IninewCrowFeb 5, 2025

The greatest thing that social media ever did for humanity was in its ability to allow all of us to talk to each other in an open platform.

Those private corporate platforms have slowly been eroded and controlled to only waste our time and designed to keep us all angry, afraid, anxious and confused.

Open decentralized social media is bringing us back to that era 20 years ago when social media was just starting and people just talked and openly discussed the issues of the day with one another. It doesn’t matter what kind of platform we have or can create, as long as it is decentralized and controlled by people, everyone will always find value in it because it allows us to talk to one another. The greatest thing I’ve ever found in taking part in the fediverse was in connecting to like minded people who want to talk about the important issues of the day without all the distractions of advertising and without having having to give up my privacy or security and have my identity sold to the highest bidder.

Show threadheavydustFeb 5, 2025

allow all of us to talk to each other

I was doing that just fine 30/40 years ago with BBS, newsgroups, and later with forums such as Lemmy. Social media put a name or a face on people, and was combined with the regular “eternal septembers,” but it didn’t bring anything useful to the conversation IMHO.

Show threadbobs_monkeyFeb 5, 2025
It did break down the barriers for those less technical by bringing the conversation to a web browser that was certainly more accessible as opposed to a terminal, for better or worse. It’s not far off from the fediverse in that it does take some technical understanding to navigate, which does create a sort of barrier. Now, whether that is good or bad is a subject of debate, and I’m inclined to agree that the more accessible a platform is, the more watered down the conversations become.
Show threadrottingleafFeb 5, 2025

It did break down the barriers for those less technical by bringing the conversation to a web browser that was certainly more accessible as opposed to a terminal, for better or worse.

I beg your pardon, but what about web forums? I don’t think anything technical was required with those.

Show threadSckharshantallasFeb 6, 2025
They were good, but is there good forum platforms nowadays that are mobile friendly, have apps etc.?
Show threadrottingleaf

WDYM mobile-friendly? There are plenty of engines, I suppose some have adaptive design.

Anyway, I remember browsing websites of that time using Sony PSP default browser. This was certainly harder than anything you get today. Still bearable enough.

Just opened one forum made with Invision Power Board, it is of course not adaptive, but I don’t need endless scroll on a forum. Pretty usable with, well, zoom in, zoom out, tap. All that.

WDYM have apps? You have a web browser. It’s intended to visit websites. I would understand if those apps would provide any functionality outside of that of a website. Maybe putting website bookmarks on the home screen would be a good user-friendly feature for Android though. Those could even use RSS to indicate something. Maybe those should be just RSS indicators even.

If you mean that you don’t want web, just something like Usenet - I have no answer except Usenet itself. Freenet (Locutus) seems to have a winter depression, but I haven’t visited their Matrix channel lately.

Feb 6, 2025 at 4:30amWeb
Show threadSckharshantallasFeb 6, 2025

What I mean is that there’s a whole different world of how you make an app usable on a mobile phone with portrait screen and a website that’s displayed on a big screen. Many remaining forums I’ve seen from the past were built for a different time, with outdated designs and no good usability on a vertical-based screen.

Now, I’ve seen something line the Swift and Rust forums that do look good on mobile, simple and aesthetically pleasing.

About apps, they’re not necessary indeed, but for many services it’s an assurance that the usability was thought for that environment. For example, the only reason I do enjoy browsing Lemmy is because of the Voyager app that resemble the defunct Apollo for Reddit and copied all the good usability of it for iOS. If it wasn’t for the apps people built for Lemmy, I’d probably not have much drive to come back to it often.

Swift Forums

Swift Forums

Swift Forums
Show threadrottingleafFeb 6, 2025
I know what hobby project I’d want to lift, but I also know that I struggle with much simpler undertakings - like, for example, cooking something normal more than twice a week.