Technology

Honestly who uses discord nowadays? its completely unbearable

I would had concern over internet forums disappearing back in 2015-2012, but now a days, I don't worry as much. if it wasn't being replaced by the fediverse. Well maybe not replaced, but it is an alternative that has some good activity surprisingly and still growing, thanks to Mastodons marketing. It's like an upgraded forums. And everyone can communicate no matter where they go on the Fediverse.

We need help communities on Lemmy. That's what is going to make it rank in SEO and fly. Communities like software help (office, adobe creative products, etc), financial help and advice. And ask docs communities.

Memes won't help SEO rank.

Just to pose a thought; how practical would it be for a small subject owner to run a FediVerse instance intended to stay localized to their domain?

For example: Indie game owner makes a reasonably popular game, they set up a website that Lemmy users can subscribe/join directly, and use that for forums/tips/discussions related to their game. People don't need to register as long as they have an account somewhere. Some number of users would be new to Lemmy and use that site's registration for later discovery. And, someday when X instance (the game, or the next popular one) gets infested by neonazis, everyone just moves to another and/or has other discussions backed up.

I don't know how practical or convenient that is though. I imagine a lot of groups don't want to risk lost users.

Forums are alive and well when looking for car info. Whenever I get a different car I look for communities with the most activity and that is usually a forum.

The one exception I can think of (proving the post to be true) is the first generation Tundra (2000-2007). The FB group had more current news than the forums and I managed to get banned (first time ever).

if anyone here used to go on kongregate a lot, go check it out now. it is depressing. they dont even have chat rooms anymore

I wouldn't blame those 2. Forums have been dying since Myspace and Facebook. The specialized ones like the machinist and woodworking ones I belong to are going strong. So are the firearm related ones.

Internet Forums disappearing is a real shame.

For my hobby there's still lots and lots of old and relevant archived forum threads that regularly help me out.

But for new information, that has all moved to Facebook Groups. This forces me to keep a Facebook account, which I hate and would otherwise ditch in a heartbeat.

At least the Fediverse exists.

I actually went out and looked up a bunch of forums after the Reddit controversy last year. They're slow, but I actually feel comfortable just browsing through and only posting if I feel like I can actually contribute. I would definitely recommend just going out and hunting for boards relevant to your interests.

I just found that Runescape shut down its forums, replacing it with a discord.

Look, i love my clans discord, and my discord with friends, but one for a game like that is nearly unusable.

I dunno, when you're talking about really specialized niches, there are still plenty of forums. Like, 600rr.net; it's dedicated to nothing but Honda CBR600RR motorcycles. If you have a problem with a 600RR, the answer is probably there, and the forum is still ticking along because it's just too hard to find those super-niche answers on Reddit. Want gun content with a healthy dose of homo/transphobia and christian nationalism? AR15.com has you covered. Want to talk about the minutiae of reloading and be autistically-focused on long-range accuracy? SnipersHide.com is your place. (They're a bit fuddy though.)

Discourse is awesome. Just needs federation.

As a mod, it is lovely to work with, extremely well indexed, has tags, categories, roles and everything you want.

Everything should be done there. Matrix or Discord make no sense, its just chatting into nirvana, nobody every finds it again

And people... dont... use... threads! They just spam everything in a single chat which makes it unusable

As someone who very much "grew up" on vbulletins and irc for better or for worse, I miss this.

But also... I am not sure if them going away is a bad thing. Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation. Specifically moderation of hate and the like. Because when you are "a small group of friends', it is a lot easier to ignore the guy with "weird vibes". Same with the people who went out of their way to "keep women out" by insisting on making their signature images so horny that even a diehard Fairy Tail fan would blush.

But, as many of us saw, as those boards get larger? Now you need real moderators. Just having the guy who hosts it in his parents' basement delete the worst stuff no longer works and now they are asking their friends to be mods. And you basically get the same problem people still complain about on discord where you get very cliquey communities and incredibly biased moderation.

And it inevitably leads to boards either becoming a cesspool of hatred, selling the board to an internet company, or just saying "Fuck all y'all" and shutting it down overnight.

And even stuff like legacy tech support or technical knowledge? Those are already a mess of the top result being some greybeard asshole talking about how OP is a jerk and this is a common problem and they should search for it. Or we have the stack overflow problem where the accepted answer is actually wrong.

But also? For living software, bugs change over time. And plenty of times I have found exactly my symptoms/behavior and... it is for something that was fixed three years ago. So I am now looking at a different bug with the exact same symptoms and basically every search engine is worthless.

And... going back to the moderation aspect: One of the biggest Looking Glass Games or Unreal fansites in existence was still MAYBE a hundred or so people who knew it existed and a couple dozen who cared enough to hang out at the forums. Now? The fansite for a mod for the latest Microprose game is one google search away and might get name dropped by an influencer and have thousands of people swarm overnight. Let alone anyone who gets targeted by the latest hate campaign. There are no "small" communities that aren't private and spun out of larger ones.

So... I dunno. I very much miss the good old days. But I also increasingly understand those weren't all that "good". And communities are so ephemeral that they map well to a discord or even a reddit that people rage delete a few months later.