Why do people think they need these big centralized authoritarian "communities" on the internet? In the late 90's and early 2000's we ran PHP forums from our parents houses.
Say I spend time on r/digg, then I find out about r/hackernews. I can start browsing there without creating a new account immediately. That lack of friction between communities is probably Reddit's biggest strength. I can't even imagine how many PHP forums have leaked my email address over the decades.
Oh, let me tell you about the real community young one, Usenet. Once upon a time, there was this system where servers collaborated and exchanged posts overnight with this dark magic called UUCP. In the morning you would wake up, and messages, discussions and such would be structured, and organized in a sane, logical manner! That is right! We did it both ways, uphill, in shorts!
We good import certain "branches" into our BBSes, respond, and then at night we dialed up the nearest BBS or system and exchanged our messages. Sooner or later the entire collection was exchanged, and everyone was up to date. Not just that, you could slice off a piece and then splice it back in (FidoNet), and it still worked!
You can have a discussion in comp.compression and lo, people would discuss only compression! You wanted to chat about something off the wall? You can find it under the alt. branch, and lo people talked off the wall stuff!
I have the same sentiment, but think we might have been in the minority. You might have run PHP forums from your parents' houses, but most people don't have that experience. I think a lot of the more successful social media sites over the years essentially are offering a centralized, easy-to-use equivalent to some of those federated systems (for example, personal blog RSS feeds -> Twitter, PHP forum -> Reddit). People use them precisely because they couldn't set up PHP forums in their house.
The centralized experience doesn't hurt either. It's just easier enough to search for a subreddit on Reddit, than it is to scour through Google search results for a forum topic.
Having said that, by the same token I really don't quite understand why some modern decentralized or federated alternatives haven't taken off more. The tech is there, some of the options I've seen are pretty good or at least promising, but it feels like often there's some social angle that gets in the way (simple critical mass, branding/positioning, complete lack of enough moderation to at least get something off the ground, etc). It seems to me a decentralized or federated system is a good fit for Reddit-style network structures, with lots of smaller nodes and community membership patterns that are relatively circumscribed for most people.
People who grew up in the Web 2.0 era are obsessed with trends and influence. Posit A#1 of these people is: The more people who think something, the truer it is. Therefore, you must be in the biggest group of people possible in order for your groupthink be true. A small group that tries to disagree with a big group is wrong. Therefore, their ideas will die, and there is no point in being a member of such a group. You might as well just think for yourself, which, as they all know, is insane.
delecti|2 years ago
zeroonetwothree|2 years ago
WaitWaitWha|2 years ago
We good import certain "branches" into our BBSes, respond, and then at night we dialed up the nearest BBS or system and exchanged our messages. Sooner or later the entire collection was exchanged, and everyone was up to date. Not just that, you could slice off a piece and then splice it back in (FidoNet), and it still worked!
You can have a discussion in comp.compression and lo, people would discuss only compression! You wanted to chat about something off the wall? You can find it under the alt. branch, and lo people talked off the wall stuff!
There is nothing new under the sun.
Cthulhu_|2 years ago
zeroonetwothree|2 years ago
code_duck|2 years ago
derbOac|2 years ago
The centralized experience doesn't hurt either. It's just easier enough to search for a subreddit on Reddit, than it is to scour through Google search results for a forum topic.
Having said that, by the same token I really don't quite understand why some modern decentralized or federated alternatives haven't taken off more. The tech is there, some of the options I've seen are pretty good or at least promising, but it feels like often there's some social angle that gets in the way (simple critical mass, branding/positioning, complete lack of enough moderation to at least get something off the ground, etc). It seems to me a decentralized or federated system is a good fit for Reddit-style network structures, with lots of smaller nodes and community membership patterns that are relatively circumscribed for most people.
DrFell|2 years ago
snthd|2 years ago
>A Lemmy frontend based on phpBB 3.3.
https://fedibb.ml/
>Flagship instance for lemmyBB
dotnet00|2 years ago