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".
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!
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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.
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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 was 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.
I still see a legacy of that when a forum for game modding requires you create an account to download.
Yeah but that’s the old way. Today you’d sign in with one of the big accounts, or, even better, a passkey that seamlessly moves around with you.
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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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Sadly this is very common for small game developers (and even large ones) to move entirely to Discord to avoid paying or managing a dedicated forum
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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?
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.
It could be argued that web forums were an answer to older system that came before it and the problems with them. Systems like Usenet and Fidonet BBS's were federated system, and web forums are actually newer than that.
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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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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
Good they left reddit, less good they aren't having an official presence on a federated platform. I no longer have any intention of creating community-specific accounts (forums or whatever) anymore so unlikely to participate.
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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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.
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'm happy that forums are making a come back. Missed visiting all my early forums, in my early Internet days.
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