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Rediscovery of the bygone days of the forums- observation from an ex redditor and my journey to discovering lemmy.world (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by Frostwolf@lemmy.world to c/casualconversation@lemmy.world

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This morning, I had free time. As usual, opened my Apollo app, only to be greeted by the loud reminder that I am cut off from the community I have lurked, posted and lurked in almost a decade.

Days, even weeks before Apollo closed, KBin, Tildes, Mastodon and lemmy have been the talk of reddit. The fediverse is trending and just for the heck of it, I applied to lemmy.ml and vlemmy.net. My account wasn’t approved on vlemmy.net for days and only recently did my lemmy.ml account was approved, only to discover they don’t allow the creation of new communities.

I searched around and discovered lemmy.world. The sign up was painless, just like in reddit. As soon as I signed in I was able to create a community and started browsing right away.

As this day came to a close few more things jumped at me.

The posts may be fewer but the quality and length is higher.
The people I interacted with are more than helpful, positive and kind.
No karma points
The collective unity behind scorning the corporatization of the greater net.

As I browsed and scrolled, and discovered communities, I am reminded yet again of the bygone days of old, when the internet was young. When everyone had geocities website and phpbb forums.

Here, everyone is making the community into a digital home, built on ideals of a freer more independent internet. Here I felt something that I haven’t felt in a long time. And maybe it is nostalgia or maybe just a post trauma from the drama that is reddit.

But as I mindlessly scroll through the post here, I say to myself, this could be a good home. And truly, I am home.

Good day fellow lemmies. And thank you for reading through my long winded rant. I just want to express how happy I am to have discovered this place.

In time, may this grow into a friendlier, kinder reddit. And in time, may it surpass what it wasn’t intended to replace but took on the responsibility anyway; a testament to the enduring resilience of our love for all things free- an internet of the people, for the people and by the people.

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[-] uhauljoe@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

You're spot on!

That's the perfect way to put it, Lemmy feels like the forums back in the earlier days of the internet, before social media took over everything and the internet was a bunch of little small niche communities, but each one was tight knit.

[-] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Not only that but the idea of the fediverse reminds me a lot of the internet of old where multiple blogs and geocities pages would be linked by blog rolls. Now that that I think about it, maybe federation is really just the modern blog roll. 😅

[-] baccano@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Goodness, I just had a memory of web rings in the 90s on tripod, anglefire, and geocities, lol.

If I set up a Lemmy instance it'll have to be named lemmycities.

[-] baccano@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Goodness, I just had a memory of web rings in the 90s on tripod, anglefire, and geocities, lol.

If I set up a Lemmy instance it'll have to be named lemmycities.

[-] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Omg! The web ring!! The link swaps and the directories. I feel so old… lemmycities. What a perfect idea. If only lemmy is as simple as clicking install on softaculous, I would have installed an instance ASAP. Build it on an offshore/privacy respecting VPS and build as many communities as I want without limits.

[-] nihilist_hippie@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 year ago

I'm really liking Lemmy so far. I've been able to scroll Lemmy like I did on Reddit, basically 1:1. There aren't a high volume of posts coming in yet but hopefully we'll get there soon.

[-] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

True. And in busier communities, you wouldn’t really know that it’s not reddit. With the dark theme, I feel like I’m back to using Apollo. Whether the UI is intentional or both lemmy and Apollo took inspiration with each other really helps the feeling of familiarity, like riding a new bike after the old one was broken.

[-] uhauljoe@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

You're spot on!

[-] RatzChatsubo@vlemmy.net 9 points 1 year ago

Welcome!

Which communities are you active on?

[-] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you ☺️ mostly the anime community and the bye reddit community I started. But will check out tech and gaming-related communities soon. I feel so giddy at the thought of discovering new communities that I feel like I’m a child again, first learning about the internet at the beginning of the dial up days. 😁

[-] thrownawayash@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Can you tell me how to create a community on Memmy? It isn’t obvious to me.

[-] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Sorry. I haven’t actually used Memmy yet. I’m on wefwef and on safari most of the time.

[-] thrownawayash@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Can you tell me how to create a community on Memmy? It isn’t obvious to me.

[-] Tygr@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Try WefWef on lemmy world. It’s a game changer. Just like Apollo in a web app. Ever since I found it, I don’t even visit Reddit logged out anymore.

[-] hossboss@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

give award / take my energy / show username / no message

Sorry, old habits die hard

But I totally agree, and same. There are some communities that I will sorely miss and for which I have little hope of a Lemmy migration...but other than that, the lemmy.world on WefWef experience has been nearly a drop-in replacement for Reddit on Apollo. 😅

[-] FatherOgre@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I was a Redditor for 12 years. I agree with everything Frost Wolf said. For me, not to heap on more, Reddit was steadily dying. I didn't have another place to go, but already since Friday I feel more engaged than I have in years at Reddit. Thanks for being welcoming, thanks for all the how to lemmy posts and infographics. You all seem like a pretty cool bunch.

[-] OtakuAltair@vlemmy.net 5 points 1 year ago

wefwef even lets you transfer subreddit subscriptions to Lemmy communities with Apollo!

[-] CashmereWitch@vlemmy.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I didn’t get to export my data from Apollo before Reddit shut down the API. Is it too late for me to transfer my subreddits to Lemmy? Is there any good way to do that now?

