• unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    For a second I thought they were launching their federated lemmy/kbin instance. With different communities, like “support”, “bugs”, “news”…

    Would have been freaking awesome and a great use case for Lemmy and federarion.

    Good for them anyway.

    • techno156@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      At the same time, it might not fit them. Lemmy is a link aggregator, which seems like extra functionality that they don’t really need, not when existing forum software will do what they need, while also being more stable/mature.

      • Dusty@lemmy.dustybeer.com
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        1 year ago

        Add in the fact they’d end up having to defederate a lot of instances due to trolls and whatnot, and it’s much better that they run it on their own site. It’s much better from a moderation viewpoint for them. I know people will be all upset here, but it’s honestly for the best.

      • unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        Not good enough of an excuse, IMO. Link aggregation is essentially a normal post with just a link to somewhere else, which you can totally do in any forum… and it is no bloat at all.

        I believe the reasoning was more like “we don’t want to do any federation, because the barrier of having to create a new account will free us from trolls/bots/etc”.

        • heady@aggregation.cafe
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          1 year ago

          They made their announcement on their own site, they are the somewhere else, and the link has found it’s way here so what’s the problem?

          We call websites like this one link aggregators but they are just platforms, it’s the users who are the aggregators collecting the links that we are interested in. We don’t need a system of top down promotion and don’t need to have our platforms serve those who want to promote. Likewise projects like Jellyfin don’t owe us a presence and this post itself proves they don’t need one. The idea that everyone must maintain a brand identity and that our social media should be polluted with advertising is something that the fediverse has and I hope will continue to stand against.

          • unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            Nah, dude, chill, 😅.

            They just built a nice independent forum, but I would have liked to be able to participate in their forum with this account (federation) instead of having to create a new account.

            That’s it, this is not going to keep me awake at night, in fact, I am happy they are finding independence from Reddit. The world keeps turning, have a nice week!

            • sillypuddy@mander.xyz
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              1 year ago

              I wonder if Lemmy could do single sign-on support like how you can log in some places with your Google or Facebook account.

      • SkyNTP@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        AskHistorians, AkScience, AMA, AskReddit, Ask*, and the myriad of semi-official support subreddits for services, games, eyc. all would like to disagree that Reddit/Lemmy is a link aggregator exclusively.

        • Hexorg@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          The tree-like comment structure is just overall better for large-crowd engagement. Phpbb forum type is just going to get flooded with many posts and hard to follow when thousands answer

          • techno156@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            I’m not sure that the Jellyfin community is that big or active enough that that will be much of an issue at all. Looking at their sub, the highest rated posts are under 1k, so number of people active on the sub is probably somewhere between 100k - 1M.

            Your average post maybe has about 10 - 20 people interacting with it at most. Expecting thousands seems… optimistic, especially when the forum numbers puts them at under 300 people.

      • Hedup@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I hope mods can restrict the types of content users can post in communities in fututure.

        • QHC@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Of course they can, what else would moderators be doing? Not entirely sure how this is even a question…

            • Morphit @feddit.uk
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              1 year ago

              I think they mean turning off the ability to submit non-text posts entirely. It’s much better that a user can’t do something that isn’t allowed than to have a bot fix up the situation after the fact.

  • Dusty@lemmy.dustybeer.com
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    1 year ago

    This is great, I’m honestly glad they have their own forum on their own page as opposed to something like Discord.

    I know people will be disappointed it’s not on lemmy or similar, but it’s for the best to be honest. Since it’s a product, it’s much easier to have something they fully control and can have ownership over (including who and what can be posted there). It’s a great decision by them.

    • NightOwl@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      As much time passes I still find forums really easy to navigate through with how categorized everything is, and I do like activity bumping up threads. Although searching through like 100+ page long threads on like xda can be a pain. Still so much better than discord for being a source of information.

      • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Ah, yes. Nothing like bumping a five year old thread for whatever reason.

        Legit funniest necro I saw recently was on one of the forums in a private tracker I’m a member of.

        There were about three pages of discussion. One dude is talking back and forth with another.

        Thread died down as they all do.

        A few weeks ago, five years after the last post, that same dude just randomly pops in to reply to the previous post with the most casual of responses.

        He wasn’t even inactive on the forums. Somehow he just left that specific thread for five years.

        On the topic of forums, I do like them, but I find they can often feel less “casual” than reddit/Lemmy. Different etiquette, I think.

