I started out with local forums on 2400–9600 baud dial up BBSes with banks of only maybe half a dozen modems for simultaneous use, run by self-funded hobbyists (who has the time and knowledge for that?). Pre-internet, if you will, although really internet did exist then, just primarily with academic and DARPA users and not public ISPs. The pinnacle of software evolution there was MajorMUD (on MajorBBS), with great adventures and full ANSI-colored text and ASCII art, but the local forms were fun too. We even had an occasional IRL picnic since everyone was within a reasonable area (not to have long-distance phone charges). But it meant the niche topics were few and far between, lacking a sufficiently broad user base (hello Lemmy!).

Boy I really hated the mess of forums you described as one of the golden eras. It wasn’t just the fractured identity management. BBcode was functional, but damned ugly, and difficult to navigate.

I hope you’re right about the future. Reddit was far and away the best forum discussion ground I had ever used, until it wasn’t anymore. I particularly like the idea mentioned in another comment of a future where (journalism, academic, professional, etc.) organizations might provide identity services in the fediverse and we could interact with either known or anonymous users. Bots and AI training are ugly issues you don’t address at all though.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts about publishing a post like that on your blog and then publishing a link to it here in the fediverse. Obviously you expect the discussion to occur here rather than in the curiously-still-enabled Wordpress comments. Would it be better to post the original content on Lemmy, but you still feel tied to Wordpress and having an RSS feed? Does Lemmy still feel like an experiment that might end whereas the blog is more still your own content repository?

Aren’t we technically on a forum now? I always viewed reddit as a forum as well.

I absolutely want people to pick other solutions than reddit and zuckerfuck, but I’m not sure Lemmy is the solution either.

The large Instances already overdo the moderation, cracking down on specific words, or people not agreeing with gender issues or vaccination issues. Just a few examples.

And no, you can’t just join another instance because the ones without similar moderation rules are defederated from Lemmy.world, which acts as the center hub of content. So in practice, any Lemmy experience without Lemmy.world is a poor one, filled with tankies and insane things. That’s not what anyone intelligent wants.

I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes. It was fine to not agree. That’s why the discussions were interesting. There was no downvotes. No popularity contests. No karma points (or ok, some forums actually had user levels based on how much they posted, but nobody cared I think).

If you want to build a proper discussion forum, it needs to allow for actual discussions and actual emotions, heated debates, insults sometimes.

At least that’s the way I see it. Or you will just have memes and pointless things scrolling by.

Nowadays, I hear a lot of people say that the alternative to these massive services is to go back to old-school forums. My peeps, that is absurd. Nobody wants to go back to that clusterfuck just described. The grognards who suggest this are either some of the lucky ones who used to be in the “in-crowd” in some big forums and miss the community and power they had, or they are so scarred by having to work in that paradigm, that they practically feel more comfortable in it.

I’m totally in agreement.

I agree that the subreddit model took off in large part because centralized identity management was easy for users. We’ll never go back to the old days where identity and login management was inextricably tied to the actual forum/channel being used, a bunch of different islands that don’t actually interact with each other.

I’m hopeful that some organizations will find it worthwhile to administer identity management for certain types of verified users: journalism/media outfits with verified accounts of their employees with known bylines, universities with their professors (maybe even students), government organizations that officially put out verified messaging on behalf of official agencies, sports teams or entertainment collectives (e.g. the actor’s unions), and manage those identities across the fediverse. What if identity management goes back to the early days of email, where the users typically had a real relationship with their provider? What would that look like for different communities that federate with those instances?

I agree. When leaving reddit I weighed my choices between setting up a forum or a lemmy community/instance and ultimately chose a forum due to their software being more polished & feature-rich, and the fact that threads can have long-term discussions. I really dislike the time-based nature of reddit & lemmy for many things.

I petitioned the forum software devs to join the fediverse though. It’s nice to see some of them already joining.

As someone who helped run a few video game forums back in the mid-00’s, it was pretty common for a pure forum to start posting blog or article content if it didn’t already as a way of attracting people to the forum. Once this happened you needed to share that content to sites like digg, del.icio.us & Reddit in order for people to actually discover it and then consider joining the forum community.

Problem is it eventually just pushed people to consume from those sites and join the meta-community there rather than actually engaging in the community back at the site itself.

After that, the standard conglomeration you get when there’s only a few players left happened and thus we ended up with Reddit being what it was for the last decade.

Most of those sites were community first, content generation second and once the community dried up, the sites all died