A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
Everytime I want to look for modern solutions to newer projects online it's always in the damn discord. I have like 20 discords in folders just because I feel like I'll need them to troubleshoot eventually.
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.
Its been driving me crazy, I am so close to abandoning the internet and going back to old reading just out of spite. yesterday I went looking on how to fix something simple a small electric item and all i got was adverts for a replacement, I use DDG and i closed the screen at three pages. I miss when you could simply search a question and the answer was there. Excited to see the resistance starting to emerge.
I’m looking for a study group for a specific maths textbook I’m reading
Discord math forum is too big and my queries get swamped so I don’t use it
I’d appreciate some advice on this and also how to develop my federated use of the internet
Here is a chrome extension that copies all messeges and media from a discord server you're a part of.
In case the stuff on a server is what keeps you coming back.
Internet forums will come back when AI overtakes Reddit and Discord goes awry because they go public.
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Firefox can translate websites locally now.
Discord, Reddit and Lemmy are bad choices for forums. If you want ANY useful information to stick, put it on forums you know are gonna get indexed and archived reliably. Reddit is indexable but there's no guarantee the page will still be there when you search for it through Google.
Discord is completely unindexable so any information that exists on a server that gets deleted is lost forever.
Lemmy is a half-way house. As far as I know it's kinda indexable but not really.
Discord is bad because its forums are not world-readable, therefore not indexable. It's very useful to the rest of the world to have conversations be public. The youngest users here may not even remember but searching Google in the 2000s before Facebook went huge and when forums were all world-readable, it was a different experience altogether. You could find somebody who was talking about your niche issue/product - no matter what it was. It was kind of magical. No matter what thing happened to you, you could be pretty sure it had happened to someone else and they were talking about it somewhere and Google would see it and point it out to you.
Not anymore. Everything's on Facebook now and Google can't see it, nor can anyone else - except Facebook. All that legacy knowledge just tucked away in Facebook's data vault and essentially useless to anybody but Facebook, which makes it less than useless.
Recently I've created a private forum and so far I'm very happy with it. It's nice that our discussions are private, keeping data gobblers, programmatic advertisers, grifters and other schmucks like this out in the cold.
To be clear, I'm advertising the idea, not membership.
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.
Decentralized and smaller platforms definitely help preserve open discussion. But when it comes to company security culture and internal comms, even forums are giving way to automation. Tools like cyberupgrade.net show how even training and risk detection are now handled without Slack threads or forum debates.