        Discord goes the complete opposite direction. It’s basically IRC with some more modern features. In other words, there is nothing but the chaos of a conversation that’s lasted maybe an hour or so.

        How people rely on it for long term stuff, I don’t know.

        • Scary le Poo@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Discord has forums for long form discussions. Slow mode can be enabled so that it doesn’t turn into a “chat”.

          • FalseDiamond@feddit.it
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            1 year ago

            Round peg, square hole IMO. Discord is designed as a chat application with an afterthought of threading and forums (I guess?). It’s not a reddit replacement, and it’s not designed as a forum.

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              1 year ago

              I don’t remember suggesting that they use discord as a forum and a Reddit replacement. I think you misread what I actually wrote.

          • dan@upvote.au
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            1 year ago

            I think forum mode has the same limitations as regular Discord - posts aren’t indexed in Google, search is kinda… meh, you have to sign up to see anything, and overall it’s still not a platform built for long-form discussions.

            • Scary le Poo@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              I feel that a lot of people are missing the point that discord has done something that other software has not. It makes it easy to centralize communication. It is invaluable for small developers.

              And while yes the information is not available via general searching, the searching within discord is actually pretty good.

              I keep seeing people mention matrix as a viable alternative to discord but my experience with matrix has me calling bs.

              • dan@upvote.au
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                1 year ago

                It makes it easy to centralize communication.

                Centralisation is why we have issues with Reddit at the moment. It puts you at the whims of a single company, who will eventually want to make more money (after all, they’re not a charity). For example, Discord could one day announce that you only get the 500 most recent messages for free, or limit the room size, or make some other changes that vastly impact how it’s being used today.

                the searching within discord is actually pretty good.

                I really don’t want to have to go to multiple different sites to search for information. That’s why we have search engines. Discord being a walled-garden makes it a lot more difficult than it should be.

        • soiling@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          On the topic of forums, I do like them, but I find they can often feel less “casual” than reddit/Lemmy. Different etiquette, I think.

          I agree and it’s what I like about forums. to someone like me they’re more approachable. discord works best for me with friends, but it’s awkward with people I don’t know well

        • uyuu@lemmy.4d2.org
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          1 year ago

          I’m a big proponent of people reading the whole thread before making a new post in forums, but in this case. I’m not so sure anymore lol.

          • dan@upvote.au
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            1 year ago

            hahaha that one thread is larger than some entire forums I’ve moderated in the past.

      • Wrrzag@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Still so much better than discord for being a source of information.

        Discord is atrocious as an info repository. It’s useful to chat and to have a way to search what’s been said, but it’s horrible having to search there for that one useful message amidst all the other replies if you haven’t participated. And the nature of a chat makes searching blindly very time consuming.

    • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com
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      1 year ago

      I don’t-

      I don’t miss having to register accounts on each one, answer a bunch of questions, give a birthday, give an email, do a capta… etc…

      Just for that forum to popup on haveibeenpwned.com a few months later.

      Knock on wood, password managers are a thing now, and its easy to give each forum a very unique password. But- still. Don’t really miss those.

      • fuzzyspudkiss@midwest.social
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        Thank you! I feel like I’m the only person who lived through that time. Having everything on one site is way simpler, reddit sucks but that doesn’t mean the concept does.

        I do not miss having to sign up for a specific forum, wait for the email, no email, check spam folder, no email, 15 mins later email shows up in spam, go to post, “sorry you can’t make a post without interacting with at least 5 other posts”, post random shit on 5 other posts, finally get to post, "this question has been answered. Post archived "

        • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com
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          1 year ago

          Another factor, is…

          Well, Especially for users in large communities, or those with lots of interests, they will end up on LOTS of forums.

          And, that turns into either, a lot of notifications, or a lot of ignored interactions due to the number of notifications.

          The last thing people don’t seem to remember, half of the damn forums wanting to put damn ads everywhere.

        • Fylkir@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          I still see a legacy of that when a forum for game modding requires you create an account to download.

        • wet_lettuce@beehaw.org
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          I guess I did forums a little differently. I had 2 main forums where I posted a lot and then a handful I would peruse occasionally. If you had a good forum, there would be a very ‘reddit-like’ feel because they’d have general discussion, fitness, gaming, etc.

          One of the things I liked about forums back in the day is that, while they didn’t have the scale of Reddit, the engagement and interactions seemed better. You got to know posters.

