this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.