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.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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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.
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".
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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.
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I welcome the return of forums. What a simpler time.
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 "
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ah, a traditional forum. Makes sense.
Since we're talking about forums, who here is old enough to remember the IMDB message boards?
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Now all they need to do is move away from twitter.
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.
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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.
The advantage I see with the Lemmy approach over Discord is comment longevity. At Discord your comment has little time before it falls off the radar. It's longer with Twitter, but still short. At Lemmy you get a reasonable trade-off for comment longevity and convenience. On a phpBB style forum comment longevity can be quite long, but you have to go to a dedicated site with it's own address which lacks convenience.
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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.
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Even tho they didn't move to the fediverse, I'm glad they left reddit.
As long as the forums are easily searchable then this is a good move. It looks like the subreddit is in read-only mode so we haven't lost any knowledge yet. That data should be preserved elsewhere, just in case the subreddit becomes unviewable.
I'd actually love if companies/products/software went back to forums and other specialized means to get support. I hate when they refer to Reddit or worse, Discord.
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MyBB is a weird choice in 2023
MyBB is great for niche/specific content. Great moderator tools and everyone knows how to navigate a freakin' forum.
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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
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Well it's a good decision. As they say, never put all your eggs in one basket, especially if you have no control over the basket.
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