• For a second I thought they were launching their federated lemmy/kbin instance. With different communities, like “support”, “bugs”, “news”…

    Would have been freaking awesome and a great use case for Lemmy and federarion.

    Good for them anyway.

    • At the same time, it might not fit them. Lemmy is a link aggregator, which seems like extra functionality that they don’t really need, not when existing forum software will do what they need, while also being more stable/mature.

      • Not good enough of an excuse, IMO. Link aggregation is essentially a normal post with just a link to somewhere else, which you can totally do in any forum… and it is no bloat at all.

        I believe the reasoning was more like “we don’t want to do any federation, because the barrier of having to create a new account will free us from trolls/bots/etc”.

        • They made their announcement on their own site, they are the somewhere else, and the link has found it’s way here so what’s the problem?

          We call websites like this one link aggregators but they are just platforms, it’s the users who are the aggregators collecting the links that we are interested in. We don’t need a system of top down promotion and don’t need to have our platforms serve those who want to promote. Likewise projects like Jellyfin don’t owe us a presence and this post itself proves they don’t need one. The idea that everyone must maintain a brand identity and that our social media should be polluted with advertising is something that the fediverse has and I hope will continue to stand against.

          • Nah, dude, chill, 😅.

            They just built a nice independent forum, but I would have liked to be able to participate in their forum with this account (federation) instead of having to create a new account.

            That’s it, this is not going to keep me awake at night, in fact, I am happy they are finding independence from Reddit. The world keeps turning, have a nice week!

        • I believe the reasoning was more like “we don’t want to do any federation, because the barrier of having to create a new account will free us from trolls/bots/etc”.

          Agreed. And they don’t really benefit from the larger Reddit/fediverse.

          And who knows what sites businesses block (not sure how that works with Lemmy).

      • Add in the fact they’d end up having to defederate a lot of instances due to trolls and whatnot, and it’s much better that they run it on their own site. It’s much better from a moderation viewpoint for them. I know people will be all upset here, but it’s honestly for the best.

      • AskHistorians, AkScience, AMA, AskReddit, Ask*, and the myriad of semi-official support subreddits for services, games, eyc. all would like to disagree that Reddit/Lemmy is a link aggregator exclusively.

        • The tree-like comment structure is just overall better for large-crowd engagement. Phpbb forum type is just going to get flooded with many posts and hard to follow when thousands answer

          • I’m not sure that the Jellyfin community is that big or active enough that that will be much of an issue at all. Looking at their sub, the highest rated posts are under 1k, so number of people active on the sub is probably somewhere between 100k - 1M.

            Your average post maybe has about 10 - 20 people interacting with it at most. Expecting thousands seems… optimistic, especially when the forum numbers puts them at under 300 people.

  • This is great, I’m honestly glad they have their own forum on their own page as opposed to something like Discord.

    I know people will be disappointed it’s not on lemmy or similar, but it’s for the best to be honest. Since it’s a product, it’s much easier to have something they fully control and can have ownership over (including who and what can be posted there). It’s a great decision by them.

    • I don’t-

      I don’t miss having to register accounts on each one, answer a bunch of questions, give a birthday, give an email, do a capta… etc…

      Just for that forum to popup on haveibeenpwned.com a few months later.

      Knock on wood, password managers are a thing now, and its easy to give each forum a very unique password. But- still. Don’t really miss those.

      • Thank you! I feel like I’m the only person who lived through that time. Having everything on one site is way simpler, reddit sucks but that doesn’t mean the concept does.

        I do not miss having to sign up for a specific forum, wait for the email, no email, check spam folder, no email, 15 mins later email shows up in spam, go to post, “sorry you can’t make a post without interacting with at least 5 other posts”, post random shit on 5 other posts, finally get to post, "this question has been answered. Post archived "

        • Another factor, is…

          Well, Especially for users in large communities, or those with lots of interests, they will end up on LOTS of forums.

          And, that turns into either, a lot of notifications, or a lot of ignored interactions due to the number of notifications.

          The last thing people don’t seem to remember, half of the damn forums wanting to put damn ads everywhere.

        • I guess I did forums a little differently. I had 2 main forums where I posted a lot and then a handful I would peruse occasionally. If you had a good forum, there would be a very ‘reddit-like’ feel because they’d have general discussion, fitness, gaming, etc.

