From the first moment I first went online in 1996, forums were the main place to hang out. In fact the very first thing I did was join an online forum run by the Greek magazine "PC Master" so I could directly to my favourite game reviewers (for me it was Tsourinakis, for those old [...]
  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    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.

  • shadowedcross@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    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.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Much easier access.

    You make a reddit account or a discors account and you have limited access to thousands of forums.

    Imagine giving your email address and making a password and solving a captcha hundreds of times instead. Who would choose to?

    And don’t even get me started on the ease of operating these subreddits and discord channels instead of building and hosting websites.

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      There were plenty of free forum hosts back in the day. (edit: just did a search and there are still free forum hosts)

      But then social media came out, and everyone got addicted to the gamified dopamine mechanics like upvotes and shit. So now everything has to have upvotes, or likes, or whatever other stupid bullshit shit that has absolutely ruined human interaction and discourse and is single handedly to blame for the extremity in modern discourse, because the need to drive clicks and upvotes leads to extreme polarization where no common sense, honest discussion can be held.

      because you either 100% agree with me (upvote) or you are a baby killing bastard who disagrees with me (downvote), and there can be no middle ground! /s

      • Dempf@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Even with a free forum host, it’s difficult to keep things running for a long time.

        Awhile back I was unsatisfied with how quickly my (new) furniture was degrading, and found a furniture forum run by a guy in the biz. So much knowledge on there about different furniture and how to actually find quality stuff that will last decades.

        The owner retired this week, and he had been paying for an IT contract to do basic maintenance / upgrades on the forum (I think he started on a free host, but as it got bigger he eventually had to move it). He needed IT help basically to apply security patches and do upgrades. He’s stated that he no longer plans to pay for the maintenance contract. I’m guessing the forum will disappear soon.

  • recklessengagement@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    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.

    • sep@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      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.

        • toastal@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          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).

          • sep@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            In what way are matrix expencive? You do not have to self host it. You can just make an account on any public matrix server.

            • toastal@lemmy.mlEnglish
              2·
              1 month ago

              Matrix servers chew up an order of magnitude more CPU/RAM which limits the places you can deploy it. The eventual consistency model makes storage balloon as every message, attachment, metadata must be copied to all nodes in a conversation which is resilient, but wasteful in duplicated content in practices which has historically caused many medium & larger servers to shut down due to the explosive just of storage (similar issues with Mastodon). That same model is why it takes on the order of minutes to just join a room or come back to a client that hasn’t been opened recently. Element X & new servers have to work so damn hard to work around asynchronously than fundamental decision to attempt to hide it from the sluggish UX but behind the scenes still too expensive. & since it is expensive to run in many vectors this causes folks to then move to the biggest servers that can handle the load which means the Matrix network is in actuality a small number of massive servers (most of which managed by Matrix.org) & a small number of tiny hobbyists running nodes of <10 users is practice. With so many users on Matrix.org-controlled instances (& again with eventual consistency), almost all data gets synced to their nodes make subpoenas a breeze.

              A healthier network would have many fewer massive centralized nodes, medium-sized nodes, & the resource requirements would be low enough that more folks would be encouraged more often to run their own nodes they control so they aren’t required to trust an unknown serves operator. Meaning “just making an account on any public server” isn’t a great mode of operation for privacy—especially as with Matrix joining a medium-sized server will put them under a lot of strain causing them to throw in the tower & joining the few massive servers further exacerbating the centralization issue.

              Copying the UX of Slack/Telegram/Discord in a decentralized manner is a fool’s errand. Keeping the chat history for eternity is already a questionable call over using forums, but trying to distribute that out like a blockchain is so wasteful.

              https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/matrix-vs-xmpp/ https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/xmpp-matrix/ https://www.process-one.net/blog/matrix-and-xmpp-thoughts-on-improving-messaging-protocols-part-1/

              • sep@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                1 month ago

                Thank you for a detailed answer. We probably do not notice much of this problem yet, since we are in the low user count of 30-40 with mostly local channels.

                • toastal@lemmy.mlEnglish
                  1·
                  1 month ago

                  It’s once you start federating do the prices start to soar, & most things can hold local channels fine… but that’s kind of the point if you are hitching your cart to say something is decentralized as a bullet point for privacy. But if it’s mostly local channels, wouldn’t IRCv3 cut it?