It’s great that they’re going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don’t miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse’s “anyone can post there” system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, “one login to access everything” systems.
Federated logins are a thing! The challenge is finding one that’s open and privacy-friendly. Unfortunately the widest-used ones come from entities like Google or Facebook with a marked interest in preying on user data. Mozilla used to maintain a federated system (Persona) but they discontinued it. I know Ubuntu offers one for all their services (bug trackers, forums etc.) but not sure if it’s open to third party systems. Perhaps there are others worth using.
Alternatively, you can aggregate all your logins in one place across devices and browsers. Firefox Accounts are a very simple method of doing this (presuming you use Firefox everywhere), and you can choose to only sync logins rather than bookmarks, plugins etc. And of course there are other dedicated password managers, with or without online sync, open or closed source, self-hosted or private hosted etc.
Since I’m now using a password manager I’ve been having less issue with creating as many accounts as needed.
But I do agree it’d be great to have a single sign on.But then you have the same centralization issue - and it’s even worse, if the central authority has a fit for some reason about you, now you’re locked out of many completely unrelated sites.
I welcome the return of forums. What a simpler time.
I’m so excited for forums to come back, just need to make sure there is a great mobile app to handle them.
It felt so much better to engage on forums. felt a bit slower and more intentional. And signatures, the signatures! Love their choice here.
a indie game i support refuses to use a forum, only discord. i hate searching thru threads in discord when a forum would be easier.
i wish people wouldn’t shun the idea of a forum just because it’s a “old idea.” good on the jellyfin folks for doing this.
Yep unpopular opinion I hate hate hate discord for anything but normal chat. The threads they added recently are neat and I hope they keep going in that direction.
I hate Discord full stop, because it’s a centralised proprietary platform just like Reddit and is going to hit the exact same issues one day, and it’s going to be even harder to recover all the conversations that have gone on there.
Not in this day and age where me and my grandma have our own.
There are so many, you can’t keep up to date with your hobbies unless you are willing to follow 50 platforms with 60 different UIs and community rules.
I prefer the aggregation of data like fediverse where we can follow topics and not platforms.
I don’t-
I don’t miss having to register accounts on each one, answer a bunch of questions, give a birthday, give an email, do a capta… etc…
Just for that forum to popup on haveibeenpwned.com a few months later.
Knock on wood, password managers are a thing now, and its easy to give each forum a very unique password. But- still. Don’t really miss those.
Thank you! I feel like I’m the only person who lived through that time. Having everything on one site is way simpler, reddit sucks but that doesn’t mean the concept does.
I do not miss having to sign up for a specific forum, wait for the email, no email, check spam folder, no email, 15 mins later email shows up in spam, go to post, “sorry you can’t make a post without interacting with at least 5 other posts”, post random shit on 5 other posts, finally get to post, "this question has been answered. Post archived "
I still see a legacy of that when a forum for game modding requires you create an account to download.
Another factor, is…
Well, Especially for users in large communities, or those with lots of interests, they will end up on LOTS of forums.
And, that turns into either, a lot of notifications, or a lot of ignored interactions due to the number of notifications.
The last thing people don’t seem to remember, half of the damn forums wanting to put damn ads everywhere.
And they announce it on Twitter? 🙄
They announced it on their website. Why OP chose to link the tweet instead is beyond me.
Now all they need to do is move away from twitter.
I thought this was an announcement they were moving to the Fediverse.
Seriously, how about they stand up a lemmy instance? That way peeps could follow their forums without having to travel to a proprietary place.
According to the footer they’re running MyBB so although it is more centralised, I wouldn’t call it proprietary.
What advantages would Lemmy have over the traditional style of forum for their use case?
Yeah it’s not the end of the world. It’s slightly disappointing that you have to create yet another account unnecessarily.
You can log in to their forum with Discord, Github, Google, Reddit, Stack Exchange or Twitter accounts. It would be better for them to support logging in with any OpenID provider using OpenID Connect, but they do support some of the major ones at least (except for Facebook and Apple).
The only real advantage I can see is they would be another mass of users on the fediverse, which is what we want I suppose. I mean I do want it to be populated, and if more people migrate, it ensures survival of their community. I don’t like how we have all scattered to the wind, but it’s their choice where to go
Kinda sad they didn’t settle for something like Lemmy, but at the same time happy that they realize the value of a forum and didn’t just move to Discord.
