It is, I miss forums. Honestly I don’t know where to even go in this day and age if I have a tech problem. Tom’s Hardware is a shell of its former self, New Egg is a joke now. Quakenet is a ghost town, I feel like covid wiped out the last of the grey beards and now we live in a barren hellscape populated by tech bros, vibe coders and discord kittens.
Forum moderation is a thankless job unfortunately and you get ever fewer people these days because they already have an app for whatever so they go on whatever instead.
Fediverse has an advantage in that you get to use just the one app on your phone or website on your computer and see many different communities. Unfortunately, outside of shitposting, politics and tech, communities tend to be somewhat inactive. There’s an active enough Apple community and of course Linux is well represented, but where things get real bad is the more niche forums that used to exist. For cars for example, it’s now Facebook groups only for all but the biggest communities which might also have a reddit following. Used to be you’d get dedicated per-model forums for cars that weren’t even super common. Best places in the world to get help.
The Internet was supposed to democratise information, and back in the days of open forums it actually did - when search engines actually found relevant content instead of paid slop.
Then all the Internet’s niche communities moved into Discord and that content disappeared, locked away behind account walls, unsearchable and unfindable. Now Discord own that data and can use it, sell it or restrict it as they please.
Just like with google maps, millions of people have spent countless unpaid hours building an absolute treasure trove of data not owned by the public, but owned by a megacorp.
On the angle of being maybe able to find some useful info that forums used to provide… nice. On every single other angle, gross.
Plus the big search engines are garbage these days anyway due to all the LLM slop and I highly, HIGHLY, doubt you’ll actually be able to find anything useful from a search that includes this index.
The Apple Reddit community moved to discord quite some time ago. https://www.discord.gg/apple
Discord is hot garbage for use cases like this, and I don’t understand how someone asking a question would actually get a useful answer there.
It is, I miss forums. Honestly I don’t know where to even go in this day and age if I have a tech problem. Tom’s Hardware is a shell of its former self, New Egg is a joke now. Quakenet is a ghost town, I feel like covid wiped out the last of the grey beards and now we live in a barren hellscape populated by tech bros, vibe coders and discord kittens.
Forum moderation is a thankless job unfortunately and you get ever fewer people these days because they already have an app for whatever so they go on whatever instead.
Fediverse has an advantage in that you get to use just the one app on your phone or website on your computer and see many different communities. Unfortunately, outside of shitposting, politics and tech, communities tend to be somewhat inactive. There’s an active enough Apple community and of course Linux is well represented, but where things get real bad is the more niche forums that used to exist. For cars for example, it’s now Facebook groups only for all but the biggest communities which might also have a reddit following. Used to be you’d get dedicated per-model forums for cars that weren’t even super common. Best places in the world to get help.
oh wow somehow that’s worse
It is.
The Internet was supposed to democratise information, and back in the days of open forums it actually did - when search engines actually found relevant content instead of paid slop.
Then all the Internet’s niche communities moved into Discord and that content disappeared, locked away behind account walls, unsearchable and unfindable. Now Discord own that data and can use it, sell it or restrict it as they please.
Just like with google maps, millions of people have spent countless unpaid hours building an absolute treasure trove of data not owned by the public, but owned by a megacorp.
I hate that we have done this to ourselves.
Interestingly, they announced awhile back that they’re going to expose it to search engine indexing : https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/discord-to-let-search-engines-index-public-server-messages/
On the angle of being maybe able to find some useful info that forums used to provide… nice. On every single other angle, gross.
Plus the big search engines are garbage these days anyway due to all the LLM slop and I highly, HIGHLY, doubt you’ll actually be able to find anything useful from a search that includes this index.