What are we going to do about it?
Sorry for the Google Translate Link. An easy alternative is much appreciated.
Edit: thanks to @Xamrica@lemmy.dbzer0.com for this translation alternative: https://translate.kagi.com/translate/https://www.xataka.com/servicios/foros-internet-estan-desapareciendo-porque-ahora-todo-reddit-discord-eso-preocupante
I’m sort of tired of articles describing some catastrophe that happened ten years ago and saying “it’s worrying.”
Is it? When was the last time you googled something and the first website that came up didn’t spit out some SEO or garbage content?
Like every day? Yeah it’s worse now but Google is still useful for a lot of things.
That being said, I do have AdBlock so it’s a different internet for me.
Have you ever tried DuckDuckGo or Qwant? They have better results in my opinion, as long as you don’t care about the business snippets.
DuckDuckGo is so much better than Google. Barely any ads, and results that are actually useful 9 times out of 10.
I’ve been using it for what seems like forever, but getting fewer and fewer relevant results over time for some reason. Switching to &udm=14 has been helpful, but I’m still uncertain about it: https://udm14.com/
It has been my experience that, yes, the user experience of DuckDuckGo is far superior to that of Google, but, DuckDuckGo doesn’t always provide the precise results. I’m looking for. I can still get the information, but it takes a little bit more work.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not shilling for Google. Their search engine has definitely gone to shit in the last 5 to 8 years. But DuckDuckGo simply doesn’t have the incredible precision that Google can if it’s properly used.
I use both
I forget the command but you can google search on ddg without ever going to google.
Today. Among thousands of times.
I’m with OP. People have been screaming this for ages, and the collective societal reaction hasn’t even been apathy, but “We vote for Big Tech CEOs, full steam ahead.”
So… Yeah, I’m tired, too. Screw it all. Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
How about strengthening the Fediverse and Lemmy?
Let the internet burn in Reddit/Discord/SEO hell. Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
So basically, let the world burn? Because that’s what it looks like we’re heading toward right now because of big tech.
Maybe we can build something from the ashes.
The big question is whether it will be us who do that.
let the world burn
That’s what’s gonna happen.
Maybe Europe and China will “isolate” themselves from much of the burning. I hope they do. But the rest of the world seems quite entrenched in Big Tech.
Maybe burning quickly is better, since more people will notice.
A couple dozen times yesterday.
Better question would be “when the last time you googled something without prefixing it with ‘reddit’ to get good results” 🤭
I’m tired of articles that just act like nothing else exists or has existed. It’s just so dishonest and not very intellectual. Right, Reddit and Discord, that’s all we have now right? Forget Facebook, Xanga, MySpace, Skype, the Messengers, IRC, ICQ, Twitter, WhatsApp, Kik, Telegram, Signal .etc it goes on and on.
But Reddit and Discord, that’s all we have!
Perfectly said dude /cheers
indeed it is the clickbait, emotional guff
also lemmy is part of the problem
I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I’m very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.
Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I’m not arguing with them, I’ll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.
(It’s a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)
Ugh, Discord is an information black hole. I despise how so many of my niches have fled there.
Reddit seems to be trying to destroy that “role” of theirs as hard as they can though. A few very niche subs I follow are drying from some kind of “bug” that deprioritizes their discoverability.
It’s not a bug. It’s absolutely a feature for making Reddit more generic, farmable garbage and noise.
They are both trash. How can we get more people to join Lemmy and the Fediverse?
Keep talking about it abroad
“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Users will search for new places. The fact that we are here is proof.
Build it, and they will come.
Yeah, well, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok are not the net, they are siloes. Discord too. Even Reddit is trying as hard as it can to be insular.
Much of my family doesn’t even know how to use a browser, at least not beyond the bare minimum for work. They probably never will.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.
With all sincerity this is fine. Seriously, let’s leave it this way.
As someone who was already around when Eternal September happened the Internet was never for normies and inviting them into the space has destroyed it. Everything that attracts the attention of normies ends up ruined; MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Slashdot and so very many more…they are all trashed because when they attracted enough users the commercialization started.
So maybe lets just leave the Fediverse for those “in the know” as long as we can.
Thing is it’s kinda too late, and the, uh, “commercial net” has all but taken over society.
Whatever happens, it would be nice if that part burns down. And I think yanking the techies from the space with the Fediverse will help.
R.I.P the original Xbox Scene forums 💔
Forums are where I learned literally everything about technology I know now. Every hack, jailbreak, method of bypassing something, building, literally anything I’ve done around my tech hobbies. Pi hole, emulation in the late 90s, how to use Photoshop, how to run Linux from a USB, everything I’ve learned from forums. I’m sad to think that me joining certain discords help deliver the death knell to the concept of forums.
