Ask Lemmy

I took a career aptitude test and it told me I should have been a software engineer and idk if that has anything to do with this, but...

Tl;dr: I got high and there's got to be a way to do it in this here vote-time continuum!

On a superficial level, couldn't you get creative with lemmy community settings (using a new sister community) and create only pinned posts/threads (may be subject to mod approval) which are then autosorted by new comments using some scripty pinned post reordering logic? That probably could only apply to a single community though...

The extent of my web design knowledge is limited to fuckin around with myspace html buuut, with more lemmy UI settings, could users elect that certain posts are "forum" worthy? As in, "this is a meme teehee" or "this is a topic worthy of revisiting over a greater period of time" kind of thing. And barring any weird astroturfing, these posts get "pinned" to be revived at the top of the community whenever some reply or top level comment threshold is passed. Inversely, pinned posts could fall away into an archived state after a certain period of no activity, much like the rest of lemmy that's over a week old (whether it's actually no longer active or not).

Getting pinned (hehe) would probably require meeting various straightforward thresholds (like relative or absolute vote value and/or the ratio of upvotes to "pins"). That could determine a sep for how long a post/thread remains subject to revival by reply.

If this configuration were applied to lemmy in general, I think to encourage participation, I'd say it should be an opt-out situation when visiting a specific community (do you want to see community-pinned posts?) and an opt-in situation when choosing to include "active archives" content in a homepage feed.

Not really sure about implementation, but to me it just becomes a secondary voting system as a means to value longevity of a topic, and various ways of incorporating those data into user sorts, community pages, and news feeds that might want to utilize.

Simple as that, right?

^heh^

I still mess around in some traditional forums and I do not miss them.

The time bias is much bigger. First comments are usually the only ones people read and replies. If there's a great comment in page 5 no one is going to see it. But if there's a troll comment in page one it is on everyone's faces. Karma system fixed that.

It's true the thing about usernames and avatars. But I prefer not to personalize a lot so for me that's also a plus, I can focus in the comment and not in who has written it.

No, I never liked the interface with all the conversations mixed so you had to copy most of the thread for context just to add half a line.
I always found them tedious and confusing.

Tremendously. Forums give me a social boost, social media and Reddit-alikes don't. As you say - disembodied voices.

I detest the deliberately ephemeral nature of modern platforms.

Does anybody else miss Compuserve, Delphi, etc?

Luckily there are still some interesting forums around for specific topics and old school games!

I do miss them, but at least Something Awful is still around

and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way

I do it that way, at least on posts with a manageable amount of comments where I actually care about the content of the comments (e.g. threads about someone asking how to do something).

Have the same feeling, I actually thought about making an alternative threadiverse client in the style of phpBB. But I believe there should still be an option to display comments like threads, it is just easier to use I believe. Default should definitely be new though for comments and posts. Its surprising how well threadiverse would be compatible with message boards.

Which also brought up the question with the fediverse being so open how different people interact with it using different clients.

I like the anonymity, though.

Kinda but in general, I miss when a online community wasn't a walled garden and is open to everyone. I prefer the format of Reddit/Lemmy as I find some forum thread to be difficult to read as there's few different conversation going on.

One of the things I love about forum is that I know that it can be find via online search. Something nice about finding answers from a smaller-niche website that's away from places like Reddit.