          One of the things I liked about forums back in the day is that, while they didn’t have the scale of Reddit, the engagement and interactions seemed better. You got to know posters.

          I couldn’t tell you another redditor’s username.

        • And services like firefox relay so yo don’t have to give up your own email addres and can easily turn it off if it ends up on a spam list. For a service like Jellyfin a forum is the best way to go.

        • Not quite- I’d say they really became popular / usable around 10-15 years ago. In the early 2000s, people either used internet explorer, or opera.

          Opera /chrome didn’t support extensions until 2009.

          NOT- saying they didn’t exist, but, the idea of a browser-integrated password manager wasn’t a huge thing back then, I don’t believe.

          •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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            Roboform was originally released in 2000. It’s the oldest password manager I can think of.

            Internet Explorer supported extensions for a long time (at least since IE5, maybe even IE3 or 4), and Firefox did too.

          • I don’t remember the year but I was using roboform quite some time ago, and keepass existed and I actually used something for years before that. Easily in like 2004. It doesn’t have to (and I think better if it doesn’t) plug into the browser. They used keyboards and tabs to input the info.

      • Not only do we have password managers now, we also have OIDC. I can see a situation where a service pops up with no offering other than identity management/verification, and forum-like software can accept log-ins from that service.

    • Not in this day and age where me and my grandma have our own.

      There are so many, you can’t keep up to date with your hobbies unless you are willing to follow 50 platforms with 60 different UIs and community rules.

      I prefer the aggregation of data like fediverse where we can follow topics and not platforms.

  • I’m sure Jellyfin considered the Fediverse but some projects like the idea of having more control of the community discussions they participate in so having a forum makes sense. I still think a Jellyfin community on Lemmy can thrive with an official forum in place.

      • Lemmy is pretty immature, and probably doesn’t suit their needs compared to a forum.

        They don’t really need a link aggregator, so using Lemmy there wouldn’t really make much sense.

        The only thing that they might use Lemmy for is the community, but otherwise, it’s not a great fit for what they need.

          • Lemmy and KBin are cool and all, but VERY rough around the edges so I wouldn’t expect large projects or communities not directly related to then to adopt either. Keep in mind for most of these projects, they picked Reddit because the users were already there and the software was relatively polished. These are both things that many of us users are interested in improving, but that projects with communities aren’t going to want to use until theyre already more advances than they are right now

    • I find the biggest problem with Lemmy and these federated apps is that search engine indexing kinda sucks right now. They get pushed so far down the bottom of the results, you only really see them when you search site:lemmy.ml or whatever.

      I believe this was a good decision. Hopefully in the future search engine indexing will improve. Otherwise I can’t see Lemmy being as useful as Reddit.

        • It’s also very annoying to crosslink content on the fediverse. So there is far fewer links between discussions. The network graph is way less interconnected, and that hurts search indexing.

    • forums is all around an infinitely better solution for support and discussions on specific tech and interest. It’s also more searchable and less ephemeral. At least reddit and fediverse is better then ephemeral solutions like discord.

      • According to the footer they’re running MyBB so although it is more centralised, I wouldn’t call it proprietary.

        What advantages would Lemmy have over the traditional style of forum for their use case?

          • You can log in to their forum with Discord, Github, Google, Reddit, Stack Exchange or Twitter accounts. It would be better for them to support logging in with any OpenID provider using OpenID Connect, but they do support some of the major ones at least (except for Facebook and Apple).

        • The only real advantage I can see is they would be another mass of users on the fediverse, which is what we want I suppose. I mean I do want it to be populated, and if more people migrate, it ensures survival of their community. I don’t like how we have all scattered to the wind, but it’s their choice where to go

    • I can understand wanting to bring your discussion hub in house to avoid something like what’s happened. But bringing it into essentially an old school phpBB forum is certainly, ah, a choice.

      • There is nothing wrong with forums, they’ve existed (and continue to exist) for decades. They are a great way to have information easily searchable, as well as easily post and contribute.

        Just because they aren’t carded like twitter or lemmy doesn’t mean they are dated. Everything has it’s place and every tool has a job. In this case, that place is a forum and the tool is phBB. Also, I wouldn’t call it “old school” as the most recent update is from May 21, 2023.

        Not everything has to be federated, and nothing is stopping anyone from creating an instance for Jellyfin ( !jellyfin@lemmy.ml ) . But for the official instance, having it hosted by them, on their hardware, that they control, it’s a great choice to use a forum.