I’m not convinced at least half of those communities trust Reddit and Discord enough to leave forums, but then again I stopped using them mostly because I haven’t had time for those hobbies. My emulation groups are still active on forums, at least.
deleted by creator
How about crossposting forum post links on Lemmy? This would help to get them exposure.
XDA forum was that for me. Great place to start and then follow links or do more research using the keywords used in the discussions. Just helpful for things like learning if a kernel is potentially fixable or not before buying a second-hand device for a custom rom project. The new look / reorganisation of stuff annoys me though as I find it harder to find stuff than it used to be but that’s because I am using it on autopilot. I guess new users might find it attractive / easy to navigate?
Subreddits were not a problem before since they were accessible on the web without needing an account. But now reddit is gradually locking them down behind authwalls and things like not letting search engines index (other than Google).
Lemmy communities dont have this problem and because lemmy is federated, its resistant to such enshittification (plus you can easily create your own lemmy instance for only your team). So imo they are a good alternative to forums (and reddit) and a good solution to this problem.
What can we do to get more people to switch over to Lemmy from Reddit?
I guess once more and more content is posted here, naturally more people will come. And also any further steps of reddit enthitiffication will move people over.
Can we actively do something to help this process?
yes. do what i’ve been doing. tell your irl acquaintances about the fediverse. tell them about the lack of algorithm and the lack of ads. tell them about the lack of billionaires farming you and yours for data.
Already on it! ✊
But I think we need a simple elevator pitch to win them over. No ads is definitely a great start.
It’s reddit with better/real people. Most people probably can feel reddit going to shit. Quality of comments is way down.
That’s true. Quantity over quality.
but that was my elevator pitch.
You are right. 😅 Basically all important information in there.
The main thing is post more. Lack of content is the main reason people don’t use Lemmy more, and the only way to fix this is to share/produce more.
Its a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think even (transparent, community-relevant) bots are a good idea at this point, given that 99% of interests have little to no activity currently. For example, if we had bots that post game update changelogs to their relevant communities, it would at least provide a baseline amount of content and make it easier to discuss for fans of those games.
post, comment, I keep seeing nonfedrrated options pop up because they know ppl are tired of stuff like reddit and are trying to grab ppl
Which ones? Haven’t seen any others yet.
Some forum software is starting to support activitypub with plugins. If they add the plugin then you can follow and interact with the forum from Lemmy. The best option for everyone is to start pestering forum admins to add those plugins so they get users and Lemmy gets more content.
Long term creating migration scripts for popular forum software like phpBB, so content, users, etc, can be moved to a custom Lemmy instance would be an option.
That sounds like an awesome idea! I’m sure that many forum owners don’t even know that they can federate.
Start copying as many of the top searches that bring people to Reddit. Have them answered here, possibly in more detail, or maybe copy paste.
That’s a great idea!
I found Lenny because someone posted about it on reddit
Awesome! What was the post and what convinced you?
I honestly don’t remember exactly but I think people were complaining about Reddit’s trajectory and someone mentioned lemmy voyager so I download it immediately.
Cool. And are you still using Reddit or are you using Lemmy exclusively?
More Lemmy posts in search results
Awesome. Let’s do that! :)
I keep an eye for engaging content on reddit and just rip it here. Mastodon and I think even BlueSky ran on repost bots in the early days. People have to find stuff here first.
I think, though, I stuck a Leminal Space link in my bio or upvoted a Luigi and got banned. So, not sure if you can directly link to Leminal over there or not.
People have to find stuff here first.
I have thought about creating a bot to crosspost content from reddit here but I suppose they will quickly block access. RSS could work to a degree, but it doesn’t include the full content and media.
If you or somebody else has ideas, I’m listening.
I think, though, I stuck a Leminal Space link in my bio or upvoted a Luigi and got banned. So, not sure if you can directly link to Leminal over there or not.
I have a link to my instance in the bio and regularly post about it and haven’t had problems with exposure until now.
I’d like to see fedi software evolve past just cloning twitter and reddit into more diverse offerings, like forums
Reddit is shadow banning people in droves for bad upvotes
This is why I’m making more effort to move to Lemmy permanently. The thing is that they’re also refusing to say what exactly will get you banned, and that they can and probably will change the criteria pretty much when they feel like it. This is the kind of shit abusive partners do. They cannot expect anyone to be able to follow a rule that they refuse to define. Personally, I don’t think that’s an accident. It feels more like they’re laying the groundwork to be able to censor whoever they like, most likely at the behest of the current US administration.
Yeah they are shit now. What can we do to move them over to Lemmy?
I only heard about lemmy a few weeks ago I bet there’s more like me. I think it’s just a question of promoting it
Cool how was the switch for you? Do you like or miss something in particular?
