A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
I’m looking for a study group for a specific maths textbook I’m reading
Discord math forum is too big and my queries get swamped so I don’t use it
I’d appreciate some advice on this and also how to develop my federated use of the internet
Let us know if you find something!
“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.
Funny thing...an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed
which one?
Its a private one that spun off from the Cakewalk user forums around 2002
Hopefully /misc.... Any other refugees here? Bruh.
without forums or decentralized social services i wouldn't have met my husband
I'm getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.
First the centralized (I prefer to say "urbanized") nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.
However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who's hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by "last comment" which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it's not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won't bother.
I get to know people on traditional forums, even miss them if they leave, but on Reddit, comments are just disembodied thoughts manifesting in the ether. That may be due to the size of the community rather than the format, though.
Check lemmybb.
Yeah, those old forum threads really were great. Many forums had threads that were discussing topics for years, all in one place. There were people posting how they were building something and they would just reply to their thread with an update. It's a great way to collect information and better than we are doing it here
On the flip side, you can also have threads where people hold different conversations, but it becomes impossible to read, because you don't get the reply-tree structure like we have here.
Then again with reply trees you cannot easily see, which tree has the latest answer and if things are generally active or not.
Different formats for different focuses.
I'd like to see a federated, self hostable forum platform. I believe NodeBB is implementing or has implemented activitypub, but while it's open source it seems even less of a turnkey solution than Lemmy or Mastodon.
The worst is Discord. It doesn't show up in search engines and somehow you have to know that is where you are "supposed" to go for help. Privacy issues aside, I am fine with discord for playing games with friends or big conventions/LAN parties, but I don't understand why anyone would use it as a forum.
Yep.
Discord is a black hole where information goes to die.
Its not indexable, its not searchable, If you are having a problem you will never find it via conventional means.
and the second the discord shuts down, all the information is gone forever.
Discord is not a tech support platform. it is not a information storage platform.
it is a communication platform.
and far, far to many organizations use it for tech support and information storage. To the detriment of everyone... even themselves.
Because people don't want to have to join special services just to find out why their piece of software doesnt work.
No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they're in the AI bed with them.
Your Favorite Forum still rules.
plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.
Maybe Lemmy is a 2020s version of phpBB (the forum software, which is open source like Lemmy is). Lemmy and phpBB can both be hosted by anyone, but of course the interesting thing about Lemmy is that Lemmy servers can share their content with each other.
You should be using Lemmy instead of Reddit. It's defederated, and it's spread out over 600 Instances in many different countries. This way, one rich egomaniac can't ruin it for everyone else.