For a second I thought they were launching their federated lemmy/kbin instance. With different communities, like “support”, “bugs”, “news”…
Would have been freaking awesome and a great use case for Lemmy and federarion.
Good for them anyway.
At the same time, it might not fit them. Lemmy is a link aggregator, which seems like extra functionality that they don’t really need, not when existing forum software will do what they need, while also being more stable/mature.
Not good enough of an excuse, IMO. Link aggregation is essentially a normal post with just a link to somewhere else, which you can totally do in any forum… and it is no bloat at all.
I believe the reasoning was more like “we don’t want to do any federation, because the barrier of having to create a new account will free us from trolls/bots/etc”.
They made their announcement on their own site, they are the somewhere else, and the link has found it’s way here so what’s the problem?
We call websites like this one link aggregators but they are just platforms, it’s the users who are the aggregators collecting the links that we are interested in. We don’t need a system of top down promotion and don’t need to have our platforms serve those who want to promote. Likewise projects like Jellyfin don’t owe us a presence and this post itself proves they don’t need one. The idea that everyone must maintain a brand identity and that our social media should be polluted with advertising is something that the fediverse has and I hope will continue to stand against.
I hope mods can restrict the types of content users can post in communities in fututure.
Of course they can, what else would moderators be doing? Not entirely sure how this is even a question…
Maybe they mean automated moderation tools that will just do that?
I think they mean turning off the ability to submit non-text posts entirely. It’s much better that a user can’t do something that isn’t allowed than to have a bot fix up the situation after the fact.
The return of phpbb, who had that on their 2023 bingo card?
They evaluated it and decided against it in favor of MyBB.
I’m a little surprised they didn’t pick Discourse.
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This is great, I’m honestly glad they have their own forum on their own page as opposed to something like Discord.
I know people will be disappointed it’s not on lemmy or similar, but it’s for the best to be honest. Since it’s a product, it’s much easier to have something they fully control and can have ownership over (including who and what can be posted there). It’s a great decision by them.
As much time passes I still find forums really easy to navigate through with how categorized everything is, and I do like activity bumping up threads. Although searching through like 100+ page long threads on like xda can be a pain. Still so much better than discord for being a source of information.
Still so much better than discord for being a source of information.
Discord is atrocious as an info repository. It’s useful to chat and to have a way to search what’s been said, but it’s horrible having to search there for that one useful message amidst all the other replies if you haven’t participated. And the nature of a chat makes searching blindly very time consuming.
Although searching through like 100+ page long threads on like xda can be a pain.
Until recently, one of the official ways to get support for the email app I use (FairEmail) was to post in a 1200-page XDA Developers thread containing 24,000 posts. https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/closed-app-5-0-fairemail-fully-featured-open-source-privacy-oriented-email-app.3824168/page-1203
Ah, yes. Nothing like bumping a five year old thread for whatever reason.
Legit funniest necro I saw recently was on one of the forums in a private tracker I’m a member of.
There were about three pages of discussion. One dude is talking back and forth with another.
Thread died down as they all do.
A few weeks ago, five years after the last post, that same dude just randomly pops in to reply to the previous post with the most casual of responses.
He wasn’t even inactive on the forums. Somehow he just left that specific thread for five years.
On the topic of forums, I do like them, but I find they can often feel less “casual” than reddit/Lemmy. Different etiquette, I think.
Discord goes the complete opposite direction. It’s basically IRC with some more modern features. In other words, there is nothing but the chaos of a conversation that’s lasted maybe an hour or so.
How people rely on it for long term stuff, I don’t know.
Discord has forums for long form discussions. Slow mode can be enabled so that it doesn’t turn into a “chat”.
Round peg, square hole IMO. Discord is designed as a chat application with an afterthought of threading and forums (I guess?). It’s not a reddit replacement, and it’s not designed as a forum.
I think forum mode has the same limitations as regular Discord - posts aren’t indexed in Google, search is kinda… meh, you have to sign up to see anything, and overall it’s still not a platform built for long-form discussions.
I feel that a lot of people are missing the point that discord has done something that other software has not. It makes it easy to centralize communication. It is invaluable for small developers.
And while yes the information is not available via general searching, the searching within discord is actually pretty good.
I keep seeing people mention matrix as a viable alternative to discord but my experience with matrix has me calling bs.
It makes it easy to centralize communication.