[-] OtakuAltair@vlemmy.net 1 points 1 year ago

Try the export option in wefwef and if it didn't work make a post in !wefwef@lemmy.world

Afaik wefwef is the only way to do this rn

[-] SocialMediyas@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I remember the countless days I've spent on traditional forums back then (particularly Gamespot and niche forums like Dissidia-Forums).

The internet did feel freer back then. And it's a little sad that I haven't felt that same sense of freedom for so long. For the past decade, the corpo-fication of every major social media just highlighted how much we needed platforms built for and by the users; platforms built for discussions and not merely for content consumption and advertiser-friendliness.

I'm glad I made the move, and I hope the fediverse continues to grow in the right direction.

[-] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Freer true. But isolated and less archival. Some forums tend to just disappear without a trace and some are hard to find (though I guess the directories and web rings back then have this mitigated.)

Still with the fediverse, I am hopeful that much of these concerns would be slowly addressed. And with the influx of users catapulting the platform to a more mainstream one, more and more issues would come to light and be easily stomped out.

As is frequently said, we’re just in the “growing pains” phase after all. :)

[-] PillowTalk420@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not the first I've seen make this comparison, but I do feel that the conclusion of it being because of the lack of corporate bullshit is false. It feels like the old internet because much like the older internet, it's smaller.

I just know that if Lemmy reaches the same level of users as Reddit has/had just a month ago, it will more than likely have a lot of the same problems in terms of quality. Eternal September comes to everything, eventually. But that probably won't be for a while, so I'm just going to enjoy this until we get there.

[-] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

There may be some truth to that as all things eventually evolve whether for the better or worse. That said, I have high hopes that the federated nature will curb the oversaturation. If one instance do become corporatized, community instances can take over and quickly abandon the erring instance. This is what I think is lacking with reddit and twitter. People can’t just leave because there’s no alternatives. But with the fediverse, the sky’s the limit.

[-] Hyperreality@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The thing you will need to get your head around, is that you've not just joined lemmy.world. You've just joined the fediverse. I'm currently commenting on your post from kbin. I don't even have a lemmy account. I am not on lemmy while I type this.

Want to 'boost' a 'toot' on mastodon, the fediverse equivalent of twitter? No problem. I'm almost certain you can do that from lemmy too, like I can from kbin. Hell, there are people working on allowing people on lemmy, mastodon, etc. to read and comment on wordpress posts:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

There are still bugs to be ironed out, but imagine being able to retweet a youtube comment from facebook messenger with a reaction gif off instagram. Impossible, right? Not in the fediverse.

And I for one think that's really really cool.

Caveat: you're an early adopter. There are going to be bugs. On the other hand, unlike reddit which made millions in advertising revenue, IME the people running networks in the fediverse don't wait ten years to half fix issues.

[-] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I noticed the mastodon instances, too when I was looking around which lemmy instance to join. The way I see it, lemmy can act as a more structured representation of the fediverse while mastodon the less archival version of it. It’s actually quite exciting to think about the interoperability and the possibilities it bring.

[-] norbert@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

That was what immediately struck me as so cool once the concept clicked. It's not platform, it's a protocol. We can all interact and share content but the UI/UX is different depending on what platform you're using. If you don't like how others are doing it you can spin up your own instance and build the front end you want.

The Fediverse is an incredible idea and is probably the way forward for peer-to-peer communication. It feels a lot like old-school Usenet with different servers having different groups and I'm into it.

[-] javelinexaminer@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Great write-up.

Forums definitely had, on the whole, a better quality discussion, friendlier discourse (but not always), and less spam. That said, I feel as though we are romanticizing them a bit as a knee jerk to the cess pool that reddit became.

The Achilles heel of forums, in my opinion, always was how disparate they were. Each one with different sign up rules and clunky interfaces. And you sometimes really had to go searching to find one that was appropriate for your needs!

Also, forum owners would shill out to vendors, and some members weren't always welcoming to newcomers. "We answered this four years ago so go rtfm" is not good for conversation and discussion, no matter how true it may be.

I'm not saying all this to be negative, but rather to say that the fediverse improves on all of these negatives. It can being everything to one place, apps are coming that will further improve the user experience.

And hopefully those managing the code behind the scenes tweak it along the way to minimize karma whoring and spamming (not sure what can really be done about AI).

In short, I too am really happy to be here and am thankful for the (probably inevitable) fall of reddit for making me realize how wonderful this is.

[-] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Well said. Aside from the obvious isolation the forums of old suffered the same weakness of reddit- power lies at the hand of the chosen few. And it rise and fall based on the action of its mods or admin. This weakness is, I believe, alleviated with federation.

some members weren’t always welcoming to newcomers. “We answered this four years ago so go rtfm” is not good for conversation and discussion, no matter how true it may be.

Ugh so true. With federation, this too will slowly fade to obscurity. If one instance becomes too toxic, there’s always the option that a more welcoming instance or community exist in the fediverse.

[-] Calcharger@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Welcome home, buddy

[-] artillect@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

I'm really happy to see what it's growing into! When I joined, there were only a few thousand users across Lemmy and kbin, and it was pretty quiet. But the quality was definitely there, which is what convinced me to stay. I'm also really happy that casualconversation is over here, I used to be pretty active on the subreddit but stopped using it a while ago, definitely gonna be more active here again :)

[-] Frostwolf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

True. This is just my first week on lemmy and I am enjoying the quality of discussions, as well as the responses. Unlike in some subreddits and forums where any question can be dismissed, at least in lemmy as I experienced it, there seems to be more willingness to engage and inform. All in all a very non toxic experience. And all the more made me more hopeful for what it could become in the future.