Why decentralization doesn't work for forums

[scytale@piefed.zip]

People who join the forum threadiverse and actually stay are likely ok with how federation affects the experience. The ones who don’t like it eventually leave and go back to centralized ones. Pushing to centralize something that has decentralization as its primary purpose is pointless. “The rest of us” isn’t accurate based on the interactions you’re getting in this post. It’s you who is the outlier.

[scytale@piefed.zip]

I think you’re misunderstanding how .world works. Lemmy.world doesn’t mean it’s open to everything, that’s just the instance name. They actually block and defederate from a lot of communities and instances.

If you want to see everything and judge for yourself, just pick an instance with a minimal defederation policy. That’s why I picked .zip so I can curate my feed the way I want it.

Before signing up for an instance, scroll down and read their instance policies so you understand what you’re signing up for.

[auster@thebrainbin.org]

Questo post è eliminato!

[rod_orm@piefed.world]

topicle.com

[auster@thebrainbin.org]

Questo post è eliminato!

[rod_orm@piefed.world]

topicle.com also active

[die4ever@retrolemmy.com]

You realize Reddit bans people too, right? The only difference between Reddit banning people and Lemmy.world banning people, is that Lemmy is transparent about it and gives you choices about it. On Reddit when someone gets banned they're gone, there is no more so-called "completeness", it's just an illusion. But Lemmy has no such issue because you can choose who your admins are, you can join an instance that didn't ban them.

Imagine if Reddit bans your friend, not as easy to ignore as Reddit banning a stranger, they're gone and you have to leave Reddit entirely. On Lemmy if lemmy.world bans your friend, you can both just change which Lemmy instance you use to something more agreeable like https://lemmy.zip/

But I realize you're probably only here to advertise your own forum. You've had 7 posts in the past month? And only 3 comments total? Just join the Fediverse! Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin are open source, use one of them for your server and you'll instantly have an active userbase of over 40k. If you use Mbin (or PieFed to a lesser extent) then it also brings access to microblog posts which means many more users linked in. And then you can allow everyone and not ban anyone.

I see a few "deleted" badges on your forums, I'm now upset that I can't access ALL of the content!

[lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org]

Decentralization works perfectly for forums. That's literally how the forums of the '90s worked: "Tom's Hardware" was never the only forum for Windows issues, "Codeguru" was never the only stop fo weird Visual Basic 5 error messages, etc.

Federation is orthogonal, and can cover a number of subjects - it's less about "what's out there" and more about "how do we get in touch". We have for example a sorta federated sign-in with things like OpenID. Lemmy, Mbin etc..., are built on the idea of federating the content. CDNs are literally federated caches.

[soratoyuki@piefed.zip]

The main reason I picked .zip was the lack of defederation. There's definitely content here I don't want to see and do hide, but I'm suprised how many people here (Lemmings? Piefeddies?) are happy to delegate that task to an instance admin.

It's my role to determine what content I see, no one else's.

[darthsundhaft@piefed.social]

By human nature, any kind of mod system lacks the quality people dream of but it will never happen. Nobody can be truly objective or unbiased, so we wind up with the same thing whether it's Lemmy or Reddit or any other platform. It's the same problem no matter what.

Also, what does good or useful speech count as? Like what are we even trying to defend with that?

I will argue that the whole centralized aspect is what actually made Reddit so mainstream. Everybody has probably used it at some point by now. It just had whatever you could think of and while that seems alright, the problem with Reddit is still the corporate and tech bros controlling what gets to run on the platform. Doesn't mean instances or comms won't also get fed similar or their own propaganda but go figure.

[tootguitar@sh.itjust.works]

The decentralized approach has at least the pro to offer something different (you can leave for another instance instead of depending on a single corporation for access).

There are lots of ways to offer something different, and new upstarts have been able to gain traction by offering something different countless times in the past.

Especially if we’re talking about a forum for the masses with a high number of users, the vast majority of those users simply don’t care about centralization vs federation.

[tootguitar@sh.itjust.works]

Hacker news, something awful, tons of special interest forums for things like cooking, cars, travel, etc. I’m sure there are many more that I’m not aware of.

[hubertmanne@piefed.social]

you think thats bad. did you non federated forums don't share or pick up content from other forums at all!!! Its like they are all super defederated!!!!

[blaze@piefed.zip]

I was talking mostly about generalist forums. Indeed topic-specific forums are still active, but that's not something OP's forum, Reddit or the Threadiverse tries to do.

[blaze@piefed.zip]

It seems to have 1k subs on https://topicle.com/t/topicle/

Is there any benefit compared to something like https://discuit.org/ ?

[blaze@piefed.zip]

I wouldn't worry too much about OP. They've also been banned in the meantime.

[neatchee@piefed.social]

It's important you also understand this: You will never, ever see all the content. What you are deciding is who and what determines which content you see.

Do you want Reddit deciding that for you based on their algorithm, moderation, and other policies like API access?

Or do you want to choose based on which threadiverse community aligns with your ideals (including the option to setup your own with full federation to everyone)?

[tootguitar@sh.itjust.works]

Yep, they’re likely about the same size, when comparing apples to apples (DAU ≠ current users logged in).

[sinza@piefed.social]

I personally use Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin/etc. for social news rather than bolted on forum-like features. That's where I think this software shines.

If you want a decentralized forum, I'd seriously recommend you look at Usenet and NNTP. Then again, I promote the usage of network protocols for what they are good at over forcing everything through the web.

[rod_orm@piefed.world]

Have (really) good app, have intuitive features, and everything is so polished as though it's been operating for years and founder still really active to develop compared to discuit