calls Lemmy and Reddit a forum
As a forum user, please don’t…
Forums are so much better than whatever Lemmy and Reddit are, the problem is none exist in the same “everything in the same place and people can create subsections” form.
Why don’t we have federated forums then? The technology should be more or less similar.
lemmyBB exists which lets you view Lemmy as a forum. Seems like all the hosted versions of it are down though, and nutomic is too busy working on the backend to maintain it.
It doesn’t solve the bumping issue though, if the majority of users use “Reddit style” Lemmy then threads become inactive when they’re not in people’s feed anymore, it’s a major point of BBs, discussions are brought back to the front so people continue participating in them long term.
I wish we did, I think they went out of favour because most people prefer the “speed” of platforms like Reddit, where threads are active for a couple of hours and then something new comes up and a new conversation starts.
The problem is, there’s no accumulation of knowledge, it’s the same arguments and information getting repeated every time a new post is started on a similar subject.
You can’t tell someone “Discussion is already happening on this subject in this thread, so we’re deleting your post” when discussions don’t get bumped to the top and discussions don’t stay active once they’re not on people’s front page anymore.
The threaded replies don’t help either, it’s impossible to keep up with a post that gets a lot of attention since you can have hundreds if not thousands of branches spreading in all directions…
There’s a good reason why specialized discussion platforms all use forums instead a Reddit style system, they want to build a knowledge database and they do, plenty of active threads that are over a decade old on many forums all over the internet!
Because as we learned in our lemmy growing pains, large-scale federation is a challenge that requires a fairly concerted effort and then doesn’t always succeed very well.
People still (rightly) have tons of complaints about lemmy failing to do things as well as reddit did. It has some huge upsides (no center ownership) but it’s a challenge. Now imagine the much-smaller userbase. I knew everyone in the topics I frequented back in my forum days because there were that few people.
Oh come on, it’s a forum with voting. Sort comments by old and posts by new and you have forum mode
And discussions that are dead after 24h max.
I take part in discussions that have been going on every day for 10 years + on forums.
And then there are forums like The Goonswarm Forums, where they get pissed when you accidentally “necro” a thread.
That was very rare back when I used forums. But similarly, at least every month I’d have a reply to a 1-2-year-old comment I left in reddit. It happens.
People conflate the two terms because, if I told someone for the last 16 years that Reddit was an aggregator, they looked at me with a blank expression. It’s not a word that is in the common parlance.
It’s also not easily recognizable as an aggregator when you go to subs/communities where there are zero or nearly zero links, and it’s all threads.
They’re honestly more like a hybrid between an aggregator and an oversimplified forum. Most subs I frequented feel like Delphi did back when I grew up.
