this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Technology
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree and it's what I like about forums. to someone like me they're more approachable. discord works best for me with friends, but it's awkward with people I don't know well
Until recently, one of the official ways to get support for the email app I use (FairEmail) was to post in a 1,200-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
I'm a big proponent of people reading the whole thread before making a new post in forums, but in this case. I'm not so sure anymore lol.
hahaha that one thread is larger than some entire forums I've moderated in the past.
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.