I love it! Reddit has slowly been going to shit for years, so many posters are nasty and there’s so much hysteria. There’s ads and political manipulation everywhere. I miss some of the subs, and would prefer a bit more activity but at the same time posts are far higher quality. Overall I’m really really happy and it’s been smooth and welcoming
Nice to hear! Yeah activity is still way lower than on Reddit but it’s slowly increasing. :)
100% and the good thing is they seem to be really nice people joining
What’s a bad upvote?
Upvoting what they deem as bad or violent content.
Anything anti billionaire, to sum it up.
I am one of those people and I wonder. Is it because I upvoted a news article about war or a nazi getting punched?
How do you find out about it? Try to view the threads while logged out and not seeing your comments, I suppose?
This is unironically on reddit right now. People lamenting a place like Lemmy doesn’t exist.
I’m less worried about Discord, honestly.
IRC is literally right there.
The protocol itself could use a little modernizing (namely around privacy concerns), but it’s still very relevant.
Discord was talking about going public, probably changing their profit incentives. My group and I were talking about setting up a Rocket Chat if that happened. But it has to have IRC compatibility, right? Can IRC provide real-time audio communications? Discord is a failover when in-game communication isn’t working for some reason.
Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a “community tool”.
It’s because of this bullshit.
Take a guess how many members this server/example community serves:
500? 2000? 10,000+?
Surely, a group of 50,000 needs a ticket system, age verification, moderation, and rules/TOS+registration?
There are twelve users in that chat/server. Three of the 12 are moderators. One is the “owner”.
Discord became a “community tool” because Discord moderators/“creators” are a special class of human being who realized their dream model train set could be upgraded with Internet connectivity.
Medium-to-large-scale-enterprise tooling is available to spin up for anyone, without having to pay for anything. In fact, Discord incentivizes donations through “boosts” where the users of a community pay for server costs rather than the hosts/maintainers themselves.
As a result, people go ham and never invest in proper training, role division or infrastructure. They cosplay at running a pseudo-corporation and Discord adds their requested features, at a price/donation premium.
P.S: I run a Discord channel of 223 users with no moderation, we have one text channel and two voice channels. We use the service like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak for a Steam Clan. I’ve literally had these busybodies from disparate communities join just to tell me I was “doing it wrong”.
P.S.S: I also hate HOAs.
Ah, the dream of having control over others alive even in a space as pathetic as a video game chat room. You definitely aren’t doing it wrong your way.
I’m reminded of forums that would have a million subforums and as a result never build up any critical mass. Have one big bucket, maybe two, and if something comes up often enough organically then, and only then, consider a separate subforum for it.
a server I was a part of a while ago had maybe 30 people, but with a ton of topic based channels. the ‘owner’ would CONSTANTLY bitch about conversations being too specific for general and reprimand people.
even in one server I’m currently in, which has ~2500 members, there’s really only 50 people active on it. one of the mods still does this all the time (“tAkE iT tO #PoLiTiCs”) and it inevitably only ends the conversation every time. nice “community”.
Whenever anyone tells me a discussion should be moved I am done. The spell is broken and the social interaction concluded because I’m no longer interested. Discord channels are fucking social poison.
I think it’s because it’s great for group messages too. SMS/MMS is kinda shit, especially when somebody has an iPhone and their iMessage interferes (seriously, enough of the ‘loved an image’ spam). IRC gets blocked on a lot of public networks because of its association with piracy, so that makes it less than reliable.
Discord is pretty full featured too, like IRC doesn’t do group calls, and getting a group phone call going is a pain. Being able to have different channels is also super nice, because you can have a channel for, idk, birthday party planning to keep it from vanishing in the general daily chitchat. I’ve used it with roommates to get everybody on board with a grocery list before, because we all had Discord accounts anyways.
It’s just useful enough as a community tool.
This is the answer.
For whatever complaints one might have about Discord (and they are legion), it does a really good job of packing a bunch of different functionality in one place and with a UI that’s super easy to grasp and understand what does what and how that requires very little foreknowledge of what the thing is or its underlying mechanisms.
If I am completely new and pretty blank of what it is, Discord’s pretty good at me being able to catch up quickly; it’s got a good UI and, following that, functionality for a bunch of things related to communication. And, if I need a quick solution that just gets me going…that’s gonna be pretty painless.
Exactly. Whats funny is facebook could have done this in like… 2010. Like I’m fairly certain I had “group pages” back then that were a very small number of people. But you’re right, the channel thing is crazy useful. Like my one group has 3 people, but we’ve got like 50 topics. It’s gotten to the point there are archives, ie: the “thanksgiving” channel moves from the “archive” group to “general” group around mid sept.
