I know this #Discord nonsense has a lot of people searching for alternatives (like Matrix, Stoat, etc), and those alternatives have a chance to shine right now.

@killyourfm Back to forums? Yes, please!!! I used to write in forums, found friends there, until that damned FB killed them all. I lost so many contacts (I never joined FB) and miss people and discussions about special topics ...

@killyourfm Football fans forums for Premier Lesgue teams are quite active to be honest

@killyourfm I miss forums.

@jonathan859 @killyourfm You mean the point that way too many people aren't actually using Discord for?

@killyourfm

Regarding forums, a few that I used to use have had to go "members only" or use firewalls like Anubis because of scrapers. It is frustrating for some users because they can't even use a regular search engine to look for things on their own forum. (This even pushed users to Discord!)

I do prefer having things open, and especially prefer not having to make an account. So I hope that forums stay mostly open and not members-only.

@killyourfm @myTerminal I have arrived at the conclusion that if someone I know enough for that kind of communication suggests a new *sensible* platform I am not already using, that is fine, I will use it. You have taken up Session or SimpleX: Cool. Let's do that. Even between Signal, Matrix, Delta Chat, Nextcloud Talk and Threema, I have a pretty good idea where people are. Of course, all this is for private communications, so not on a huge scale.

I wasted so much time on badly moderated forums, I'm burnt out on them.

No, the answer "I don't know what I did, but now it's working" isn't a valid solution.
I'm also not going to find the answer on page 81 of 217, because most forum searches are not that great unfortunately.

There are some ways to make forums more useful, but they all require moderation and effort, which, let's be honest, will probably be handed over to an AI anyway.

@myTerminal @killyourfm I feel that discussing larger topics or resolving issues really turns to shit in the Wall-Of-Text era of discussion.
If one had suggested in the time of the forums - with the huge, deeply threaded discussions quoting several people in posts - that maybe we should just do this in IRC, people would have called that out as absurd.
Yes, the forums have a much bigger potential in large groups.

@killyourfm fediverse is the forum tho

@GlitchGhost @killyourfm RSS isn’t any part of activitypub some servers just happen to implement it.

@sun @killyourfm i know, i just like having RSS as an option to follow stuff online becasue you can follow blog,forums, video channels and many more stuff across the web. its pretty much like the subscribe system of the web the way i see RSS

@killyourfm federated forums exist, just use them.

Oldschool forums that you need to register to are dying and that's expected.

@killyourfm I still visit the refuge of what once was the Facepunch forums do this day.

I also set up Stoat for my friends if they want it, which they said they do, and because Stoat is receiving a "Voice v2" overhaul (and is thus inoperable on self-hosted according to my experience and understanding) I set up Jitsi which disconnects me from calls in a few minutes.

Why is Voicechat for Open Source so hard, arghhh.

@killyourfm Fourteen comments about discord and I have no idea what the hell any of them are talking about. Y’all have been using it as a replacement for forums this whole time?

I’ve just been using it for essentially 20-way international voice calls. There’s a text section to help coordinate times, but the bulk of my time is spent in voice chat. I’m not looking forward to needing to set something up to handle that, and I’m sure most people don’t even have the minimum requirements to even start hosting it locally.

@GlitchGhost @killyourfm yeah it’s a good system

@sun @killyourfm damn right it is and its great for people who just want to follow and read stuff from outside of websites and not to make accounts on sites or give out your email to follow stuff, a lot of stuff can be made into RSS feeds these days and there are many sites out there that can convert sites that dont have RSS feeds as well and depending on what RSS reader you use it can all be done for free so thats another plus about RSS i see

@killyourfm

Who is the "we" in this case?

Community owners and managers?
Somebody else?

Because forums still exist, they've never gone away. So if people are using Discord instead of a forum, they've likely got a reason for doing that. So before yelling that they need to expose their communities to the open web, I wouldn't like to know why they chose not to in the first place?

Don't you want to know?

@killyourfm The great thing about forums is, that they never really went away. Most of the folks on the internet just got lured in by the promise of "easier" and more convenient platforms. Plus the old culture of "use the search function" and "just google it" really poisoned forum culture for most of the folks. Which in turn really facilitated the rise of people pleasing AI-Bots as search engine replacements. Fun thing: I recently asked the same question as you in a friends discord server.

@killyourfm to avoid having to make a new account on every forum you want to post on, it would be cool to have an ActivityPub Single Sign On system. Another idea (which I believe Discourse has already?) is to implement ActivityPub in the forums directly, so that you can post on any forum from your main one.

@killyourfm However I fully agree on your sentiment on discussions and knowledge needing to be again search- and discoverable on the open web in lieu to them being hosted on closed platforms. I am insanely grateful to everyone still maintaining proper documentation and searchable forums with actual knowledgable people providing insights there instead of machine-yes-mans.