          I couldn’t tell you another redditor’s username.

      • vvv@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Not only do we have password managers now, we also have OIDC. I can see a situation where a service pops up with no offering other than identity management/verification, and forum-like software can accept log-ins from that service.

        • Dusty@lemmy.dustybeer.com
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          1 year ago

          And services like firefox relay so yo don’t have to give up your own email addres and can easily turn it off if it ends up on a spam list. For a service like Jellyfin a forum is the best way to go.

      • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Yeah but that’s the old way. Today you’d sign in with one of the big accounts, or, even better, a passkey that seamlessly moves around with you.

    • christophski@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      I’m so excited for forums to come back, just need to make sure there is a great mobile app to handle them.

      • roombobcat@lemmy.roombob.cat
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        1 year ago

        a indie game i support refuses to use a forum, only discord. i hate searching thru threads in discord when a forum would be easier.

        i wish people wouldn’t shun the idea of a forum just because it’s a “old idea.” good on the jellyfin folks for doing this.

          • OnionFutures@vlemmy.net
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            I hate Discord full stop, because it’s a centralised proprietary platform just like Reddit and is going to hit the exact same issues one day, and it’s going to be even harder to recover all the conversations that have gone on there.

        • Moon@aiparadise.moe
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          Sadly this is very common for small game developers (and even large ones) to move entirely to Discord to avoid paying or managing a dedicated forum

          • roombobcat@lemmy.roombob.cat
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            1 year ago

            exactly. it’s not hard to install SMF or PHPBB on a small web server, however actually maintaining/managing a forum is a bit harder.

            it’s easier to round up Discord moderators, but good luck finding anyone with forum moderation experience.

      • terrrmus@beehaw.org
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        I miss forums too. Discord has kind of taking over that role for my friends and I, but Discord makes it feel like you are posting something with everyone staring at you through a window. I hate that it notifies that you are actively typing.

        • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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          Discord sucks for what forums are good for. Forums are great for durable discussions that can be indexed, searched, discovered, and referenced. Discord? It’s only good at real time conversations

          • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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            I don’t get the popularity of discord. You have to wade through so much casual conversation to find anything of value.

        • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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          Discord sucks for what forums are good for. Forums are great for durable discussions that can be indexed, searched, discovered, and referenced. Discord? It’s only good at real time conversations

        • haruki@programming.dev
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          And my questions got lost in a flood of messages… Even Discord now has to implement forums feature to prevent this problem.

    • Alkalyon@lemmy.ml
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      Not in this day and age where me and my grandma have our own.

      There are so many, you can’t keep up to date with your hobbies unless you are willing to follow 50 platforms with 60 different UIs and community rules.

      I prefer the aggregation of data like fediverse where we can follow topics and not platforms.

  • Nullify9964@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’m sure Jellyfin considered the Fediverse but some projects like the idea of having more control of the community discussions they participate in so having a forum makes sense. I still think a Jellyfin community on Lemmy can thrive with an official forum in place.

      • BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.social
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        True but the downside is exposure and footfall. Subreddits work well as people can dip into them easily from elsewhere in Reddit, both new users and regular contributors can keep an eye from their feeds.

        A forum is on it’s own and only people out looking specifically for the forum or who know about Jellyfin will go looking for it, and it won’t pop up in people’s feeds. The Internet used to be littered with forums, but social media is the very reason they fell out of fashion.

        But users have also created a Jellyfin community on Lemmy: [email protected]

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Jellyfin is all about self hosting. I don’t see why they wouldn’t just create their own Lemmy instance if that was the concern. It wouldn’t need to be big if they limited the userbase

      • techno156@kbin.social
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        Lemmy is pretty immature, and probably doesn’t suit their needs compared to a forum.

        They don’t really need a link aggregator, so using Lemmy there wouldn’t really make much sense.

        The only thing that they might use Lemmy for is the community, but otherwise, it’s not a great fit for what they need.

        • interolivary@beehaw.org
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          Yup, “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Lemmy and the Fediverse are great, but they aren’t the end all, be all solution to online content.

          • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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            Lemmy and KBin are cool and all, but VERY rough around the edges so I wouldn’t expect large projects or communities not directly related to then to adopt either. Keep in mind for most of these projects, they picked Reddit because the users were already there and the software was relatively polished. These are both things that many of us users are interested in improving, but that projects with communities aren’t going to want to use until theyre already more advances than they are right now

    • HawkMan@kbin.social
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      forums is all around an infinitely better solution for support and discussions on specific tech and interest. It’s also more searchable and less ephemeral. At least reddit and fediverse is better then ephemeral solutions like discord.

