Perhaps it’s just me having different priorities, but I have no interest in making small talk with lots of people. There’s plenty of spaces for that already whilst the spaces for enthusiasts have been sacrificed to the general public.
I’m not arguing this specifically about Lemmy, or trying to suggest policy, I’m just chipping in that there’s at least something to be said for not trying to make all social spaces for all people.
Amazing, I needed something like that a few months ago (and will need again in future).
You’re posting in Lemmy Shitpost. You’re allowed to say “shit”.
But can they affect me?
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.
Whilst I don’t disagree with your points, don’t they primarily apply to specifically a support forum?
I am very biased in this stuff, I’ll say that up front. I was in the “in-crowd” for multiple forums over the years, ran my own for many years (essentially a personality cult, as per your article), and so of course I have a warm and fuzzy view of the medium. Importantly, I found my time on forums to be socially stimulating. By that I mean that the interactions were strong enough that I didn’t feel lonely, despite being stuck in various isolated places. I have never felt that way about the interactions I’ve had any other platforms, with the exception of direct IM clients.
With that preamble out of the way, something that’s come up in the comments below but I don’t feel has been explored sufficiently is permanence. Modern profit-driven platforms focus on transience. They are built around the endless-feed model and keeping users engaged as long as possible. This is built into their very bones - it’s always about new content and discussion isn’t designed to last more than a day. Old content is actively buried.
That’s antithetical to the traditional forum model. Topics on a subject would persist for as long as there was interest (sometimes too long, of course) and users’ contributions would form a corpus of work, so to speak. I found that forums that allowed for avatars and signatures were particularly good in this respect as they served as “familiar faces”, allowing users to become visibly established community members.
I’ve used Reddit for 14 years (although lately I’ve given up on it) and not once in that time have I felt a sense of community. The low barrier of entry and the minimal opportunity cost of leaving a community makes the place a revolving door of (effectively) anonymous users. It’s my opinion that a small barrier to entry is a good thing, coupled with persistence of content. It’s not enough to have much of a chilling effect, but it provides a small amount of consequence to users’ actions and that’s arguably good for community formation and cohesion. A gentle counter to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory ( https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies ).
I run a Facebook group and we have an entrance question - the answer to the question is basic knowledge for the target audience, however the question itself also includes directions for where to find the answer (the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article OR the group’s rules). Most people just give the answer (and some overthink it and put a load of extra info in, because the question is suspiciously easy) but a subset of people either can’t be bothered or don’t even finish reading the question. In my opinion, the community we’ve built is better without those people.
This ties into the concept of profit-driven vs. community-driven platforms. A profit-driven platform wants as many eyeballs as possible, regardless of what the owner of those eyeballs can contribute to the community. The community exists purely to facilitate profit, something which feels to me like a terrible basis for a community.
Something I do feel OP is correct about is discoverability - that’s particularly an issue in the modern era of garbage search engines. I don’t have any particular thoughts on the subject, I just wanted to say “Yep! Agreed!”, haha.
He used to be on a podcast I listen to (Bad Voltage) and there was an episode (pre-pandemic) where he came out as anti-vaccinations. I didn’t listen to the show again until he left. I have zero time for people who think they know better than their children’s doctors.
I’m part of the admin team for a group on Facebook dedicated to a niche wargame. Anyone can apply to join but there is an entry question. The question itself tells the user where to find the answer (it’s both on Wikipedia and in the rules of the group!). We still get people that either don’t answer or put something like “I can’t be bothered looking it up”.
Those people do not get to join.
I’m firmly of the belief that if people are working to maintain a space for you then it’s on you to put a bare minimum of effort in to be allowed to use that space. We curate the group to keep content on topic and try to keep it a nice place to be.
The nuance is of course in what level of gatekeeping is healthy.
I don’t like that there’s so few people questioning the core concept of “one platform for everyone”.
Why does it have to appeal to everyone? Why can’t its audience be a subset of humanity who like nerdy shit? It’s what I liked about Reddit in the early years - it wasn’t completely inaccessible but it was niche enough that there was a bit of a filter, allowing me to find content and people that appealed to me.
Aiming for lowest common denominator doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
I suppose at some point I should learn Node.js and other JS-related stuff. I speak vanilla JS but I’ve not really touched frameworks. Anyway, thank you for the recommendation.
I mostly find the design of WP clunky as all hell. I’d like to add some features to my site and doing so feels tremendously awkward. Learning how to implement stuff in their way of doing things doesn’t feel worthwhile to me, I guess.
I suppose what I’m looking for is a lightweight, multi-user CMS, with support for both static pages and a blog. If the blog could support (at least one-way) federation that’d be a bonus. It should ideally be built to work with both desktop and mobile devices (so that I can customise the look rather than build it from scratch).
It’s something I could build from scratch but if I can do it then I’m sure lots of more skilled people have done it better!
Same boat here. I had some good times with it but these days it seems to be a bloated mess. Are there any good, lightweight alternatives these days?
Don’t enable his embarrassing nonsense by calling Twitter “X”.
I don’t want a private company controlling government email servers, why would I want them to control government social media platforms?
In general I’ve found Lemmy to be closer to the feel of old forums in interactions. Arguments and petty squabbles are still entirely possible, but it doesn’t feel like every interaction is about to become one. It’s what pushed me to stop using Reddit - everything seems to end up as a fight for the slightest reason. Whilst I’m plenty abrasive as a person, it felt like Reddit got worse over the last 5 - 10 years.
They might have a bigger userbase now than when I joined but it’s not ended up being worth it, I feel.