Ask Lemmy

Might be handy if Lemmy allowed to hide karma altogether. You could still up-/downvote (depending on the instance, only upvoting allowed). Or places where karma is disabled by default.

Yes. I’m still on one or two but they’re definitely diminished. They had a bad habit of degenerating into factionalism, or losing their plurality of viewpoints due to popularist ideological purity purges.

I miss dial-up BBSes that had nothing more than a wall of text, like SASSy was in Montreal. Single line system, no user names or logins, 7 bit ASCII, no colors, no sound, no files.

You just kept dialing until you got the line. Then you'd download all the lines from the last line you left off, then either typed in your stuff or pasted it. If you were super lucky, the sysop would barge in while you were typing.

It was great. Really felt like technology and people mixing well, we even eventually met IRL with "GT"s, Get Togethers.

I miss the sense of fun and adventure and my youth. Especially my youth.

I do too, but all the ones I used to visit have gone offline, and whenever I try looking for one on some relevant topic the most recent post is from 2017.

Have the same feeling, I actually thought about making an alternative threadiverse client in the style of phpBB. But I believe there should still be an option to display comments like threads, it is just easier to use I believe. Default should definitely be new though for comments and posts. Its surprising how well threadiverse would be compatible with message boards.

Which also brought up the question with the fediverse being so open how different people interact with it using different clients.

I also notice that I don't pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They're just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don't post for a while and miss them if they're gone for too long.

I feel unseen.

Those still exist. You just have the wrong address.

obligatory RIP kongregate

Mgl, not paying attention to subreddit names and treating everything like I'm swimming through a sea of floating ideas, when posting, is part of why I'm on Lemmy today. Reddit's sadistic mods didn't like it much.

I miss UUCP style forums. They had threading that worked and the concept of 'i've alread read this so don't show it to me again'. Together those made it easy to see well thought out responses weeks latter.

All other forums are worse. They encourage writing something quick - long well thought writing won't be found because by the time someone gets it down the topic is dead.

though the original trolls were from such forums. It should be no surprise that everyone else has them - they change nothing.

Not really. There are so many comments in a single Lemmy thread that continuing it would be a fools errand. Old forum threads were not much better besides often having more direct conversations with people. But I find that to be much better on Lemmy than on Reddit too.