigi Luigi Luigi. I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.
The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad.
Many people, including a large chunk of Lemmy, are perfectly fine with censored discussions. They honestly want it that way…as long as the discussion is censored such that it agrees with their opinion.
I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.
It’s extremely difficult to free people from things that they want.
It’s frustrating but true.
To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed. The rhetoric makes the space becomes completely unserious; just not a good environment.
The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.
I am not going to argue in terms of right/wrong because I’m just not equipped to. But in terms of platform result, I do not want to participate on a 4Chan clone - because it always leads to unserious discussion, bad faith, and death.
To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed.
In the forum days those users would get attacked and / or blocked by other users. If they caused enough havoc for long enough then the mods / admins would step in. The expectation NOW is that the mods / admins will actively monitor every post and comment in order to remove disagreeable content before it can be seen. That’s quite the change over the last 20 years!
The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.
“Mirror” is probably more apt than you realize. IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave. I’m not blaming you or saying that you’re wrong, I’m just pointing out the difference.
I agree that all forums require some level of moderation in order to keep from turning into total troll-fests however there’s a wide chasm between moderating someone because they won’t stop posting racial slurs and moderating someone because they’re going against the grain / hivemind.
There’s a lot of nuance to be had here, but it’s a conversation for another time.
You bring up something interesting though
IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave.
I wonder if this is because people view these spaces as a home or a “third place”. Like if someone did something offensive in your home, you would indeed ask (or force) them to leave.
People also find it insanely difficult to “leave” because all of their friends are on the platform. Since it’s almost never open-protocol, that means being locked to said space - so you can only get people you don’t like to leave.
We generally agree the moderation has become overbearing. I would argue most of it is straight up ineffective and performative. We need actual data and science backing moderation policies, not just “this feels good”.
Email is a poor analogy because that’s direct communication.
As an aside, I work as a consultant and clients are getting scammed via email all the time. Email is responsible for a lot of heart ache and heavy losses.
Regardless, you might be able to filter newsletters from bills in your email inbox but how do you filter out Russian disinformation farms from reddit?
I think the idea that the internet might usher in a new information age is dead. Long dead. The internet solved the problem of access to information but now we just produce lots of bad information.
Something I was hopeful for but seems to have died is lemmyBB. A phpBB-style front-end to Lemmy. I’d like the accessibility of being able to use an existing account that federation brings but the forum-style approach that phpBB has.
Mostly though I’ve been disappointed in the teens and twenty-somethings. They seem to have, in distressingly large numbers, just opted to go along with whatever they’re encouraged to use by large platform holders. There doesn’t seem to be an appetite to create communities and define spaces that they control. Perhaps that’s just me getting old though…
What do you think Lemmy is missing that phpBB had aside from strong user communities built over years where many of the users knew each other IRL?
Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).
Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model
Hmmm, you’re probably on to something there. I think Lemmy could do that but no one cares to set it up.
and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).
I’m honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I’m in a hurry to get back to that!
One of my favorite forums has been around since 1999 and is currently running on XenoForo which is very phpBB-esque. Anytime I get a nostalgia hankering I drop in for a few minutes. It’s not always as good as you may remember. :)
XenoForo
Just looked it up. $60/mo is the “starter” price!? Are forums normally so expensive to run?
XenoForo is a bit spendy but they’re providing the software, hosting and data storage. IIRC the forum I’m talking about is on the “Business” plan due to how busy it is.
