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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
I too remember those bygone days of the modem handshake sound. I wish all these kids would get off my lawn.
In all fairness, it probably did take less time to load messages on BBSs than it takes to update Fortnite :)
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.
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.
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.
So glad to see Jellyfin on here! I love hosting my server, it’s so nice to have
Strange they don’t even mention Fediverse. It just felt too dated.
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
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.
I welcome the return of forums. What a simpler time.
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.
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).
