• De_Narm@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        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.

    • tiramichu@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      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.

    • pseudo@jlai.lu
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      1 month ago

      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.

      • De_Narm@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        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.

          • De_Narm@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            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.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      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

  • shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • plantedworld@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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

      • shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        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.

      • Flamekebab@piefed.social
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        1 month ago

        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.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

  • recklessengagement@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      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 >:(

      • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 month ago

        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.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month ago

          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.

          • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 month ago

            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.

            • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 month ago

              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.

    • sep@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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.

        • sep@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          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 ;)

          • recklessengagement@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            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?

            • sep@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              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.

        • toastal@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          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).

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 month ago

            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.