Hello, I know that the fediverse contains many challengers to the walled garden approach of the main stream social media options. But, unless I miss comprehend, the fediverse isn’t anything new, more a return to how things were in the the past. Case in point Newsgroups. Why aren’t they mentioned in the same breath as Lemmy, kbin or Mastodon?
That is highly dependent on the newsgroup. Many newsgroups WERE heavily moderated. The ones in the alt branch were not, generally.
But, say, comp.os.linux? It was very moderated.
Additionally, a couple of projects tried to put a really nice, forum-like UI on top of NNTP, and it worked pretty well. The problem was a lack of uptake, really, because “Well, we have facebook and reddit already!”
One of the “bigger” attempts at this was done when forums were basically dying, and everyone was moving to facebook and reddit, away from forums.
I miss forums. I used to host one for a guild on a game I played. We used the forum for quest hints, and long term planning. But then used icq and the like for quick communication.
Forums seem like the most natural use case for ActivityPub. I’m over the Reddit style UX, and absolutely ready to take a step back and try to pick an older jumping off point.
Lemmy/Reddit is basically a forum with the one significant difference being threaded vs linear comments. Would a version of Lemmy slightly modified to have linear comments and only text posts work as a traditional forum?
No, they’re not. Forums and content aggregators are significantly different in terms of user experience and, frankly, project goals.
One of the biggest differences between Reddit and forums is focus. A web forum is focused on a topic, and has sub-topics. Content aggregators are flat, and focused on, well, content aggregation. They’re a mix between link aggregators and blogs. The modern version of them also involves user created and maintained discussion groups, where forums have set sub-topics and generally have site-wide moderation.
And modern forums, FWIW, have threaded comment chains.
Reddit and Reddit-like services are really quite shit at being forums. There’s very little about the user experience that they have in common.
Do you have a few examples of modern, active forums ? Curious to have a see what this looks like
Same here! Which is a huge reason I actually enjoy lemmy, for the time being. It’s a forum, complete with subforums, and decentralized!