I can see the argument in favour of classic forums. Keeping everything chronological can help for certain kinds of discussion, and it’s easier to sort content by subforums in a way that doesn’t scale well with Lemmy. You’d need to create a lot of different communities to keep it all separated, which is messy.
The biggest thing forums lack is multi-threaded discussions. That said, simple chronological helps people at the bottom of the thread get assistance since it doesn’t disappear into the web of conversation, so this might also be an advantage of single-threaded forums.
Also, voting gamifies the whole experience, so people are reluctant to post in older threads since they won’t get “points”.
Finally, threads on Lemmy also don’t get bumped, so old content effectively dies. This sucks for troubleshooting since people very frequently have the exact same problem many years apart.
I feel like “release” and “discussion” threads would probably benefit from Lemmy’s structure to allow for deeper engagement in sub-conversations, but the core of their use is single-topic requests and, frankly, forums are better at that.
Strange they don’t even mention Fediverse. It just felt too dated.
I can understand wanting to bring your discussion hub in house to avoid something like what’s happened. But bringing it into essentially an old school phpBB forum is certainly, ah, a choice.
There is nothing wrong with forums, they’ve existed (and continue to exist) for decades. They are a great way to have information easily searchable, as well as easily post and contribute.
Just because they aren’t carded like twitter or lemmy doesn’t mean they are dated. Everything has it’s place and every tool has a job. In this case, that place is a forum and the tool is phBB. Also, I wouldn’t call it “old school” as the most recent update is from May 21, 2023.
Not everything has to be federated, and nothing is stopping anyone from creating an instance for Jellyfin ( !jellyfin@lemmy.ml ) . But for the official instance, having it hosted by them, on their hardware, that they control, it’s a great choice to use a forum.
TIL about Jellyfin. Is it like Plex? Better? I assume it’s solid since everyone knows about it?
It’s plex but open source and without any sort of subscription. I have been using it for a couple of years and never had a problem
Does it work outside of the home network as well as plex does? Also, do you think it is worth switching if I already bought the lifetime plex pass?
It should work, but I use tailscale so I can’t personally vouch for it. I don’t think it differs that much from plex tho, so if you are fine with it and you have already the pass, you aren’t losing out anything major
It’s great software but for me it’s missing at least 1 must-have feature, being intro detection & skipping.
If you want to get into them you can run them both on the same library and just compare which you like best
There is a plugin you can install for that, but it is a bit finicky:
I’m sure Jellyfin considered the Fediverse but some projects like the idea of having more control of the community discussions they participate in so having a forum makes sense. I still think a Jellyfin community on Lemmy can thrive with an official forum in place.
Jellyfin is all about self hosting. I don’t see why they wouldn’t just create their own Lemmy instance if that was the concern. It wouldn’t need to be big if they limited the userbase
Lemmy is pretty immature, and probably doesn’t suit their needs compared to a forum.
They don’t really need a link aggregator, so using Lemmy there wouldn’t really make much sense.
The only thing that they might use Lemmy for is the community, but otherwise, it’s not a great fit for what they need.
Yup, “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Lemmy and the Fediverse are great, but they aren’t the end all, be all solution to online content.
Lemmy and KBin are cool and all, but VERY rough around the edges so I wouldn’t expect large projects or communities not directly related to then to adopt either. Keep in mind for most of these projects, they picked Reddit because the users were already there and the software was relatively polished. These are both things that many of us users are interested in improving, but that projects with communities aren’t going to want to use until theyre already more advances than they are right now
forums is all around an infinitely better solution for support and discussions on specific tech and interest. It’s also more searchable and less ephemeral. At least reddit and fediverse is better then ephemeral solutions like discord.
Totally agree, it pains me to see communities move to Discord.
This is probably true. Forum software is a lot more mature then Lemmy etc and probably a better overall option currently for a project like Jellyfin to operate. They just want something that works and provides the least amount of moderation overhead possible.
The moderating tools on MyBB is worlds away and better than Lemmy/Kbin.
True but the downside is exposure and footfall. Subreddits work well as people can dip into them easily from elsewhere in Reddit, both new users and regular contributors can keep an eye from their feeds.
A forum is on it’s own and only people out looking specifically for the forum or who know about Jellyfin will go looking for it, and it won’t pop up in people’s feeds. The Internet used to be littered with forums, but social media is the very reason they fell out of fashion.