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      I find the biggest problem with Lemmy and these federated apps is that search engine indexing kinda sucks right now. They get pushed so far down the bottom of the results, you only really see them when you search site:lemmy.ml or whatever.

      I believe this was a good decision. Hopefully in the future search engine indexing will improve. Otherwise I can’t see Lemmy being as useful as Reddit.

      • Moon@aiparadise.moe
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        It makes sense for fediverse instances to have very low SEO (search engine ranking) as the content is split up across many different websites and domains.

        • Troy@lemmy.ca
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          It’s also very annoying to crosslink content on the fediverse. So there is far fewer links between discussions. The network graph is way less interconnected, and that hurts search indexing.

    • marco@beehaw.org
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      Seriously, how about they stand up a lemmy instance? That way peeps could follow their forums without having to travel to a proprietary place.

      • brie@beehaw.org
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        According to the footer they’re running MyBB so although it is more centralised, I wouldn’t call it proprietary.

        What advantages would Lemmy have over the traditional style of forum for their use case?

        • duncesplayed@lemmy.one
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          Yeah it’s not the end of the world. It’s slightly disappointing that you have to create yet another account unnecessarily.

          • dan@upvote.au
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            You can log in to their forum with Discord, Github, Google, Reddit, Stack Exchange or Twitter accounts. It would be better for them to support logging in with any OpenID provider using OpenID Connect, but they do support some of the major ones at least (except for Facebook and Apple).

        • reric88🧩@beehaw.org
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          The only real advantage I can see is they would be another mass of users on the fediverse, which is what we want I suppose. I mean I do want it to be populated, and if more people migrate, it ensures survival of their community. I don’t like how we have all scattered to the wind, but it’s their choice where to go

    • grte@lemmy.ca
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      I can understand wanting to bring your discussion hub in house to avoid something like what’s happened. But bringing it into essentially an old school phpBB forum is certainly, ah, a choice.

      • Dusty@lemmy.dustybeer.com
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        There is nothing wrong with forums, they’ve existed (and continue to exist) for decades. They are a great way to have information easily searchable, as well as easily post and contribute.

        Just because they aren’t carded like twitter or lemmy doesn’t mean they are dated. Everything has it’s place and every tool has a job. In this case, that place is a forum and the tool is phBB. Also, I wouldn’t call it “old school” as the most recent update is from May 21, 2023.

        Not everything has to be federated, and nothing is stopping anyone from creating an instance for Jellyfin ( [email protected] ) . But for the official instance, having it hosted by them, on their hardware, that they control, it’s a great choice to use a forum.

      • tinselpar@feddit.nl
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        It could be argued that web forums were an answer to older system that came before it and the problems with them. Systems like Usenet and Fidonet BBS’s were federated system, and web forums are actually newer than that.

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    Ah, a traditional forum. Makes sense.

    Since we’re talking about forums, who here is old enough to remember the IMDB message boards?

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      I’m old enough to remember dialing into different BBSs with my 14.4 Kbps modem.

      These days my teenaged son is complaining that his 12GB Fortnite update isn’t downloading fast enough and he has to wait a whole 20 minutes.

      • Jitzilla@beehaw.org
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        I too remember those bygone days of the modem handshake sound. I wish all these kids would get off my lawn.

        • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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          I too remember those bygone days of the modem handshake sound.

          I had that as my cellphone ringtone for so long. An intern at work asked me once why my ringtone was the sound that a fax machine makes, and I could help but think “Oh, you sweet summer child.”

  • Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Kinda sad they didn’t settle for something like Lemmy, but at the same time happy that they realize the value of a forum and didn’t just move to Discord.

    • blindsight@beehaw.org
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      I can see the argument in favour of classic forums. Keeping everything chronological can help for certain kinds of discussion, and it’s easier to sort content by subforums in a way that doesn’t scale well with Lemmy. You’d need to create a lot of different communities to keep it all separated, which is messy.

      The biggest thing forums lack is multi-threaded discussions. That said, simple chronological helps people at the bottom of the thread get assistance since it doesn’t disappear into the web of conversation, so this might also be an advantage of single-threaded forums.

