tteh !MemesToDNA joined in and replied with this 1 year ago, 1 hour later[^][v]#1,289,888
Forums are dying out in general. Consider the perspective of someone looking to create a community: there are no hurdles to creating a subreddit or Facebook group, and your audience is right there and essentially guaranteed.
If you want to create a forum, you're going to need to purchase a domain, set up DNS, pick forum software and then install and maintain it. If you don't know how, you have to learn. Then you have the task of actually bringing people to your forum. There are free solutions like ProBoards etc. (in the early 2010s there were innumerable fly-by-night "free forum" platforms that have since disappeared) but they're all a bit naff, and nowadays they all push you heavily towards premium plans. It's effort and money people don't care to invest.
More generally, I think attracting new users is a greater challenge than ever. Especially younger people, who are the main audience for e.g. chans, imageboards, chatrooms, etc.
Gen Z definitely know their way around their smartphone or tablet but they're shockingly tech illiterate and might be perplexed at the basic task of saving a file or navigating a directory structure on a desktop. "The Internet" to them is the handful of apps and sanitised platforms they and all their friends use: TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube. I don't think they tend to care as much for quieter, slow-paced hangouts tucked away in the corners of the Internet.
Anonymous F joined in and replied with this 1 year ago, 49 minutes later, 5 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,289,905
Nothing has changed much, except platforms have been dumbed down to make them more accessible to normies. The internet and computers in general used to be used by a small handful of tech savvy nerds. The size of that group hasn't changed, it's just been dwarfed in comparison by the number of tech illiterate users, and hence the focus has been on making stuff to satisfy that crowd.
Anonymous H joined in and replied with this 1 year ago, 5 days later, 5 days after the original post[^][v]#1,290,529
@1,289,895 (D)
The thing about Lemmy is that its creator came out and said he wants to make it difficult for people to use it to build communities that aren’t leftist. So it’s maybe a cool idea in theory but in practice it’s Reddit x1000
Anonymous H replied with this 1 year ago, 10 hours later, 6 days after the original post[^][v]#1,290,667
@1,290,563 (boof)
I think they actually said they wanted to make it hard for right wingers, but in effect that means anything that does not hold leftist values in reverence.
Look at how Reddit recently banned r/dankmeme. That’s where it gets questionable and you know the people on Lemmy are thrilled about that decision.
@previous (D)
Is there any right wing Lemmy server you can point to?
boof replied with this 1 year ago, 44 minutes later, 6 days after the original post[^][v]#1,290,676
@previous (H)
why are we using the term "leftist" at all? Who even talks like that unless we refer the the decades-ago guerrillas of places like Nicaragua? It just sounds like something some paid political commentator would say.
> Is there any right wing Lemmy server you can point to?
Exploding Heads was right wing, and shut down for other reasons.
Gab uses Mastodon for their software. They could flick a switch and federate with other Mastodon server, or any Lemmy server.
There's no reason you couldn't have a federated right-wing forum, but the tech is more well-known among left-leaning communities.
The software is built with the assumption that some servers won't get along, and makes it easy to block other servers and discover new servers from the ones you allow. Leftist infighting is notorious, and different sects will frequently block each other.
What problems do you see from a right-wing server opening up?
boof replied with this 1 year ago, 3 hours later, 1 week after the original post[^][v]#1,290,769
@1,290,716 (H)
well I actively avoid vaush and destiny (except for the funny outtakes of Norman Finklestien calling Mr D a fucking imbecile) and I never heard of someone calling themselves infrared. I mean what the fuck, only one of those people in the list uses their actual name. As for Maddow, I don't remember her calling herself a "leftist", but I'm fine with being shown an example when she did if it is there to see.