Discourse is a great server, i see a lot of places with their own forum now, which is good.

Yeah everyone like “AI content flood oh noooo, AI AI AI” yet very few mention this much much bigger issue of centralized algorithmically controlled walled gardens where everyone is. That’s kinda like WeChat in China. It is hard to have real democracy or freedom of information (or privacy of any sort) when only a few big corporations have the social networks all locked down. The bad thing is because of the social network effect it’s extremely hard to get people to switch even if the alternatives are even better! So much momentum. We need to find out a way to be able to help distribute users because the software isn’t the problem anymore and neither is infrastructure or any of the other stuff that is given the big guys advantage really. The biggest problem aside from the social network effect is monetization I suppose. Still, it’s hard to even start any kind of method of monetization for alternative platforms or decentralized platforms when you can’t get anybody to switch in the first place or can’t get critical mass.

I feel like we need a better model. Reddits/Lemmys algorithm makes long conversations impossible and forums make long conversations dominate and this causes a lot of additional disruption. There has to be a design that meets a middle ground that can take over which better represents both the ephemeral nature of news and article discussion while also supporting a number of long standing more detailed discussions which expel low effort content.

Especially since Reddit passes out bans like candy, it’s the biggest forum on the internet and I can’t use it because of a site wide ban that I didn’t deserve.

Mods all over the Internet killed forums with their bullshit. The users too. You can’t tame the mob and the users drag their shit on the carpet like a dog doing the scuttle.

Take a look at the shit show of the Neogaf/Resetera split as an example.