Re: Welcome! I made a forum.
Posted: Fri Dec 30, 2022 3:39 pm
Due to the newness of this forum, I am extremely tempted to make an account called "fart" or something.
This is one of my problems, too. People even ask me if I have a discord server or if I could create a subreddit. But I really don't want to use proprietary software, which is controlled by a huge company, where I am not even in control and could be banned for any reason (even pranks could destroy a whole community). And the spyware, which is included everywhere nowadays, is more than annoying, because I don't want to tell people "Hey, if you want to participate in any discussion with me, you just have to get spied on by those 116 third-party tools, which are build in into this website". Naaahh.... this is just ridiculous and disgusting.MattKC wrote: ↑Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:28 am [...] As a content creator, shouldn't I just direct people towards a Discord server or subreddit like everyone else? [...] I'm not really a fan of "public Discord servers". [...] but in general they've very much lost their prevalence to the aforementioned Discord servers and subreddits, which I think is kind of a shame.
And this is a reason why I love forums, too, but I wanted to be a little bit modern and tried federated systems (Fediverse), like Mastodon (Twitter replacement) and the last months I tried my own lemmy instance (reddit replacement, here is an example).MattKC wrote: ↑Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:28 am Subreddits are also generally very insular, having to focus on a single topic so they don't get disorganized, with very few shared users between them. A forum, on the other hand, can be much broader in scope with the same userbase, allowing for much more cross-pollination between ideas and subcommunities.
You're talking from my heart! I miss well-organized discussions and I am pretty annoyed of all the chat replacements like Slack or even linux discussions in IRC.MattKC wrote: ↑Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:28 am While undoubtedly some of my fondness for forums is nostalgia, for a while I've also been wanting a place where I (and others) can post and discuss things like tech/game modding research/discoveries in a way that's well-organized (unlike a subreddit), easy to write for (unlike a blog/wiki), and doesn't disappear up the endless scroll of an instant messenger like Discord, hidden away from public view and search engines.
Your mention of "branches" reminded me of mailing lists (I am thinking about the Linux kernel one specifically)...maxmoon wrote: ↑Wed Jan 11, 2023 10:45 am I think I still wait for a solution, which is like a forum, but has threads and branches like I mentioned above, because unimportant posts will disappear automatically and don't have to be read by anyone who wants to follow the thread, again, and your well-organized threads can't be destroyed so fast, like in a forum. But I have to say, I am looking for a good solution for years and maybe a bulletin board is the best solution, even if it only can work with a lot of mods.
Have you tried other systems than classical forums?
mailing lists would be even good, if there would be a good way to make them easily accessible to others. There are websites, which are converting emails into html, but those are very ugly and most of the time you can't follow a thread, because it's just bad or you can't read the text, because of weird format and no/bad css, sometimes even looking for the next post after clicking on next, because there is too much crap on the site. I've never seen a generated and good structured thread made out of a mailing list.
Personally while my first ever Internet account was on a local social media (that died agonizingly due to its greedy corporate not knowing how to make it better) I had most of my childhood on the Internet interacting with people on forum platforms (when I did not just surf around the W3 most of the time) and I did not have the same feeling when I had to use Facebook for real life happenings until this place went online which is just very much what I needed after I had stopped using Discord for good and had nowhere to share my thoughts...