      • It could be argued that web forums were an answer to older system that came before it and the problems with them. Systems like Usenet and Fidonet BBS’s were federated system, and web forums are actually newer than that.

    • I can see the argument in favour of classic forums. Keeping everything chronological can help for certain kinds of discussion, and it’s easier to sort content by subforums in a way that doesn’t scale well with Lemmy. You’d need to create a lot of different communities to keep it all separated, which is messy.

      The biggest thing forums lack is multi-threaded discussions. That said, simple chronological helps people at the bottom of the thread get assistance since it doesn’t disappear into the web of conversation, so this might also be an advantage of single-threaded forums.

      Also, voting gamifies the whole experience, so people are reluctant to post in older threads since they won’t get “points”.

      Finally, threads on Lemmy also don’t get bumped, so old content effectively dies. This sucks for troubleshooting since people very frequently have the exact same problem many years apart.

      I feel like “release” and “discussion” threads would probably benefit from Lemmy’s structure to allow for deeper engagement in sub-conversations, but the core of their use is single-topic requests and, frankly, forums are better at that.

    • The advantage I see with the Lemmy approach over Discord is comment longevity. At Discord your comment has little time before it falls off the radar. It’s longer with Twitter, but still short. At Lemmy you get a reasonable trade-off for comment longevity and convenience. On a phpBB style forum comment longevity can be quite long, but you have to go to a dedicated site with it’s own address which lacks convenience.

      • Yeah but really it makes more sense for an official forum. I kind of miss the days before reddit, when everything had their own private forum. The good ones were great.

        • For sure, before these modern forums took over the scene, dedicated forums like phpBB were all I used. Though there is definitely something to like about Lemmy and the fediverse. Just super convenient. You can talk about everything in one place. The longer exposure of comments with the old style was nice, but I can trade that off willingly enough.

          As far as dedicated official forums, I don’t know. Think I’d still rather have access to them here. The Fediverse just makes a lot of sense serving as a centralized communications hub. Kind of reminds me of Usenet back in the early internet days, but a lot better. Usenet could be pretty kludgey.

          • I dunno, whynotboth.jpg is kind of my catchphrase. I think we could have high quality niche forums, but also link aggregation sites with meta commentary.

  • As long as the forums are easily searchable then this is a good move. It looks like the subreddit is in read-only mode so we haven’t lost any knowledge yet. That data should be preserved elsewhere, just in case the subreddit becomes unviewable.

  • It’s great that they’re going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don’t miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse’s “anyone can post there” system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, “one login to access everything” systems.

      • If you are looking for a little bit of “extra” to go with your password manager, check out firefox relay. You can create emails that forward to your real email without exposing it. They allow you to block emails entirely, or just promotions. Their paid option is like $12/year (USD) and allows unlimited masks, and allowing you to create your own relay subdomain (like (whatever I decide)@dusty.mozmail.com). It’s definitely worth the relatively tiny charge for the paid version.

        There is also a relay service with Cloudflare but I’ve not tried it out yet. But having an email like 0tK8h384jkcxas@mozmail.com saved to my password manager is no big deal.

      • But then you have the same centralization issue - and it’s even worse, if the central authority has a fit for some reason about you, now you’re locked out of many completely unrelated sites.

        • You mean the password manager as the central authority? You can self host a password manager using, eg, Vaultwarden.

          Even if you use a trusted, paid commercial service, I think the risk of that happening is lower than on Reddit. Their business model is simpler and more transparent. They want to keep you as a customer so you will keep paying them. And there is less opportunity for them to ban you for political reasons when you’re not expressing yourself on their platform.

    •  lemmyvore   ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) 
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      Federated logins are a thing! The challenge is finding one that’s open and privacy-friendly. Unfortunately the widest-used ones come from entities like Google or Facebook with a marked interest in preying on user data. Mozilla used to maintain a federated system (Persona) but they discontinued it. I know Ubuntu offers one for all their services (bug trackers, forums etc.) but not sure if it’s open to third party systems. Perhaps there are others worth using.

      Alternatively, you can aggregate all your logins in one place across devices and browsers. Firefox Accounts are a very simple method of doing this (presuming you use Firefox everywhere), and you can choose to only sync logins rather than bookmarks, plugins etc. And of course there are other dedicated password managers, with or without online sync, open or closed source, self-hosted or private hosted etc.