I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
EDIT: given this is my most upvoted post on here to date I’d say the answer is yes.
I like this better.
The threaded conversations allow a useful interesting discussion to continue, even after some random person’s comment details half the participants.
Yeah. The way forums threaded made things impossible to follow.
The image board style works well for forums, ala 4chan, but the issue with some of those is mainly the lack of any moderation. I feel like there could be a Fediverse version of image board forums that work really well.
Namely, they should not have anonymous posting/commenting and should have active moderation.
Imo, image boards were pretty peak for memes and generating original content, when there was any semblance of moderation.
Me, following several forums and the topics within: uh
Like, a forum, at least in the default view, is like a waterfall of conversation. This is because every topic is single threaded.
When you have subconversations and quotes that form, the entire conversation history gets bumped along with the reply. It ends up being like… an avalanche of text.
Threading, like we have here, means I don’t get barraged by a wall of text if we have a long conversation. Its nested and makes coherent sense, and doesn’t overwhelm.
Its a major improvement.
I’d counter that point though, and say ‘then you should be/stay on topic’ and not forking the discussion into other topics. It’s certainly not difficult to create a new topic about a related discussion, and if it interests the original posters then yay, they might join in, but either way you aren’t cluttering up the original discussion.
I see forums as more… professional? Whereas layouts like we have here are much more ‘lol memes’. The two types serve two different users.
I spent a good chunk of my teen years on forums and it was definitely a direct, ‘here is A Thing and I want to discuss A Thing’ conversations. Lemmy/reddit comments are like ‘I have this one thought of a kinda-tangible idea for A Thing 2’ and it’s just… It’s not ‘bad’, but it’s most definitely scatterbrain thoughts, just shared for other wandering thoughts to collide. Scribbled brainstorming vs careful planning, I guess? I dunno.
Maybe I’m just old. Blah.
Yeah, if you want to chat off-topic take it to AIM.
A/S/L?
14/f/cali, obvs
Ha ha ha, I’m in danger
If youre reading from the top though, you have all the references of what people would be responding to (especially with quotes), and youre reading in order of reply.
I still prefer threaded conversations, but I can recognize the appeal of single thread conversations.