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.
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.
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!
I wonder if Lemmy could do single sign-on support like how you can log in some places with your Google or Facebook account.
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”.
Agreed. And they don’t really benefit from the larger Reddit/fediverse.
And who knows what sites businesses block (not sure how that works with Lemmy).
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.
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…
Maybe they mean automated moderation tools that will just do that?
I think they mean turning off the ability to submit non-text posts entirely. It’s much better that a user can’t do something that isn’t allowed than to have a bot fix up the situation after the fact.
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 believe they had a Discourse blog before but they removed it. I’m assuming their past experience made them not want to use it?
Discourse is kinda garbage though. I think Flarum and NodeBB are better.
I used to be a developer on SMF, but these days I see the older forum systems like phpBB, SMF, etc. as “previous generation”.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Yeah but really it makes more sense for an official forum. I kind of miss the days before reddit, when everything had their own private forum. The good ones were great.
For sure, before these modern forums took over the scene, dedicated forums like phpBB were all I used. Though there is definitely something to like about Lemmy and the fediverse. Just super convenient. You can talk about everything in one place. The longer exposure of comments with the old style was nice, but I can trade that off willingly enough.
As far as dedicated official forums, I don’t know. Think I’d still rather have access to them here. The Fediverse just makes a lot of sense serving as a centralized communications hub. Kind of reminds me of Usenet back in the early internet days, but a lot better. Usenet could be pretty kludgey.
I dunno, whynotboth.jpg is kind of my catchphrase. I think we could have high quality niche forums, but also link aggregation sites with meta commentary.
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.
Having worked with both as a dev, can’t really understand MyBB over phpBB. I found it much friendlier to both the users and the devs
I’ve tried both as a forum admin. I think it’s just a matter of preference at this point. phpBB is still sporting that old compact style, which kinda makes it look dated.
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.
right, i didn’t know they were in Mastodon
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 just now learned that something like jellyfin exists. That’s just awesome. I’m eager to try it out
It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out for them. I’m a fairly casual user of Jellyfin - not enough that I’d sign up on their forum or regularly read it, unless I specifically needed tech support. Unfortunately though that means that I might miss out on updates and if there was any (relatively easy) tech support questions I won’t see them and be able to contribute. I suspect that the pool of people they interact with is going to be substantially smaller on their forum than it was previously.
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
Agreed. Lowkey disappointed.
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
i never heard of it and have been using plex for years. i love that its open source. definitely checking it out. plex has been driving me nuts with all the extra crap theyve been adding. i just want my media
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
Way better!
Imho, it is better. Being free is an extra bonus
It’s great software but for me it’s missing at least 1 must-have feature, being intro detection & skipping.
There is a plugin you can install for that, but it is a bit finicky:
It’s a Plex alternative, I don’t know about better. IIRC it’s a fork of Emby. I try both (Emby and Jellyfin) usually a couple times a year, but there’s always something that gives me issue and I just stay with Plex.
Also, seems kind of silly, but the name is just dumb. Neither my wife or I want to audibly say “let’s watch something on Jellyfin”.
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.
Good for them. Hopefully this will make it much easier to consolidate guides and helpful info for Jellyfin.
I know people are okay with them not integrating ActivityPub, but personally it would have meant me participating as apposed to not.
I have been eyeing jellyfin for years and easier access to their official forum would have been great.
easier access to their official forum would have been great.
What’s “not easy” about it? Having to click on their website instead of your own? Having to use a usernamd and password like literally every other site you log into (use a password manager)? Needing an email address (use a throwaway or something like firefox relay).
I get that people love the latest “shiny new thing” (lemmy) but that doesn’t suddenly make everything else “difficult”. Also for the vast majority of people, signing up to a forum is much easier than finding an lemmy instance, figuring out how to browse other instances, figuring out the layout (being cards isn’t always ideal), figuring out the (sometimes slow defintely clunky) search, etc…
In this instance, having a forum that they control, in a format that the vast majority of their userbase is used to, is the way to go. They are a company after all. So providing the best experience for their users should be quite high on their priority list, not using “latest shiny thing that’s still extremely niche”
Aand that’s why we need to make it easier for them so we don’t scatter too much in the long run.
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.
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.If you are looking for a little bit of “extra” to go with your password manager, check out firefox relay. You can create emails that forward to your real email without exposing it. They allow you to block emails entirely, or just promotions. Their paid option is like $12/year (USD) and allows unlimited masks, and allowing you to create your own relay subdomain (like (whatever I decide)@dusty.mozmail.com). It’s definitely worth the relatively tiny charge for the paid version.
There is also a relay service with Cloudflare but I’ve not tried it out yet. But having an email like 0tK8h384jkcxas@mozmail.com saved to my password manager is no big deal.
Yeah, I use anonaddy
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.
You mean the password manager as the central authority? You can self host a password manager using, eg, Vaultwarden.
Even if you use a trusted, paid commercial service, I think the risk of that happening is lower than on Reddit. Their business model is simpler and more transparent. They want to keep you as a customer so you will keep paying them. And there is less opportunity for them to ban you for political reasons when you’re not expressing yourself on their platform.
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.
“one login to access everything” systems.
Sign in with Google, Facebook. But fucked if I’m using that.
Self-hosting your own OpenID identity provider is a good solution, but not many sites let you type your own OpenID URL to log in any more :(
I’m surprised to hear people don’t like Discourse, I really enjoy the layout and find following threads much easier than a traditional forum. Maybe it’s because I was never really into traditional forums lol
an alternative is flarum. https://discuss.flarum.org/