But users have also created a Jellyfin community on Lemmy: jellyfin@lemmy.ml
Yeah, but at the same time Reddit is kind of an awaful place for getting tech support for things like this. It’s great for general discussion, but as a mod you have no real power to do things like move support requests from “general” and into a space where it will be highly visible by those willing to lend support.
Forums are better for community management than link aggregators along every axis except for footfall.
I find the biggest problem with Lemmy and these federated apps is that search engine indexing kinda sucks right now. They get pushed so far down the bottom of the results, you only really see them when you search site:lemmy.ml or whatever.
I believe this was a good decision. Hopefully in the future search engine indexing will improve. Otherwise I can’t see Lemmy being as useful as Reddit.
It makes sense for fediverse instances to have very low SEO (search engine ranking) as the content is split up across many different websites and domains.
It’s also very annoying to crosslink content on the fediverse. So there is far fewer links between discussions. The network graph is way less interconnected, and that hurts search indexing.
Please note they also have a Mastodon account where they’ve made the same announcement:
https://mastodon.online/@jellyfin/110568058365759513
Let’s support the Fediverse or FOSS alternatives when we can.
I’ve been using Plex forever. Got the lifetime subscription a million years ago.
Is there anything I’m missing out on by not using Jellyfin? Anything I’d miss on Plex moving to it?
The main reason I use jellyfin over plex is just because they only host my media, nothing else. None of the plex pass bs cluttering it up
Does it support OTA recording?
For a second I thought they were launching their federated lemmy/kbin instance. With different communities, like “support”, “bugs”, “news”…
Would have been freaking awesome and a great use case for Lemmy and federarion.
Good for them anyway.
At the same time, it might not fit them. Lemmy is a link aggregator, which seems like extra functionality that they don’t really need, not when existing forum software will do what they need, while also being more stable/mature.
I hope mods can restrict the types of content users can post in communities in fututure.
Of course they can, what else would moderators be doing? Not entirely sure how this is even a question…
Not good enough of an excuse, IMO. Link aggregation is essentially a normal post with just a link to somewhere else, which you can totally do in any forum… and it is no bloat at all.
I believe the reasoning was more like “we don’t want to do any federation, because the barrier of having to create a new account will free us from trolls/bots/etc”.
They made their announcement on their own site, they are the somewhere else, and the link has found it’s way here so what’s the problem?
We call websites like this one link aggregators but they are just platforms, it’s the users who are the aggregators collecting the links that we are interested in. We don’t need a system of top down promotion and don’t need to have our platforms serve those who want to promote. Likewise projects like Jellyfin don’t owe us a presence and this post itself proves they don’t need one. The idea that everyone must maintain a brand identity and that our social media should be polluted with advertising is something that the fediverse has and I hope will continue to stand against.
Nah, dude, chill, 😅.
They just built a nice independent forum, but I would have liked to be able to participate in their forum with this account (federation) instead of having to create a new account.
That’s it, this is not going to keep me awake at night, in fact, I am happy they are finding independence from Reddit. The world keeps turning, have a nice week!
Add in the fact they’d end up having to defederate a lot of instances due to trolls and whatnot, and it’s much better that they run it on their own site. It’s much better from a moderation viewpoint for them. I know people will be all upset here, but it’s honestly for the best.
AskHistorians, AkScience, AMA, AskReddit, Ask*, and the myriad of semi-official support subreddits for services, games, eyc. all would like to disagree that Reddit/Lemmy is a link aggregator exclusively.
The tree-like comment structure is just overall better for large-crowd engagement. Phpbb forum type is just going to get flooded with many posts and hard to follow when thousands answer
I’m not sure that the Jellyfin community is that big or active enough that that will be much of an issue at all. Looking at their sub, the highest rated posts are under 1k, so number of people active on the sub is probably somewhere between 100k - 1M.
Your average post maybe has about 10 - 20 people interacting with it at most. Expecting thousands seems… optimistic, especially when the forum numbers puts them at under 300 people.
The return of phpbb, who had that on their 2023 bingo card?
They evaluated it and decided against it in favor of MyBB.
I’m a little surprised they didn’t pick Discourse.
I think Flarum and NodeBB are better that Discourse. Discourse is a Ruby app which makes it a pain to deploy.
I used to be a developer on SMF, but these days I see the older forum systems like phpBB, SMF, etc. as “previous generation”.
