I really hope it's not Discord... Discord is screaming to be next to go public and throw everything free out and then you will have to do everything all over again.
Largely because the internet before the mid-2000s was a fairly decent place to be. Some of those old forums are still running, and are still way more intelligent than reddit.
But I would guess a large percentage succumbed to attacks from spammers, ddos, seo stuffers, etc, until the admins decided it wasn't worth it. Oh almost all of them had their password db hacked at some point, whether they told you or not, which pushes people to centralized services.
am I using discord wrong? I see it as a chat and voice client, reddit has wiki's and posts... I have no idea how to discover old content that has been posted in discord besides searching but that's not really "discovering" in my mind. I can scroll through some top posts of all time in a subreddit to see what it's all about. How do you do that in discord right after joining a server?
There is modern forum software out there, and I for one am not opposed to going back to that model. (I run a forum, and for awhile was a code contributor for one of the modern forum softwares)
Currently I'm looking at lemmy.ml. It has its issues, but they removed the hardcoded "slur filter" awhile back, and the UI is imo reasonable for non-technical users. Bonus points for being decentralized.
I think getting this particular community onto a private Discourse server would be a heavy lift, and I'm not eager to add a server for 10k DAU's to my AWS bill. Imo Discord is a non-starter, for a variety of reasons.
It's unfortunate that no substantial competitor to reddit is currently available. I would really like to see an alternative for those of us with niche communities. And it would be doubly great if reddit.com kept all the "outrage porn" that hits their front page, which seems to be what they're optimizing for anyway.
For as many years as so many of us have been watching reddit's continual decline, it seems like a site that hosts small communities and offers similar functionality should have arisen by now. I think there are a lot of moderator-types such as myself who value the opportunity to serve our respective communities and would be happy to send a few dollars a month to a site that offered reddit-style forum hosting in order to provide a place online for people to gather and exchange information.
Tildes is way too small, niche, and controlled entirely by its creator. When I first started looking for reddit alternatives, I got an Tildes invite and hung around for a few weeks before asking how one goes about making new subs. They're entirely made by the admin and subject to his discretion, so my request for an aquarium sub and a gun sub were just kind of ignored.
It's going to be really hard for them to grow a real userbase as long as it's bottlenecked that way.
What happens when the server op decides they don't want to run it anymore and pulls the plug? Or alternatively, when they decide they want to get involved with this or that.. server ops are dictators.. just because it is on the fediverse (what mastodon uses) doesn't mean they are mature people with contingency plans and codes of conduct.
My problem with Lemmy is that I just can't figure out what happens if server A has a "sub-section" called news, and server B also has an instance called news. Do they get merged into one view? Do both servers now have two different "news" sections? I can't seem to get any solid answers on this and that's why I haven't bothered registering or using it yet.
Communities are namespaced. You'd have news@foo.com and news@bar.com. The local server is an implicit namespace for its own communities, so for local users of foo.com, news@foo.com is presented as simply "news".
What happens when YC decides to shut down HN? Or, alternatively, they do $THING you don't like?
Worst case, with Lemmy, some server op decides to rage quit and shut down the server, and you're left in the same situation as if HN decided to just shut down without notice. In the other scenario, with Lemmy, you do the same thing you would if the same thing happened at HN: either play along or take your ball and go home.
You're right that being federated doesn't magically make people into reasonable humans. If you happen to discover that technology, please let me know; I have several hundred thousand people I'd like to use it on for starters lol.... But, at least with Lemmy, you have an easy option to start up your own server if you don't like how someone is running one that you participate on.
Mastodon's account migration implementation has some serious issues. AFAIK you can't migrate without access to the original account, so if that instance shuts down you're out of luck. I think it's also not possible to move past posts to a different instance so if your original one gets in bad hands you cannot get your content off of that.
I saw someone say this the last time Lemmy came up, but I'm legitimately confused at what you're saying here. Is the "fascist" the one insisting on keeping the slur filter or the one asking for it to be removed? And could you elaborate on why either one deserves to be lumped in with Nazis, other than that Godwin's Law decrees it must be so?
FWIW, in the context of the fediverse where there are reportedly instances run by actual neo-Nazis, it's both wrong and confusing to label someone a fascist for instituting a policy designed to keep those people out. You can disagree with the policy, but it's particular important to choose accurate labels here.
Banning words does not only keep those people out. If I put up a "No whites" sign it will also keep most (all?) neo-nazis out, but that's not acceptable either.
Allowing communities to decide for themselves: Great.
Banning anyone who wants to use your supposedly open source & decentralized software from using certain words that you deem inappropriate in American English is not acceptable. Spanish people are not allowed to use the word for the color black, for example.
Great! I personally agree that a filter like this imposed globally is a mistake, and their attitude in that thread is hostile. I'm just extremely tired of seeing people use the word "fascist" to describe anyone who's acting the least bit authoritarian in any context, no matter how petty the stakes.
"Fascism" is correctly used to describe a set of far-right ultranationalistic and militaristic ideologies that are directly responsible for the deaths of millions of people. If you're going to use that label, I want to at least see overt racism if not actual calls for violence.
This example is particularly egregious because the brand of authoritarianism we're looking at is antifa, which quite literally defines itself in opposition to fascism. The far right does not have a monopoly on authoritarianism, and using the word "fascist" to describe left-wing authoritarianism gives up rhetorical ground that you don't want to sacrifice.
> fascism is a mass political movement that emphasizes extreme nationalism, militarism, and the supremacy of both the nation and the single, powerful leader over the individual citizen.
As someone who administered several websites and forums with friends in the 00s: This. Buy some web server space and host your community yourselves.
The majority of communities centralizing into Reddit, Discord, Facebook, et al. has been a mistake and is a stupid textbook lesson of why the internet was designed as a distributed network.
This is a harmful misunderstanding and mischaracterization of the phenomenon. Ordinary people are far more likely to get canceled than fascists because the cancelers don't hang out on fascist forums. They go after people who have slightly less "pure" opinions than their own in the regular communities they participate in. A classic example is the implosion of the knitting community - https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
This problem predates the Internet and is a strong argument against mob violence as a form of protest. For example race riots in the US invariably occur in low income black neighborhoods, and the result is a bunch of black businesses get looted and destroyed. The mob is not capable of going to where the elite are and doing real damage to them so instead they trash their own neighbors and perpetuate the cycle of oppression. Similarly the cancelers tend to participate in communities that largely share their views and then destroy those communities over minor affronts.
The context in which the GP was speaking was running a forum. I've responded to it.
You've responded by going on tangents about personal blowback for personal activities and, strangely enough, protests.
That's not the threat vector that people trying to self-host forums tend to face - and even when it is, it's not that different from regular, run-of-the-mill mill stalking/and/or/harassment/chan-board-brigading/sub-brigading that anyone running any forum, self-hosted or not has to deal with.
where will you go?