      Also, voting gamifies the whole experience, so people are reluctant to post in older threads since they won’t get “points”.

      Finally, threads on Lemmy also don’t get bumped, so old content effectively dies. This sucks for troubleshooting since people very frequently have the exact same problem many years apart.

      I feel like “release” and “discussion” threads would probably benefit from Lemmy’s structure to allow for deeper engagement in sub-conversations, but the core of their use is single-topic requests and, frankly, forums are better at that.

    • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
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      The advantage I see with the Lemmy approach over Discord is comment longevity. At Discord your comment has little time before it falls off the radar. It’s longer with Twitter, but still short. At Lemmy you get a reasonable trade-off for comment longevity and convenience. On a phpBB style forum comment longevity can be quite long, but you have to go to a dedicated site with it’s own address which lacks convenience.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        Yeah but really it makes more sense for an official forum. I kind of miss the days before reddit, when everything had their own private forum. The good ones were great.

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          For sure, before these modern forums took over the scene, dedicated forums like phpBB were all I used. Though there is definitely something to like about Lemmy and the fediverse. Just super convenient. You can talk about everything in one place. The longer exposure of comments with the old style was nice, but I can trade that off willingly enough.

          As far as dedicated official forums, I don’t know. Think I’d still rather have access to them here. The Fediverse just makes a lot of sense serving as a centralized communications hub. Kind of reminds me of Usenet back in the early internet days, but a lot better. Usenet could be pretty kludgey.

          • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I dunno, whynotboth.jpg is kind of my catchphrase. I think we could have high quality niche forums, but also link aggregation sites with meta commentary.

    • Some subs had existing fourms that had some loose affiliation so I’ve saw some migrate that way, but it is weird to make a new fourm instead of something Federated, but if it works for them so be it.

  • Andreas@feddit.dk
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    1 year ago

    It’s great that they’re going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don’t miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse’s “anyone can post there” system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, “one login to access everything” systems.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      Federated logins are a thing! The challenge is finding one that’s open and privacy-friendly. Unfortunately the widest-used ones come from entities like Google or Facebook with a marked interest in preying on user data. Mozilla used to maintain a federated system (Persona) but they discontinued it. I know Ubuntu offers one for all their services (bug trackers, forums etc.) but not sure if it’s open to third party systems. Perhaps there are others worth using.

      Alternatively, you can aggregate all your logins in one place across devices and browsers. Firefox Accounts are a very simple method of doing this (presuming you use Firefox everywhere), and you can choose to only sync logins rather than bookmarks, plugins etc. And of course there are other dedicated password managers, with or without online sync, open or closed source, self-hosted or private hosted etc.

    • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.dev
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      1 year ago

      Since I’m now using a password manager I’ve been having less issue with creating as many accounts as needed.
      But I do agree it’d be great to have a single sign on.

      • Dusty@lemmy.dustybeer.com
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        1 year ago

        If you are looking for a little bit of “extra” to go with your password manager, check out firefox relay. You can create emails that forward to your real email without exposing it. They allow you to block emails entirely, or just promotions. Their paid option is like $12/year (USD) and allows unlimited masks, and allowing you to create your own relay subdomain (like (whatever I decide)@dusty.mozmail.com). It’s definitely worth the relatively tiny charge for the paid version.

        There is also a relay service with Cloudflare but I’ve not tried it out yet. But having an email like [email protected] saved to my password manager is no big deal.

      • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        But then you have the same centralization issue - and it’s even worse, if the central authority has a fit for some reason about you, now you’re locked out of many completely unrelated sites.

        • OnionFutures@vlemmy.net
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          1 year ago

          You mean the password manager as the central authority? You can self host a password manager using, eg, Vaultwarden.

          Even if you use a trusted, paid commercial service, I think the risk of that happening is lower than on Reddit. Their business model is simpler and more transparent. They want to keep you as a customer so you will keep paying them. And there is less opportunity for them to ban you for political reasons when you’re not expressing yourself on their platform.

  • @cheddarcrackers.club
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    1 year ago

    As long as the forums are easily searchable then this is a good move. It looks like the subreddit is in read-only mode so we haven’t lost any knowledge yet. That data should be preserved elsewhere, just in case the subreddit becomes unviewable.

  • narc0tic_bird@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’d actually love if companies/products/software went back to forums and other specialized means to get support. I hate when they refer to Reddit or worse, Discord.