Hello, I know that the fediverse contains many challengers to the walled garden approach of the main stream social media options. But, unless I miss comprehend, the fediverse isn’t anything new, more a return to how things were in the the past. Case in point Newsgroups. Why aren’t they mentioned in the same breath as Lemmy, kbin or Mastodon?
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.
Lemmy/Reddit is basically a forum with the one significant difference being threaded vs linear comments. Would a version of Lemmy slightly modified to have linear comments and only text posts work as a traditional forum?
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.
Do you have a few examples of modern, active forums ? Curious to have a see what this looks like