Centralisation is why we have issues with Reddit at the moment. It puts you at the whims of a single company, who will eventually want to make more money (after all, they’re not a charity). For example, Discord could one day announce that you only get the 500 most recent messages for free, or limit the room size, or make some other changes that vastly impact how it’s being used today.
the searching within discord is actually pretty good.
I really don’t want to have to go to multiple different sites to search for information. That’s why we have search engines. Discord being a walled-garden makes it a lot more difficult than it should be.
(yes, I know, this also sounds like centralisation, but we have a choice of multiple search engines, plus I can self-host my own searx instance).
Ah, a traditional forum. Makes sense.
Since we’re talking about forums, who here is old enough to remember the IMDB message boards?
I’m old enough to remember dialing into different BBSs with my 14.4 Kbps modem.
These days my teenaged son is complaining that his 12GB Fortnite update isn’t downloading fast enough and he has to wait a whole 20 minutes.
In all fairness, it probably did take less time to load messages on BBSs than it takes to update Fortnite :)
I too remember those bygone days of the modem handshake sound. I wish all these kids would get off my lawn.
I too remember those bygone days of the modem handshake sound.
I had that as my cellphone ringtone for so long. An intern at work asked me once why my ringtone was the sound that a fax machine makes, and I could help but think “Oh, you sweet summer child.”
As long as the forums are easily searchable then this is a good move. It looks like the subreddit is in read-only mode so we haven’t lost any knowledge yet. That data should be preserved elsewhere, just in case the subreddit becomes unviewable.
Kinda sad they didn’t settle for something like Lemmy, but at the same time happy that they realize the value of a forum and didn’t just move to Discord.
The advantage I see with the Lemmy approach over Discord is comment longevity. At Discord your comment has little time before it falls off the radar. It’s longer with Twitter, but still short. At Lemmy you get a reasonable trade-off for comment longevity and convenience. On a phpBB style forum comment longevity can be quite long, but you have to go to a dedicated site with it’s own address which lacks convenience.
It’s great that they’re going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don’t miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse’s “anyone can post there” system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, “one login to access everything” systems.
Since I’m now using a password manager I’ve been having less issue with creating as many accounts as needed.
But I do agree it’d be great to have a single sign on.But then you have the same centralization issue - and it’s even worse, if the central authority has a fit for some reason about you, now you’re locked out of many completely unrelated sites.
Federated logins are a thing! The challenge is finding one that’s open and privacy-friendly. Unfortunately the widest-used ones come from entities like Google or Facebook with a marked interest in preying on user data. Mozilla used to maintain a federated system (Persona) but they discontinued it. I know Ubuntu offers one for all their services (bug trackers, forums etc.) but not sure if it’s open to third party systems. Perhaps there are others worth using.
Alternatively, you can aggregate all your logins in one place across devices and browsers. Firefox Accounts are a very simple method of doing this (presuming you use Firefox everywhere), and you can choose to only sync logins rather than bookmarks, plugins etc. And of course there are other dedicated password managers, with or without online sync, open or closed source, self-hosted or private hosted etc.
Strange they don’t even mention Fediverse. It just felt too dated.
I welcome the return of forums. What a simpler time.
I don’t-
I don’t miss having to register accounts on each one, answer a bunch of questions, give a birthday, give an email, do a capta… etc…
Just for that forum to popup on haveibeenpwned.com a few months later.
Knock on wood, password managers are a thing now, and its easy to give each forum a very unique password. But- still. Don’t really miss those.
Thank you! I feel like I’m the only person who lived through that time. Having everything on one site is way simpler, reddit sucks but that doesn’t mean the concept does.
I do not miss having to sign up for a specific forum, wait for the email, no email, check spam folder, no email, 15 mins later email shows up in spam, go to post, “sorry you can’t make a post without interacting with at least 5 other posts”, post random shit on 5 other posts, finally get to post, "this question has been answered. Post archived "
Password managers have been a thing for like 20 years?
Not quite- I’d say they really became popular / usable around 10-15 years ago. In the early 2000s, people either used internet explorer, or opera.
Opera /chrome didn’t support extensions until 2009.
NOT- saying they didn’t exist, but, the idea of a browser-integrated password manager wasn’t a huge thing back then, I don’t believe.
Roboform was originally released in 2000. It’s the oldest password manager I can think of.
Internet Explorer supported extensions for a long time (at least since IE5, maybe even IE3 or 4), and Firefox did too.
