Buelldozer

I have my smoke / CO detectors, KIdde Z-Wave units, tied to my Home Assistant setup. HA will push a notifier to my phone if the smoke or CO alarm goes off and it’s able to track the battery life and let me know I need to change them before they start beeping.

HP can make some neat stuff but I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one.

XenoForo is a bit spendy but they’re providing the software, hosting and data storage. IIRC the forum I’m talking about is on the “Business” plan due to how busy it is.

there’s no persistence or community.

That’s it right there, that’s what you are missing. The older forum communities were small enough that you could keep track of whose who, something that isn’t possible when the user counts are in the tens of thousands to tens of millions. I think a lot of us olds would like to go back to that but its impossible; our monkey brains can’t handle communities of that size.

To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed.

In the forum days those users would get attacked and / or blocked by other users. If they caused enough havoc for long enough then the mods / admins would step in. The expectation NOW is that the mods / admins will actively monitor every post and comment in order to remove disagreeable content before it can be seen. That’s quite the change over the last 20 years!

The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.

“Mirror” is probably more apt than you realize. IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave. I’m not blaming you or saying that you’re wrong, I’m just pointing out the difference.

I agree that all forums require some level of moderation in order to keep from turning into total troll-fests however there’s a wide chasm between moderating someone because they won’t stop posting racial slurs and moderating someone because they’re going against the grain / hivemind.

Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model

Hmmm, you’re probably on to something there. I think Lemmy could do that but no one cares to set it up.

and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).

I’m honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I’m in a hurry to get back to that!

One of my favorite forums has been around since 1999 and is currently running on XenoForo which is very phpBB-esque. Anytime I get a nostalgia hankering I drop in for a few minutes. It’s not always as good as you may remember. :)

The fact that most internet discussion happens in extremely censored places is bad.

Many people, including a large chunk of Lemmy, are perfectly fine with censored discussions. They honestly want it that way…as long as the discussion is censored such that it agrees with their opinion.

I want the rest of the world to change and this is another tool to help towards that end, not merely an escape.

It’s extremely difficult to free people from things that they want.

What are we going to do about it?

Do nothing, nothing about it. The great hordes of the unwashed have ruined every single place they’ve showed up starting in the early 90s. They don’t want to be saved from the commercialization that has taken over the internet, to the contrary they thrive on it and are willing to put up with nearly anything to attract and keep it.

If most of Reddit shifted over to Lemmy it would get commercialized into a smoking crater. As soon as there’s enough regular people using a thing the companies and venture capitalists will show up and at that point the game is over.

The best of the internet has always been built by and populated with people who don’t fit into a box. It’s that internet people keep trying to bring back but you can’t hold the castle once it’s being assaulted by the normies.

So the solution is to do nothing. Let the normies stay in their palaces of commercialization and corruption. It’s for the best.

As to what we do about it?

Nothing. We do nothing about it. I’ve literally watched this happen over and over and over and over since the early 90s. $Place on the internet gets popular and is then ruined by the hordes of normies and the commercialization they attract. It’s even worse now with rise of influencers, troll farms, online advertising agencies, and power users.

The normie users add almost nothing to the online experience and they take so very much.

So the wisest move is to do nothing and let the flotsam and turds of the internet wash up in harbors like Reddit.

What do you think Lemmy is missing that phpBB had aside from strong user communities built over years where many of the users knew each other IRL?

I think old school internet folks are underestimating just how much of a grip Big Tech has on users’ attention.l, and their devices.

With all sincerity this is fine. Seriously, let’s leave it this way.

As someone who was already around when Eternal September happened the Internet was never for normies and inviting them into the space has destroyed it. Everything that attracts the attention of normies ends up ruined; MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Slashdot and so very many more…they are all trashed because when they attracted enough users the commercialization started.

So maybe lets just leave the Fediverse for those “in the know” as long as we can.

In some ways yes in other ways no. The urge to hivemind and purity test everything is definitely the same however the ability to move to another instance and get away from a group of power tripping mods is different.

Lemmy is essentially a collection of 2000s era forums that have agreed to share user accounts.

Yeah I know. I’ve done that as well. I just wanted to point out that it can be done in FF.

No one does collaboration as easy as Microsoft and that’s not changing anytime soon.

Anything in M365 works reasonably well in Linux, even when accessed via Firefox. I do it all the time.