We need help communities on Lemmy. That’s what is going to make it rank in SEO and fly. Communities like software help (office, adobe creative products, etc), financial help and advice. And ask docs communities.

Memes won’t help SEO rank.

you spelled ‘non-federating internet forums’ wrong

I like the idea of Reddit and it works much better than Lemmy. But the moderation and AI scraping make it a no-go site for me anymore which is a shame.

I love internet forums and have been a mod at some and very high poster at other. But the snowball effect gets them. If there’s no traffic, there’s no posts, so there’s no traffic. You need to have a good community to make it work. One area reddit really shines, small communities exist on a huge platform. Great idea before the enshittification.

I hate discord and the fact that anyone replaces customer support or fan support pages with it, is just fundamentally broken. The idea of a forum is that the question is asked and archived. 20 years later someone else googles the question and sees the answer and all the replies that lead up to it. That’s what forums are for. In discord you ask a question and 30 seconds later it’s gone forever eaten by useless drivel. Never to be searched or found again. Idiotic.

Maybe I’m too young or just had bad luck, but ALL the interactions I’ve ever had with Internet forums have been unbelievably awful. Whenever I asked a question, I was asked why I wanted to know that and was lectured that my reasons were stupid, bad, or wrong (how is that even possible?). People hijacked my post and talked about anything else, and I received NO answer whatsoever! This kind of thing happened way too often, regardless of the type of forum. This occurred in Skyrim forums, Coh2 forums, PC forums, aquarium forums, … I hate forums. It’s good that they are dying, and I, for one, will not miss them at all.

Honestly, the layout and formatting of forums just isn’t as good as the way comments are sorted and how they can spawn side discussions like on Reddit or Lemmy.

At least the Fediverse exists.

I’ve been complaining about this for years now.

Don’t worry, the US government is hard at work banning social media. Wouldn’t want people to expressing ideas.

Just to pose a thought; how practical would it be for a small subject owner to run a FediVerse instance intended to stay localized to their domain?

For example: Indie game owner makes a reasonably popular game, they set up a website that Lemmy users can subscribe/join directly, and use that for forums/tips/discussions related to their game. People don’t need to register as long as they have an account somewhere. Some number of users would be new to Lemmy and use that site’s registration for later discovery. And, someday when X instance (the game, or the next popular one) gets infested by neonazis, everyone just moves to another and/or has other discussions backed up.

I don’t know how practical or convenient that is though. I imagine a lot of groups don’t want to risk lost users.

Ha – one of my favorite hobbies has an active listserv. They also apparently have a FB group but it’s not as active nor as helpful.

Honestly who uses discord nowadays? its completely unbearable

I remember when I used to be able to find dedicated message boards for bands that I liked. Now I’m lucky if there’s a subreddit where it’s just a bunch of people submitting poorly drawn fan art of the band.

Discourse is awesome. Just needs federation.

As a mod, it is lovely to work with, extremely well indexed, has tags, categories, roles and everything you want.

Everything should be done there. Matrix or Discord make no sense, its just chatting into nirvana, nobody every finds it again

And people… dont… use… threads! They just spam everything in a single chat which makes it unusable

As someone who very much “grew up” on vbulletins and irc for better or for worse, I miss this.

But also… I am not sure if them going away is a bad thing. Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation. Specifically moderation of hate and the like. Because when you are "a small group of friends’, it is a lot easier to ignore the guy with “weird vibes”. Same with the people who went out of their way to “keep women out” by insisting on making their signature images so horny that even a diehard Fairy Tail fan would blush.

But, as many of us saw, as those boards get larger? Now you need real moderators. Just having the guy who hosts it in his parents’ basement delete the worst stuff no longer works and now they are asking their friends to be mods. And you basically get the same problem people still complain about on discord where you get very cliquey communities and incredibly biased moderation.

And it inevitably leads to boards either becoming a cesspool of hatred, selling the board to an internet company, or just saying “Fuck all y’all” and shutting it down overnight.

And even stuff like legacy tech support or technical knowledge? Those are already a mess of the top result being some greybeard asshole talking about how OP is a jerk and this is a common problem and they should search for it. Or we have the stack overflow problem where the accepted answer is actually wrong.

But also? For living software, bugs change over time. And plenty of times I have found exactly my symptoms/behavior and… it is for something that was fixed three years ago. So I am now looking at a different bug with the exact same symptoms and basically every search engine is worthless.

And… going back to the moderation aspect: One of the biggest Looking Glass Games or Unreal fansites in existence was still MAYBE a hundred or so people who knew it existed and a couple dozen who cared enough to hang out at the forums. Now? The fansite for a mod for the latest Microprose game is one google search away and might get name dropped by an influencer and have thousands of people swarm overnight. Let alone anyone who gets targeted by the latest hate campaign. There are no “small” communities that aren’t private and spun out of larger ones.

So… I dunno. I very much miss the good old days. But I also increasingly understand those weren’t all that “good”. And communities are so ephemeral that they map well to a discord or even a reddit that people rage delete a few months later.

Internet Forums disappearing is a real shame.

For my hobby there’s still lots and lots of old and relevant archived forum threads that regularly help me out.

But for new information, that has all moved to Facebook Groups. This forces me to keep a Facebook account, which I hate and would otherwise ditch in a heartbeat.