Not in this day and age where me and my grandma have our own.
There are so many, you can’t keep up to date with your hobbies unless you are willing to follow 50 platforms with 60 different UIs and community rules.
I prefer the aggregation of data like fediverse where we can follow topics and not platforms.
It felt so much better to engage on forums. felt a bit slower and more intentional. And signatures, the signatures! Love their choice here.
a indie game i support refuses to use a forum, only discord. i hate searching thru threads in discord when a forum would be easier.
i wish people wouldn’t shun the idea of a forum just because it’s a “old idea.” good on the jellyfin folks for doing this.
Yep unpopular opinion I hate hate hate discord for anything but normal chat. The threads they added recently are neat and I hope they keep going in that direction.
I hate Discord full stop, because it’s a centralised proprietary platform just like Reddit and is going to hit the exact same issues one day, and it’s going to be even harder to recover all the conversations that have gone on there.
TIL about Jellyfin. Is it like Plex? Better? I assume it’s solid since everyone knows about it?
It’s plex but open source and without any sort of subscription. I have been using it for a couple of years and never had a problem
It’s great software but for me it’s missing at least 1 must-have feature, being intro detection & skipping.
If you want to get into them you can run them both on the same library and just compare which you like best
There is a plugin you can install for that, but it is a bit finicky:
Finally. I’m happy to see them moving from the subreddit. It wasn’t terrible, but a forum will be better I think in the long run.
Now all they need to do is move away from twitter.
I’m sure Jellyfin considered the Fediverse but some projects like the idea of having more control of the community discussions they participate in so having a forum makes sense. I still think a Jellyfin community on Lemmy can thrive with an official forum in place.
forums is all around an infinitely better solution for support and discussions on specific tech and interest. It’s also more searchable and less ephemeral. At least reddit and fediverse is better then ephemeral solutions like discord.
This is probably true. Forum software is a lot more mature then Lemmy etc and probably a better overall option currently for a project like Jellyfin to operate. They just want something that works and provides the least amount of moderation overhead possible.
The moderating tools on MyBB is worlds away and better than Lemmy/Kbin.
True but the downside is exposure and footfall. Subreddits work well as people can dip into them easily from elsewhere in Reddit, both new users and regular contributors can keep an eye from their feeds.
A forum is on it’s own and only people out looking specifically for the forum or who know about Jellyfin will go looking for it, and it won’t pop up in people’s feeds. The Internet used to be littered with forums, but social media is the very reason they fell out of fashion.
But users have also created a Jellyfin community on Lemmy: [email protected]
Jellyfin is all about self hosting. I don’t see why they wouldn’t just create their own Lemmy instance if that was the concern. It wouldn’t need to be big if they limited the userbase
Lemmy is pretty immature, and probably doesn’t suit their needs compared to a forum.
They don’t really need a link aggregator, so using Lemmy there wouldn’t really make much sense.
The only thing that they might use Lemmy for is the community, but otherwise, it’s not a great fit for what they need.
Yup, “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Lemmy and the Fediverse are great, but they aren’t the end all, be all solution to online content.
Lemmy and KBin are cool and all, but VERY rough around the edges so I wouldn’t expect large projects or communities not directly related to then to adopt either. Keep in mind for most of these projects, they picked Reddit because the users were already there and the software was relatively polished. These are both things that many of us users are interested in improving, but that projects with communities aren’t going to want to use until theyre already more advances than they are right now
And they announce it on Twitter? 🙄
They announced it on their website. Why OP chose to link the tweet instead is beyond me.
I thought this was an announcement they were moving to the Fediverse.
Seriously, how about they stand up a lemmy instance? That way peeps could follow their forums without having to travel to a proprietary place.
According to the footer they’re running MyBB so although it is more centralised, I wouldn’t call it proprietary.
What advantages would Lemmy have over the traditional style of forum for their use case?
Yeah it’s not the end of the world. It’s slightly disappointing that you have to create yet another account unnecessarily.
You can log in to their forum with Discord, Github, Google, Reddit, Stack Exchange or Twitter accounts. It would be better for them to support logging in with any OpenID provider using OpenID Connect, but they do support some of the major ones at least (except for Facebook and Apple).
The only real advantage I can see is they would be another mass of users on the fediverse, which is what we want I suppose. I mean I do want it to be populated, and if more people migrate, it ensures survival of their community. I don’t like how we have all scattered to the wind, but it’s their choice where to go
