Well, stop expressing that people shouldn’t have to make choices about what they use, and maybe I’d give a shit what you say or do.

They’re websites. You’re arguing that people shouldn’t use different websites. On the Internet. Which is kind of how the Internet’s been going the last 15 years, and has turned out to be a total disaster.

The idea that the largest game in town should adopt the features of smaller players, rather than users exploring other options because there’s a slight inconvenience to the user just seems, I don’t know, incredibly entitled. It’s also how smaller projects stay invisible and die, leading to a monoculture.

So no, you’re not arguing that “we should have a monoculture!”, you’re just saying “people shouldn’t have to make choices!” which… leads to monoculture. And overwhelmingly supports the status quo.

they would have to do the whole “which instance to join” dance, again.

Oh, this again.

Seriously, you’re now arguing for a monoculture and centralization.

At that point, just go back to Reddit.

We can not just tell someone “what you want is on kbin, use that instead”, because there will be different use-cases that kbin does not fulfill.

So instead, it’s “let’s beg Lemmy to fulfill these use cases that it currently does not”. Got it. Makes total sense, and is not internally incoherent at all.

Definitely not just arguing for a monoculture.

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.

Remember when forums would be super active with, like, 500 users?

“Millions of users” is a vanity stat. The critical mass needed to keep a discussion group alive is actually quite small – assuming you’re interested in, you know, discussing things. So, how active “Lemmy” is is entirely dependent on which topics you’re interested in.

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.

The thing is, mbin is right there if you want that kimd of functionality. There isn’t really a reason why everything needs to evolve into omni-applications. It’s better to have a broad ecosystem that has something for everyone, rather than a monopoly that’s servibg everyone a compromise.

Just look at the Twitter mugrations in 2022, and the clammor for quote posts. Misskey was right there, giving them exactly what they wanted, but you couldn’t speak the name of anything that wasn’t “mastodon” because everyone is brand focused and context blind.

What OP wants exists. It’s right there. It’s just not named Lemmy.

Ni, but the UX is shit, and the value proposution is so poorly thought out that you can’t really sell people on it who aren’t already ready to buy in.

Everyone makes the same mistake: Diminish the home instance, paper over the heterogeneous nature of things, and try to make it look like centeralized social media. It breaks the user experience.

My analigy:

You have a Reddit account. You recently bought a Honda Civic, and know there’s a web forum for civic owners over there, called hondacivicforum. You would like to participate in it.

You can just subscribe to the forum topics you care about from your Reddit account. No need to create a new account.

Also, you have family on Facebook that posts updates and photos and whatnot. You can follow them, too, and reply to their posta without needing a Facebook account.

You use Reddit. You can interact with content outaide of Reddit from Reddit.

Tada.

There’s no reason you couldn’t do this with a network of Lemmy, mbin, NodeBB, or even Friendica wrbsites

Presumably for the same reason you’re on a federated forum-like platform: to have your posts syndicated to other websites for easier discovery, and to comment on posts from other websites without needing abother account?

Lemmy is a failure at being like centralized social media, just like I’m a failure at being an athlete. It’s no more built to do that than I am.

I get that many folks around here don’t care for it, but Beehaw is a better model for this space. If people started treating the fedeverse as a Local+ framework, and treated the websites as the fundamental building blocks af the fediverse, and not just weird dangling tails on the ends of things, the experience would be significantly better. But none y’all want to do that, because that means leaving the mental model of centralization at the door.

Lemmy is not a forum, though, any more than Mastodon is. It’s a totally different, if relates, form factor and provises a radically different user experience.

Why is it a silly thing to do? A non-federating lemmy instance is just another content aggregator site like Reddit.

In many ways, it’s a better experience than federated Lemmy. It’s just harder to recruit members.

Wait, are people unaware that forums, Reddit, and Lemmy are also social media?

Social networking sites are a type of social media. Discussion groups are another.

Is the 4 column layout not standard on Mastodon?

It’s a poor design if what you want to do is emulate a centralized social media service.

But maybe we should stop trying to do that.

ActivityPub works like a magazine subscription. They don’t send you back issues for subscribing.

It’s not a community setting or feature. It’s a fact of the internet.

If you publish something to someone else’s website, you no longer have any control over it. And federation means publishing your content on thousands of websites, many of them not even running the same software. Your comments are out there on mbin sites, Friendica sites, Hubzilla sites, Mastodon sites, Misskey sites, and many others. Someone’s pribably got a custom web server they developed, slapped some ActivityPub inside of it, and didn’t bother to make it even understand delete requests.

This is the internet. It is public, and it is forever. You really need to treat it as such.