I read an interesting point which I hadn’t realized before. Discussions on current social media are always current, not long term. You open the app or website to see what’s going on now. When you comment, it’s soon lost to history, buried by newer stuff. If you happen on a post more than a day or two old, it doesn’t make sense to comment as it’s already passed and nobody will read your reply. You’re not building anything of long term value. It was not like this in forums that predated social media. You could reply to a years old thread, and it would be bumped to the head of the queue. I suppose both the form of social media with its feeds and the algorithms designed to hook you and make you come for more are to blame.
How could we make kbin or fediverse in general more purposeful long term and less for instant gratification? Going back to old forum form is probably not the answer, but maybe something between feeds and forums or even something entirely new? With fediverse we have the opportunity to build something better and more useful than what we have now, as we are not bound by the economic imperative to make the users hooked.
I would argue that the current form of Lemmy (and kbin, and lotide) is a lot like a forum, to the point that there’s a phpbb front-end.
I think the key to long-term discussions is going to be having small enough communities that you can recognize the other people you’re talking with.
Once you recognize the person you’re talking with, then the conversation naturally becomes a continuation of the last one.
My soapbox instance is a good example. There’s a number of people that I routinely have discussions with, and because I recognize those people and I know who they are, and I know where they’re coming from, we don’t need to rehash earlier forms of the discussion. Instead, we can keep the conversation going even though the Twitter style conversation thread would suggest that you can’t do that.
One of the things that I think will help in the long term is having profile pictures. Somebody who’s having a conversation with me may not remember my specific name, but the icon next to my message is going to be the same and so they will remember the last time that they had a conversation with me.
I think that that sort of long-term conversation also might help with some mutual tolerance. You see someone, and you know their views and so you end up having a conversation with the person rather than with the class of people that they represent.
I think that’s one of the biggest problems in political discourse online today, is that instead of people having conversations, people have conversations with classes of people as represented by one other person. In that way, there can’t be any nuance because not agreeing with the class that you represent is itself a sort of own, instead of common ground two individuals can agree with.
That’s just not feasible once the fediverse grows more. You’re expecting people to memorize hundreds of names/avatar images or else stay in a tiny echochamber in order to know the people. And doesn’t address the issue of other people coming in and having to scour numerous threads and comments to follow your “conversation”.
Unfortunately, the problem is that it’s big, and as reddit shows us, threading won’t fix anything.
The fediverse however can grow in decentralized ways so there’s smaller more tight-knit communities that know each other instead of megacommunities where everyone is just a molecule of water in the stream
threading won’t fix anything
Tell me you didn’t grow up using forums without telling me you didn’t use forums. There’s a reason even discord has added forums back. They work.
🤦
I did grow up with forums. They key though is that communities are much weaker today despite many still having threaded conversations. Back then you’d get to know people because there were few enough people to know. Today when you have a subreddit with millions of users it doesn’t matter that there’s threads or not because due to sheer volume it’s all ephemeral.
Again, tell me you’ve never been on a large forum without telling me.
I don’t think my personal motivation is the same as what you describe, but there is a functionality in kbin that may somewhat get at what you’d like in your experience.
Instead of sorting by hot, top, or new, you can sort by active and see the most recent thread that had a comment added.
Now, admittedly, it’s not fun if you alone are the only person contributing to older threads, but perhaps you can promote awareness of this feature and start building a community that uses the feature.
Good advice to sort by Active, I will start using that approach.
I honestly think it needs a collective cultural shift by the users to not get so clickbait-y. I think one of the issues in social media is the constant pressure to stay updated, not just to post but also react. Interactions have a deadline and if you don’t meet it, too bad, so sad–which, to a degree makes sense for its usage. If I just want to keep people updated on the goings-on in my life, quick reactions are more than enough.
But if I want more meaningful discussions (which is what I hope for in the fediverse and what I tried to get from reddit), interactions should be normalized or even encouraged to have longer lifespans and users would ideally contribute more thoughtfully. This comes with the consequence of not having as much content, or having to be one of the few people constantly commenting and posting to keep a magazine or community active.
This is why I’m on the fence about “rule” posts. On one hand, it’s one way to populate the fediverse and I do like variety in my scrolling, but on the other, it detracts from being able to see discussions, and it can get tiresome to see meme after meme; because honestly, if I wanted a barrage of shit posts I would’ve stayed on reddit.
facebook groups really killed off long term availability of information. If you want true niche communities, and easy to find information, you have to go looking for true old school forums (xenforo, phpbb, vbulletin etc). so many forums I used to use had a mass exodus to facebook.
Reddit doesn’t really help either, it’s still centred around instant gratification and doomscrolling.
Just look at say one of the largest woodworking forums (www.woodworkforums.com), vs /r/woodworking. The forums are full of subforums so filtering information is easy. Default sort is by newest response, so if you bump a week/month/year old post, it will get noticed. The combination of easy to find information, and the display mode reduces duplication of information.
Whereas /r/woodworking is mostly just a showcase of work, minimal conversation, and minimal advice. It might as well be instagram. If you respond to a 2 day old post with a question, good luck having anyone even read it, let alone respond.
A lot of forms ceased to exist after facebook came along, or at least exist to the same extent. Facebook groups are horrible. Searching for information/help is so hard, no one does it, so you get the same questions over and over. it’s easier to post your question, wait for a response, than it is to actually search for the same question that was asked just the other day! My other issue with facebook groups is there are so many of them (I am in three or four for once hobby). You see a post in your feed, accidentally cause a feed refresh, and do you think you can find that post again? nigh on impossible.
I’d love to see kbin/lemmy introduce a solid tagging system, or sub communities somehow so information can be stored and accessed in a meaningul way.
eg
/m/woodworking/furniture
/m/woodworking/toolsetc etc.
This is what sorting by active fixes.
It’s like the old “sort by recent replies” on forums.
I realized this at some point in my Reddit “career” and didn’t really like it much. Dig a little further and threads get archived or something and you CANNOT comment on them.
There are many conversations that should never stop or expire. Philosophy, religion, politics are first to come to mind but any significant issue like abortion, nuclear weapons, etc. is the same.
I think kbin better supports these longer conversations. Why don’t we start one?
Yeah, that’s the one thing I miss about forums. Want to bring up some old obscure topic? Just comment on it and everyone suddenly sees it again.
I guess kbin’s active tab is somewhat similar? Not enough though, probably.
Once idea is not to have push notifications. Instead have an inbox where the user can check their notifications and each one is a link to a thread / post that becomes something meaningful and can even be tagged for archival.
A “push notification” is just a notification sent direct to the phone, outside of the app. It’s to alert you that “hey, this app has something to show you”. The inbox is its own seperate thing in the app, and already does something similar.
I suppose both the form of social media with its feeds and the algorithms designed to hook you and make you come for more are to blame.
Yes, it is possible with big corps involved in the fediverse like meta is trying to do. As it requires large capacity and expensive servers to collect and process huge amounts of data.
But of course that could kill the fediverse, and jeopardize the privacy of fediverse users.
https://infosec.pub/post/400702
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
And threads app itself is a privacy nigtmare, it will collect as much of your data as possible to use in algorithms to promote posts.
And just to make sure everything’s covered there’s “other data” too.
I personally think a native repost feature to share posts with other people would work very well.
Tumblr has it, and due to that, even year old posts still have active discussion.