I’ve also been lucky enough to avoid having it be work related. Like I have slack for work, that notification noise is the devil, where as the discord notification noise means my buddy is posting pictures of his kid.
Yeah, but it shouldn’t replace forums.
1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There’s <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I’m on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it’s great. It’s direct out of 2010, it wouldn’t suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that’s really what lemmy seems like to me: “what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?”
I don’t mind using it for larger teams, it can be great for organised communication such as dev teams!
But it shouldn’t replace documentation.
(Also, Discord itself is a proprietary, censoring telemetry wasp nest, your FOSS dev team shouldn’t be organised in it but Matrix, XMPP, IRC channels or something else open.)
Last I checked you can only thread a conversation one level down from the channel and that’s it (when I last used it like 5 years ago).
To me that’s practically unusable for what it’s supposed to be. Slack even does a better job, in my opinion.
Discord is far worse in this context, though. Much of reddit is still publicly visible and is still indexed by some search engines, even if it could be better. Discussions from years ago are still visible and provide useful information to many (this is part of the reason “search term + reddit” became such a popular query template). When communities move to Discord, many of their conversations become completely private to anyone who isn’t a member. The conversations move quickly and there is no easy way for people to reference past information. I get that people on Lemmy hate reddit and it’s popular to circlejerk about it, but forums being replaced by things like Discord and Telegram that aren’t equivalents at all has been much more damaging.
You make a really good point here. However, is that same anti-indexed nature a boon in the era of Ai site scraping.
Discord was never ‘user-friendly’. It always gave me nerd, incel, neurodiverse, or weirdo vibes so not something I would miss much although I probably qualify as nerd, neurodiverse, and weirdo (but not incel, never that).
It definitely let people create insulated pockets. Is there a chat app that doesn’t do that? Telegram?
What are we going to do about it?
Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they’ve showed up starting in the early 90s. They don’t want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.
If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there’s enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.
The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don’t fit into a box. It’s that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can’t hold the castle once it’s being assaulted by the normies.
So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It’s for the best.
Back in mid 00s I created a forum for fellow classmates to share notes, info on exams and whatever. It was active for a year or a bit more, then someone set up a Facebook page for our group and the forum died in about a month. I could not understand why people migrated so quickly, Facebook group was atrocious when it comes to search functions, any files, notes or anything you didn’t download immediatelly were lost to time never to be seen again. If the forum is still up I’m sure I’d still be able to easily download exam schedules and all notes from all the classes there, with Facebook it was a pain even a week after someone posted. There is something fundamentally wrong with society if an inferior product can sweep the board so easily. People do not care about quality or usefulness of anything, all that matters is marketing and trends.
Every forum I used before Reddit even existed is still active (hell, PHPBB was updated as recently as November!) and new platforms, like Lemmy, pop up all the time . IDK what the fuck these articles are talking about. Maybe they just don’t know how to actually find anything on the web? 🤷🏻♂️
I think it’s more about the scale. 80% or more of the content gets created on Reddit or alike, probably.
Barely any content is created on Reddit. It’s an aggregate site where 90% of the posts are links to other sites, just like Lemmy. Even most of the memes/image macros are unoriginal and taken from somewhere else.
I have to disagree. I have seen a lot of helpful question/answer Style content there which was only there.
well maybe on certain (mainstream?) subs, but tech subs like those that do something with selfhosting have a lot of discussions. including in the comments of posts that point to external content!
its a shame that there’s no lemmy instance thats basically a mirror of a few reddit subs (or is there?)
I’m not sure if it’s a Lemmy feature or voyager feature. But under the settings, there’s a migrate subreddits. It pulls across the subreddits you are subscribed to and matches them to ones on Lemmy.
afaik that just auto-subscribes you to a popular lemmy-alternatives of your communities
deleted by creator
If anyone is looking for a pretty good list of forums-
https://aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today?ueid=6310597850b065b278e2b143b21b73b5
I for one would want a more open source system where a single guy running a server doesn’t have all the power in the forum. It would be awesome if a fedi form of forums took over and one could replicate all the info as relays.
They’ve been dissapearing for a long time, if they were an animal, they’d be somewhere between Endangered, and Critically Endangered…
The eye-opener now has been that Reddit has turned into corpo/authortiarian boot licking trash, and Discord is planning on going publicly traded. (Read More Corpo bootlicking trash)
I’m so inspired by the Fediverse, the social options we have these days are just magical.
A decade ago, Diaspora got press because they were going to build an alternative to Facebook. But there was hype and then there was disappointment.
Now, everybody knows how terrible legacy social media is. Everybody knows. Sure, most people are still stuck there. But these vibrant alternative places exist! The options are exciting! It is so much better than it’s ever been!
Just keep building. This is great, and it’s only just started.
