Ask Lemmy

I want to write mails for mailinglists again :(

Not really. There are so many comments in a single Lemmy thread that continuing it would be a fools errand. Old forum threads were not much better besides often having more direct conversations with people. But I find that to be much better on Lemmy than on Reddit too.

I miss Livejournal, the original Livejournal where you were able to tell people intimate things about yourselves and make friends for life.

I miss forum signatures. The best you can usually get these days is a tiny little piece of flair. It would be fun if Lemmy or something supported forum signatures, though I suppose the moderation for that could be annoying.

I just really liked that level of expression.

I feel like forums sucked too because of the lack of sorting.

They just don't scale well to many users. Once you hit a certain number of users, without some method to sort, its just information overload.

Hell, forum threads that are too long inevitably go completely off the rails and become off topic troves.

I think there has to be a better intermediate format, like perhaps a mix of systems, but I think the main thing that makes reddit-likes suck, is their systems of governance.

Something I realized very quickly with lemmy for instance, is that its the not at all benevolent dictator positions that are the big problem. The main incentives for people choosing to spend their time in mod positions still remains to impose their will, whether that be their opinion or power over others speech.

There is something at its core which is wrong with this system at scale. It allows for mods to collect up critical masses of people before then knowing that due to that critical mass they have captive audiences where there is high friction to leave or start something else.

Lemmy has a very bandaid "solution" for this in that there can be multiple of any given community/subreddit, but they all suffer from the fact that whatever a moderator wants is what happens, and even in the worst case scenarios, that is just moved up one layer to admins, who are incentived to appear as hands off as possible on moderators, lest they get turned on by the people who "help" them.

Reddit sucks because of a lot of other profit driven reasons, but I think this is the main structural problem and lemmy shares in this.

Forums have this problem too by the way, but its just that forums are so separate and so bad at handling massive amounts of casual users, that they run into this far less.

You guys are missing out on my badass image signatures.

I definitely miss being able to search the internet for helpful forum posts. The fact that most things are on discord now and not internet searchable is extremely annoying and only going to get worse.

The absolute pain of opening an old forum thread with an exact solution/guide and all of the images are long gone.

Of course asking for the same solution on reddit will get you a 300 long chain of useless comments.

I miss dial-up BBSes that had nothing more than a wall of text, like SASSy was in Montreal. Single line system, no user names or logins, 7 bit ASCII, no colors, no sound, no files.

You just kept dialing until you got the line. Then you'd download all the lines from the last line you left off, then either typed in your stuff or pasted it. If you were super lucky, the sysop would barge in while you were typing.

It was great. Really felt like technology and people mixing well, we even eventually met IRL with "GT"s, Get Togethers.

I miss the sense of fun and adventure and my youth. Especially my youth.

I was just thinking, the optimal "reddit"-type site should have been just a big list of links to different forums, and nothing more

If you spend enough time and effort in selected communities on Lemmy you can get a similar experience.

And of course the necro-haters when you reply to something that is older than a week. So the spirit of old times is still there.

Sometimes but they weren’t really that informative. I remember lots of duplicate threads. Topics sometimes stretching to 1000s of posts. Very basic search engines which had pros/cons.

They’re still in use though. Topics have to be very constrained or they get unwieldy because of how many users.

In the age of most of humanity slowly getting access, you need algorithms. We should be fighting about whether algorithms should serve users or owners. And to be frank, I don’t think you can have free services that serve users. Even Wikipedia takes $5-40 a year from me while Facebook never asked for a cent.

I miss them so badly

This is such a disappointing alternative

I still use a few

I do too, but all the ones I used to visit have gone offline, and whenever I try looking for one on some relevant topic the most recent post is from 2017.

Are there forums on Lemmy? I thought it was just memes.

Yes and no... I miss the internet from the time period of traditional forums; but the forums themselves... I'm not 100% sure. The community feel was arguably better back then, and I do agree with you about not paying attention to usernames on Lemmy or Reddit vs getting to know specific users. There's something about associating an image, or a signature with a user that we don't really get on the more modern platforms.

I think it's a problem of scale. Lemmy and Reddit have very large user-bases for a plethora of topics and interests, all congregated within a common location. Forums were for specific sets of interests with recurring, smaller user-bases.

Maybe we could get something that's a hybrid of both by bringing back signatures with animated gifs at the end of each post we make on Lemmy.

Everyone here saying they still exist.

That’s not the point.

The variety and quantity have all been replaced by spaces like Facebook, Youtube, Discord, and Reddit. Heck, I used to help run two gaming phpBB forums and participate in several others. They’re all gone or the groups have moved to Discord or whatever. PhpBB forums were usually run by private individuals, modded by those with shared interest, and subsisted on donations to run if the owner didn’t just pay for it out of pocket. It was still a little bit of the “old internet” where anyone could create their own slice of it for next to nothing.

I miss them because is was a concentration of each niche and there usually wasn’t much competition. No competition for “likes” or whatever. More of a conversation. If you were into something like old tractor restoration (this one still exists as a forum), you could find a wealth of knowledge in text and photo form, videos, if any, are short and generally to the point without deliberate monetization. I absolutely cannot stand YT as a “information” source because of the constant fluff generation to extend the video for adspace and groveling for subscribers. But that’s a whole different rant.

Anyway, yeah…some forums do still exist. Thankfully they’re generally pretty good at what they do. The others have vanished or moved to corporate social media platforms.

Still on a forum for sports

I get the nostalgia, but I do like the thread format of modern forums. Sometimes I don't want to wade through subtopics that people are discussing. I'll just collapse the whole thing and focus on what I want to read. I think it's nicer this way.

Bodybuilding forums led to a notorious debate on the number of days in a week. I feel like a reddit format would water down the debate by not presenting replies as they are posted in real time.

RIP Blizzhackers

Get on some Linux forums.

Not particularly.

There was so much to deal with back then. So many different rule sets to follow, so many differences in each community, so many sign-up and on-boarding processes for posting or contributing each.

I miss the internet itself from that time period, and I realize that there is a certain community feel that is missing due to how congregated the current internet is, but I still don't really miss forums specifically all that much.

Depending on the topics, Whirlpool is still pretty active: https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/

I prefer and always have preferred a vote system like we have here. Forums made paralel conversations impossible to follow, gave a bigger voice to trolls and made finding information in big threads difficult. I absolutely hated the common answer to a question being "search the forum". I already have Jared, the search function is trash and the information is scattered and outdated.

What aspect I do miss is the fact that threads stayed relevant for more than 24hrs. I think a combination of the two systems would work for a forum 2.0, where ranking is based on activity and votes, so a post gets pushed back up in ranking if it's still active and relevant, instead of just taking raw votes and age in considerarion, but also the comments within are grouped in conversations based on who replied to who and can move up and down based on activity and age.