Like I say in the OP, Lemmy and other Redditlikes have a default post sorting algorithm that prioritizes new posts over old but still active posts. This has a huge impact on the culture of the site. Topics are more ephemeral. Once they drop off the first page nobody will ever see them again.

On a forum, if a person wants to make frequent updates over a long period of time on a single topic, they can make a single megathread that stays visible as long as new replies keep coming. On Lemmy et al. the topic quickly drops off the radar no matter how many people reply, meaning if the OP wants to make frequent updates on a similar topic they have to keep making new posts if they expect people to reply.

Let’s say I’m on a car enthusiast forum, for example (IDK anything about cars). And let’s say I’m restoring an old car and want to share my progress over the course of months. I can make a single topic about my project and post replies to it with pics and updates about what’s going on. As long as I keep updating or as long as people keep commenting on what’s already there the topic remains relevant and more importantly visible, and could remain so for years or even decades.

Now let’s imagine the same project on a Redditlike site like Lemmy. Yes I can do the same thing as above, make a single post and keep replying to it, and people can chime in with comments. But because the default sorting algorithm causes older posts, no matter how active, to drop off over time, I’ll be replying to the void since nobody will see the post. In order to maintain the same level of visibility and interaction, I have to make new posts for each update. It’s less likely that my project will become an enduring part of the community’s history because it will either get swept away by new content if I use a single topic, or be scattered across several disparate posts.

Other differentiating factors that people have brought up are signatures and avatars. Avatars are really small on these sites and there are no sigs at all. These were modes of self-differentiation on forums, allowing individual users to be more recognizable and allowing connections between users to develop. On Redditlike sites you’re just a username and maybe a little icon, making it harder to see anything but disembodied ideas floating in the ether.

Yes I can make Lemmy behave like a forum by sorting posts by latest comment and using the “chat” display option for comments, but nobody else does that so posts will get swept away by new ones for them even if they aren’t for me, meaning the culture never grows around this system.

When I hear “HTPC” I kinda assume you don’t want a full fat desktop, at least you don’t want it right at boot, but a TV-specific interface, something that’s easy to use at 60 inches and 10 feet away.

I really want the full story

hmmm I hadn’t thought of avatars and sigs being part of it but you have a point. Did Reddit even have Avatars before they started pushing their profile pic customizer thing? Even then they’re pretty small, likewise on Lemmy, so there’s not much room for personality, and as can be seen here a lot of people just don’t bother.

The problem though is if others are using a different UI the conversation may flow differently

Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. You CAN recreate the message board experience on Lemmy pretty faithfully by sorting posts by latest comment (like the bumping system of forums) and setting comments to “chat” which flattens the comment tree, and sorting oldest to newest, but nobody does that so the community doesn’t develop around it.

I hadn’t thought of SEO as a contributing factor to the decline of the search experience, but it absolutely makes sense. To some degree I think SEO is actually GEO (Google’s Engine Optimization) but if some other platform, even a paid one that isn’t incentivized to weigh sponsored content higher, became dominant SEO would just pivot to minmaxing for that platform instead.

Incidentally, there’s a search engine called wiby.org that only indexes sites that don’t use Javascript, which in practice makes it a great web 1.0 search engine.

Yes that was my understanding of its original purpose, as a real-time communication service for gaming. It has since been put to broader use but isn’t suited to this broader purpose.

I can’t miss them because I was too young when they were relevant, but I do love the early days of home computing specifically because I was technically alive and aware but not old enough to know what was going on. Anything from the 80s has a surreal dream-like quality for me. I’ll hear a random word like “CompuServe” and instantly be transported back to the floor of the living room when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, when I heard the word on a TV commercial or overheard older kids or grownups mention it. Then I’d be like “Oh yeah that really did exist and wasn’t just the product of my tiny baby brain.” It’s also why I like synthwave music and cassette futurism.

