Sounds like mastodon and other services ought to really support this extension though.

I actually don’t care to grow my readership, I’ve been blogging for 20 years now but it’s more of a personal space to write some opinions. Nevertheless thanks for the long analysis. I think some things go against the my style, but will seem what I can retain.

OK, so is lemmy out of standard or not? Like I can understand why lemmy doesn’t support apub notes, as it’s out of scope, but why does mastodon support articles badly?

You can actually do that on lemmy already like so. Sorting by new doesn’t use the voting. Hell you can even sort them like a forum by sorting by “new comments”

I am the author. Heard you were talking shit…

I kid, I kid :D

I insist that in their current form, reddit (and lemmy) can serve as both forums and link aggregators with comment sections.

Not gonna lie, I’d love for better integration between services, but I am fairly sure I saw lemmy devs adamantly insisting they’re following apub and mastodon is doing it wrong so 🤷

Benned and Jerrys!

I think Mastodon is very far from standard. Way I hear it from the developers, it’s lemmy that is following the Apub standard. But I will disclaim that I’m not an expert to judge either way.

As for the posts outside communities? That makes sense lemmy-wise I think. Where would those posts be? But it doesn’t make sense for Discourse, since they are indeed separated into topics.

Why doesn’t discourse simply make their different topics into communities is the question

Let’s say you find a year old discussion, you don’t bother to read 120 pages, so you just ask your question at the end. If you’re lucky enough not to be in a forum that won’t flame you for necroing and not searching, you’re given a link to a page. You visit that page but don’t find the answer. Then ask again. Maybe this time you get a correct link, or maybe you get flamed this time.

See how it’s easy to make hypotheticals? Not to disrespect your preferences, but this approach is downright inane. What you’e describing is working despite the software, not because of it. As others mentioned in this thread, you get the exact opposite reactions to another forum about automobiles.

You know what is superior to this? Having a lemmy community about this one motorcycle model, with an FAQ or wiki on the side. People can ask a question as a new thread, and guess what, people can link them to a previously answered thread, just like they would link them to a specific page in your gigathread. Nothing functionally changes here. The lack of threading or sorting by new comments doesn’t change the experience. It’s the willingness to be nice to newbies that matters.

What you’re describing is simply changing a lemmy community into a single thread in a bbforum. It is an objectively worse scenario.

In lemmy you start with a generic topic. Say, automobiles. If it starts getting too busy, you start two new communities, cars and motorcycles, if those get too busy, you expand to brands and models. Each of them nicely organized and easily searchable by titles.

What I see here is a community that coalesced around an old forum software and did the best it could. Unlike most others, it happened to have the right people to make the best of it and find a working system with what they got. But again, it’s not the software, it’s the people, which is proven by so many similar communities in similar software just failing miserable instead.

I would argue that this community would work much better with a software much better suited for it.

I’m not upset, mate. I’m just perplexed why you’re confidently making statements which directly contract the article and appear as if you didn’t read it. But you do you.

Lemmy already has both of those sorting options built in

I’m not a researcher, but I was there from the start and I saw the same process play out multiple times in the old forums I used to be in. Accessibility and convenience won.

…how?

Article claims the forums were expensive and difficult to maintain

Not to mention that the article never even mentions “expensive”. Wait, you fed it to an LLM and asked for a summary, didn’t you?

It had post voting, but no comment voting.

Doesn’t your screenshot show the opposite?

More or less I would argue that the article is missing convenience as a driving factor.

Did you…uh…read the article?

Ask a question and people will tell you what page to look at if you can’t find it, post something that has already been talked about and they’ll refer you to the page where people talked about it.

You are relying on some random people being around to serve as your search engine. Cmon. You can do the same thing here with megathreads and wikis. Hell you can also ask around on megathreads and people will link you. Nothing you describe here is unique to forums.

Necroing in order to continue talking about something and build on the base already established is much better than the constant repost and knowledge reset we see on here where the same questions are asked again and again and again and people need to explain the same things again and again and again.

The same happened in forums. Even in forums with megathreads like these, people asked the same question again and again. This is a matter of culture, not of software. You just happened to find a forum with a good culture and assumed it’s the result of the software.

Just build that community here and you have the same results AND federation with other topics if needed.

Also I lowkey find the expectation that you rely on people with thousands of bookmarks to be around to point you to a page in one gigathread to be quite disturbing.

slashdot (community topics + threads) >

slashdot hads voting though. In fact I wish we had the same sort of votes slashdot had. up/down votes are so limited :(

I can’t disagree enough. There was little knowledge accumulation in oldschool forums either. There were constant arguments about thread necromancy and people not searching before asking. It sounds like you’re describing a parallel idyllic universe.

This kind of knowledge repository is why were have megathreads and/or attached wikis.

Regardless of that, if you really wanted to run a lemmy instance like that, you can do that right now. You can set up a lemmy instance where you default to sorting everything by “New Comments” and discussions as “Chat” and you get an identical model to old school forums. Hell, as long as you find a good amount of like-minded folks and you all agree to sort the same way, you can build up your “knowledge accumulation” inside the existing lemmy instances and communities.

It seems to me the only thing you’re missing from the functionality you want on lemmy is a sorting system which just bumps any threads with new comments to the top. I don’t like that approach myself, but if that’s what you want I don’t see a reason not to have it. Why don’t you suggest it to the lemmy devs? It doesn’t seem like it would be difficult to add it.

EDIT: Actually, nevermind, this already exists with the “New Comments” feature. Why don’t you just use that? https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/?dataType=Post&listingType=Subscribed&sort=NewComments

Yes, but how did they suck? It’s what I go into detail explaining.