I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
EDIT: given this is my most upvoted post on here to date I’d say the answer is yes.
I want to write mails for mailinglists again :(
Not really. There are so many comments in a single Lemmy thread that continuing it would be a fools errand. Old forum threads were not much better besides often having more direct conversations with people. But I find that to be much better on Lemmy than on Reddit too.
Similarly to forums, Lemmy is small enough that you often recognize usernames and recognize who it is and what they’ve talked about recently. E.g you might kinda know what’s going on in their lives.
I miss Livejournal, the original Livejournal where you were able to tell people intimate things about yourselves and make friends for life.
I miss forum signatures. The best you can usually get these days is a tiny little piece of flair. It would be fun if Lemmy or something supported forum signatures, though I suppose the moderation for that could be annoying.
I just really liked that level of expression.
Animated signature banners were fun
Signatures were so silly but fun. I doubt you could do something similar today. Too many people are so cynical and would dismiss it as stupid. Back then you could be more silly on the internet without immediate backlash of people putting you down.
I miss them too. I used to love designing little banners, and choosing the most appropriate quote to communicate my teenage angst.
Couldn’t agree more. I don’t miss getting information from forums. A voting system for posts and comments makes it easier to filter out the bullshit and get straight to the answers. It also encourages people to make more helpful replies so that they get upvoted. Definitely don’t miss the days of going through pages and pages of dumb, pointless replies, just to get to the one comment with the helpful response.
What I miss is the same thing you do: the fun part of forums. The signatures, avatars, ranks and titles. The sense of community, because everyone knows each other and they all post regularly. You don’t get the same sense of community on a social media platform like Lemmy. Just strangers sharing their opinions and nobody remembers anyone.
I feel like forums sucked too because of the lack of sorting.
They just don’t scale well to many users. Once you hit a certain number of users, without some method to sort, its just information overload.
Hell, forum threads that are too long inevitably go completely off the rails and become off topic troves.
I think there has to be a better intermediate format, like perhaps a mix of systems, but I think the main thing that makes reddit-likes suck, is their systems of governance.
Something I realized very quickly with lemmy for instance, is that its the not at all benevolent dictator positions that are the big problem. The main incentives for people choosing to spend their time in mod positions still remains to impose their will, whether that be their opinion or power over others speech.
There is something at its core which is wrong with this system at scale. It allows for mods to collect up critical masses of people before then knowing that due to that critical mass they have captive audiences where there is high friction to leave or start something else.
Lemmy has a very bandaid “solution” for this in that there can be multiple of any given community/subreddit, but they all suffer from the fact that whatever a moderator wants is what happens, and even in the worst case scenarios, that is just moved up one layer to admins, who are incentived to appear as hands off as possible on moderators, lest they get turned on by the people who “help” them.
Reddit sucks because of a lot of other profit driven reasons, but I think this is the main structural problem and lemmy shares in this.
Forums have this problem too by the way, but its just that forums are so separate and so bad at handling massive amounts of casual users, that they run into this far less.
You guys are missing out on my badass image signatures.
I had a ton of great ones back in the day on fbody.com (if you’re not a car person, it’s not what you think.)
I definitely miss being able to search the internet for helpful forum posts. The fact that most things are on discord now and not internet searchable is extremely annoying and only going to get worse.
Sometimes but they weren’t really that informative. I remember lots of duplicate threads. Topics sometimes stretching to 1000s of posts. Very basic search engines which had pros/cons.
They’re still in use though. Topics have to be very constrained or they get unwieldy because of how many users.
In the age of most of humanity slowly getting access, you need algorithms. We should be fighting about whether algorithms should serve users or owners. And to be frank, I don’t think you can have free services that serve users. Even Wikipedia takes $5-40 a year from me while Facebook never asked for a cent.
I miss dial-up BBSes that had nothing more than a wall of text, like SASSy was in Montreal. Single line system, no user names or logins, 7 bit ASCII, no colors, no sound, no files.
You just kept dialing until you got the line. Then you’d download all the lines from the last line you left off, then either typed in your stuff or pasted it. If you were super lucky, the sysop would barge in while you were typing.
It was great. Really felt like technology and people mixing well, we even eventually met IRL with "GT"s, Get Togethers.
I miss the sense of fun and adventure and my youth. Especially my youth.
The absolute pain of opening an old forum thread with an exact solution/guide and all of the images are long gone.
Of course asking for the same solution on reddit will get you a 300 long chain of useless comments.
Photobucket image not found 🚫
I was just thinking, the optimal “reddit”-type site should have been just a big list of links to different forums, and nothing more
I do too, but all the ones I used to visit have gone offline, and whenever I try looking for one on some relevant topic the most recent post is from 2017.
Are there forums on Lemmy? I thought it was just memes.
You’re in one right now. Lemmy is basically a forum: people can make posts and reply to them. The only difference is the points system.
Like I say in the OP, Lemmy and other Redditlikes have a default post sorting algorithm that prioritizes new posts over old but still active posts. This has a huge impact on the culture of the site. Topics are more ephemeral. Once they drop off the first page nobody will ever see them again.
On a forum, if a person wants to make frequent updates over a long period of time on a single topic, they can make a single megathread that stays visible as long as new replies keep coming. On Lemmy et al. the topic quickly drops off the radar no matter how many people reply, meaning if the OP wants to make frequent updates on a similar topic they have to keep making new posts if they expect people to reply.
Let’s say I’m on a car enthusiast forum, for example (IDK anything about cars). And let’s say I’m restoring an old car and want to share my progress over the course of months. I can make a single topic about my project and post replies to it with pics and updates about what’s going on. As long as I keep updating or as long as people keep commenting on what’s already there the topic remains relevant and more importantly visible, and could remain so for years or even decades.
Now let’s imagine the same project on a Redditlike site like Lemmy. Yes I can do the same thing as above, make a single post and keep replying to it, and people can chime in with comments. But because the default sorting algorithm causes older posts, no matter how active, to drop off over time, I’ll be replying to the void since nobody will see the post. In order to maintain the same level of visibility and interaction, I have to make new posts for each update. It’s less likely that my project will become an enduring part of the community’s history because it will either get swept away by new content if I use a single topic, or be scattered across several disparate posts.
Other differentiating factors that people have brought up are signatures and avatars. Avatars are really small on these sites and there are no sigs at all. These were modes of self-differentiation on forums, allowing individual users to be more recognizable and allowing connections between users to develop. On Redditlike sites you’re just a username and maybe a little icon, making it harder to see anything but disembodied ideas floating in the ether.
Yes I can make Lemmy behave like a forum by sorting posts by latest comment and using the “chat” display option for comments, but nobody else does that so posts will get swept away by new ones for them even if they aren’t for me, meaning the culture never grows around this system.
It’s not what I would consider a forum. Traditionally forums were built around an interest or topic, Lemmy like Reddit is a conglomerate of communities or subreddits some of which I’d consider forums. Lemmy doesn’t have the population to support nitch groups like Reddit does.
If you spend enough time and effort in selected communities on Lemmy you can get a similar experience.
And of course the necro-haters when you reply to something that is older than a week. So the spirit of old times is still there.
I still use a few
Same. Lostcity.rs is the best RuneScape forum