Absolutely agree. I don’t think anything I’ve said or done online is particularly damning, but it’s not what I think that matters. It’s about what people think 15 years from now when I’m running for mayor or interviewing for a new job. I also know in real life you talk and act in different ways depending on who you’re with. I use different vocabulary at work vs when I’m on Discord with my friends vs when I’m talking to parents or siblings. Having a single monolithic entity hosting all possible content, heaven forbid associated with your real name, makes anonymity impossible.

Nested comments aren’t the problem, at least I don’t think they are. It’s how posts/topics are sorted by default that creates a strong bias toward recent content, rather than older content that is still active.

I think there are pros and cons to both nested and unnested systems. With a nested comment structure you pretty much can’t have a single comment that replies to multiple upper comments, you can only reply to one comment at a time. But nested comments allow for branching conversations that don’t derail the main topic.

You can sort posts on Lemmy by “latest comment” which mirrors the bumping method of forums. That’s how I do it. My complaint was that people always use the default so the community never grows around the style facilitated by the older forum method. Maybe if individual communities could force a default or at least have a community specific default that could be changed per user that would help.

There are still quite many game developers’ forums, but what bothers me a little bit is that sometimes the long living ones periodically lost their past.

That’s an unfortunate consequence of being a smaller community with fewer hosting resources. The older a forum is, the bigger the backend database hosting all those posts, and the more it will chug running queries.

Oh GameFAQs! That was my first foray into the forum experience along with Gaia Online around 2003 or so. I’ve hung out on other forums that are sadly now defunct. If anyone remembers the first big cloud gaming service OnLive, I bought into the ecosystem for the few months it was relevant, and found a really fun fan forum that to this day exemplifies my platonic ideal of the message board. It was just a bunch of fans coming together to talk about the thing they loved. I also hung out on the Minecraft forum for a while. That one’s still up but I don’t think it’s very active now surprisingly given the enduring popularity of the game.

For now I mostly hang out on a couple conlanging/worldbuilding forums using phpBB.

nodeBB is a message board server that has activitypub built in. Not sure what “threadiverse” means though I assume it’s something to do with the Reddit-like format of nested comments. I can’t remember if you can nest nodeBB comment chains, but it does have a voting system that can be disabled.

I put up a nodeBB server for a while earlier this year. Got cold feet about admin responsibilities. I know how to self-host but seeing a list of people’s actual email and knowing I was responsible for keeping it secure scared me away.

Game UI convention seems to have settled on green for stamina. Skyrim, Zelda, Dark Souls, Tunic etc. There’s a YT video examining why mana is blue and the same reasons apply here I think. It’s basic color theory. Red was already taken as the obvious choice for HP since it’s the color of blood. Blue contrasts with red and green stands out from the other two.

As for Gatorade, the white one gives you frost damage reduction. Same with orange for fire and yellow for lightning.

There was a flavor of Powerade back in the 90s called jagged ice that was really dark blue. I loved it and wish it were still around. Maybe it gives you underwater breathing.

I actually tried this, with nodeBB rather than Discourse. Thing is I don’t trust myself to secure people’s PII, and I was kind of stepping on the toes of an already established community that I’m a part of and had no intention of fracturing. I just didn’t like (and still don’t tbh) their use of phpBB. I want to be able to use markdown instead of bbcode and I want a user mention feature. But the forum is the people, not the platform.

Yes, I also think the voting system can make things worse in some ways. On a traditional forum the one and only way to show you like or dislike something was to leave a reply. With a voting system a lot of the “engagement” is just a number that moves up or down. It’s also way too easy to slip into the unhealthy mindset of mining karma because monkey brain like number go up. Granted on Lemmy it’s a bit better since you don’t have a single cumulative score.

Discord is even more ephemeral than Lemmy/Reddit. Conversations fly by in minutes or seconds. Discord as a specific platform is starting to enshittify as well.

And I point that out in the OP, but my point is it’s not the default so the community culture doesn’t encourage long term discussion. I’ve tried making a single megathread for all my content on a particular community but it never went anywhere because, to everyone else who wasn’t sorting posts and comments as described above, the post just dropped off the front page after a day or two never to be seen again.

Oh so do I, but the consolidation of social media has left forums dying. Now everyone’s on Reddit or (maybe not so much now) Facebook.