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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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The Reddit style voting/threading is superior of forums though.
An unfederated Lemmy instance for example would actually be really good.
The benefit to a forum is that posts with new comments move to the top. If a Reddit/Lemmy post gets a single new comment it may or may not be seen again by anyone except the OP or of the comment was a reply then to the op of the replied comment.
Some forums do have up/down votes as well as nested comments.
Lemmy does have this actually
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
and then there's the "Active" sort, which is kind of a compromise
Neat! Now if I could see which of my subscriptions has new posts/comments.
You could force latest comment sort on the posts, but leave the comments sorting to the user.
you might like mbin then. same content, more reddit-like plus includes microblog interaction that lemmy fails at
ex: https://moist.catsweat.com/
Possibly, is Mbin basically a single instance like kbin was?
no, its an open source platform just as kbin was a platform. kbin was never a 'single instance'. my instance started on kbin before migrating to mbin.
the dev for kbin had personal issues and abandoned it. kbin was forked to mbin with the goal of having a 'community' of developers instead of a single one.
https://joinmbin.org/
Why does it need to be unfederated?
If you are a company looking for a forum, you want to be able to control it. Unfederated means you can control account access and don't have to worry about someone going to All and seeing porn etc.
Federated could work, but you need to make it clear that it's just a community on a platform.
Discourse already exists (and most big companies use that).
Also you can see many other things on Reddit or Discord too (or the internet). Im not sure how that is a point against federation. If companies really want to control everything they can create their own instance (like KDE's lemmy instance).
They can defederate everyone from their instance to get an "unfederated" instance but again it changes nothing imo.
In fact defederation is a negative since now you have to worry about new signups, moderation, etc. While in a federated instance, you can leave moderation to other instances and only allow team/company members on your instance. Users can sign up on other instances and still be able to interact with your instance for support, help and other stuff.
They are going to moderate their communities, if its unfederated, you don't have to worry about moderating (or the lack of) on any other instances communities at all.
Thats going to be too confusing for a lot of users - they just want to sign up and complain about/discuss things.
It depends if they are saying, we have a community on lemmy (federation fine) or saying, here is our official forum thing (federation bad)
Why do we need companies running things?
We're talking about Reddit. It's one of the biggest porn sites out there. If anything, it's way easier to control what your employees see if they are on a company instance.
Also, which company uses Reddit as their forum? Most of the ones I have seen use Discourse, which is open source but unfortunately not federated.
We're all a big community. I think people get this quickly.
....that was entirely my point.
lots of small apps, orgs, communities etc just have a subreddit and a discord server. Lots of bigger companies have official or semi-official subreddits.
Someone wanting to get support for their hoover or something may not. they create an account to discuss the pros and cons of certain hoover and see loads of random stuff about American politics and Linux. Their going to get real confused. Most people have heard of reddit now though (and to a lesser extent discord)