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This is great, I’m honestly glad they have their own forum on their own page as opposed to something like Discord.
I know people will be disappointed it’s not on lemmy or similar, but it’s for the best to be honest. Since it’s a product, it’s much easier to have something they fully control and can have ownership over (including who and what can be posted there). It’s a great decision by them.
As much time passes I still find forums really easy to navigate through with how categorized everything is, and I do like activity bumping up threads. Although searching through like 100+ page long threads on like xda can be a pain. Still so much better than discord for being a source of information.
Ah, yes. Nothing like bumping a five year old thread for whatever reason.
Legit funniest necro I saw recently was on one of the forums in a private tracker I’m a member of.
There were about three pages of discussion. One dude is talking back and forth with another.
Thread died down as they all do.
A few weeks ago, five years after the last post, that same dude just randomly pops in to reply to the previous post with the most casual of responses.
He wasn’t even inactive on the forums. Somehow he just left that specific thread for five years.
On the topic of forums, I do like them, but I find they can often feel less “casual” than reddit/Lemmy. Different etiquette, I think.
Discord goes the complete opposite direction. It’s basically IRC with some more modern features. In other words, there is nothing but the chaos of a conversation that’s lasted maybe an hour or so.
How people rely on it for long term stuff, I don’t know.
On the topic of forums, I do like them, but I find they can often feel less “casual” than reddit/Lemmy. Different etiquette, I think.
I agree and it’s what I like about forums. to someone like me they’re more approachable. discord works best for me with friends, but it’s awkward with people I don’t know well
Discord has forums for long form discussions. Slow mode can be enabled so that it doesn’t turn into a “chat”.
Round peg, square hole IMO. Discord is designed as a chat application with an afterthought of threading and forums (I guess?). It’s not a reddit replacement, and it’s not designed as a forum.
I think forum mode has the same limitations as regular Discord - posts aren’t indexed in Google, search is kinda… meh, you have to sign up to see anything, and overall it’s still not a platform built for long-form discussions.
I feel that a lot of people are missing the point that discord has done something that other software has not. It makes it easy to centralize communication. It is invaluable for small developers.
And while yes the information is not available via general searching, the searching within discord is actually pretty good.
I keep seeing people mention matrix as a viable alternative to discord but my experience with matrix has me calling bs.
It makes it easy to centralize communication.
Centralisation is why we have issues with Reddit at the moment. It puts you at the whims of a single company, who will eventually want to make more money (after all, they’re not a charity). For example, Discord could one day announce that you only get the 500 most recent messages for free, or limit the room size, or make some other changes that vastly impact how it’s being used today.
the searching within discord is actually pretty good.
I really don’t want to have to go to multiple different sites to search for information. That’s why we have search engines. Discord being a walled-garden makes it a lot more difficult than it should be.
(yes, I know, this also sounds like centralisation, but we have a choice of multiple search engines, plus I can self-host my own searx instance).
Still so much better than discord for being a source of information.
Discord is atrocious as an info repository. It’s useful to chat and to have a way to search what’s been said, but it’s horrible having to search there for that one useful message amidst all the other replies if you haven’t participated. And the nature of a chat makes searching blindly very time consuming.
Although searching through like 100+ page long threads on like xda can be a pain.
Until recently, one of the official ways to get support for the email app I use (FairEmail) was to post in a 1,200-page XDA Developers thread containing 24,000 posts. https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/closed-app-5-0-fairemail-fully-featured-open-source-privacy-oriented-email-app.3824168/page-1203
I’m a big proponent of people reading the whole thread before making a new post in forums, but in this case. I’m not so sure anymore lol.
hahaha that one thread is larger than some entire forums I’ve moderated in the past.
Ah, a traditional forum. Makes sense.
Since we’re talking about forums, who here is old enough to remember the IMDB message boards?
I’m old enough to remember dialing into different BBSs with my 14.4 Kbps modem.
These days my teenaged son is complaining that his 12GB Fortnite update isn’t downloading fast enough and he has to wait a whole 20 minutes.
In all fairness, it probably did take less time to load messages on BBSs than it takes to update Fortnite :)
I too remember those bygone days of the modem handshake sound. I wish all these kids would get off my lawn.
Finally. I’m happy to see them moving from the subreddit. It wasn’t terrible, but a forum will be better I think in the long run.
