Technology

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".

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.

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.

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 "

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.

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.

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.