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.
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.
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.
True but the downside is exposure and footfall. Subreddits work well as people can dip into them easily from elsewhere in Reddit, both new users and regular contributors can keep an eye from their feeds.
A forum is on it's own and only people out looking specifically for the forum or who know about Jellyfin will go looking for it, and it won't pop up in people's feeds. The Internet used to be littered with forums, but social media is the very reason they fell out of fashion.
But users have also created a Jellyfin community on Lemmy: jellyfin@lemmy.ml
Yeah, but at the same time Reddit is kind of an awaful place for getting tech support for things like this. It's great for general discussion, but as a mod you have no real power to do things like move support requests from "general" and into a space where it will be highly visible by those willing to lend support.
Forums are better for community management than link aggregators along every axis except for footfall.
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
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
I find the biggest problem with Lemmy and these federated apps is that search engine indexing kinda sucks right now. They get pushed so far down the bottom of the results, you only really see them when you search site:lemmy.ml or whatever.
I believe this was a good decision. Hopefully in the future search engine indexing will improve. Otherwise I can't see Lemmy being as useful as Reddit.
It makes sense for fediverse instances to have very low SEO (search engine ranking) as the content is split up across many different websites and domains.
It's also very annoying to crosslink content on the fediverse. So there is far fewer links between discussions. The network graph is way less interconnected, and that hurts search indexing.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
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.
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!
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 too remember those bygone days of the modem handshake sound.
I had that as my cellphone ringtone for so long. An intern at work asked me once why my ringtone was the sound that a fax machine makes, and I could help but think "Oh, you sweet summer child."
This reminded me announcement of Gear Grinding Games about moving from reddit... but this happen long before blackout.
Some people have luck or talent to feel the $h17 before something happen.
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
Plex is better overall currently imo having tried both recently. It's just simply more mature software where things just work and it has a ton more features.
Jellyfin is pretty awesome though in its own right and heading in a great direction.
It mostly comes down to personal preference honestly.
Jellyfin is open-source and more focused on your own selfhosted media. I, too, bought a Plex pass years ago and have enjoyed Plex but they've been adding a bunch of crap to their interface.
I'm big on free open-source software but I won't be biased and say that Jellyfin has some rough edges, but it works well enough for me to watch movies with my wife. Plex is a bit smoother and more production-ready for those power users that host Plex for several others.
I'd encourage you to try it out if for nothing more than exposing yourself to alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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 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.
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"
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