I don’t know what Lemmy is. With decentralization I mean things as Purism forums, KDE forum, GNOME forum, Pipi & Tina forums … you get my point. That is the true spirit of decentralization. In none of the forums I am registered there is an AI bot issue.
Federated services have indeed often some issues. In my opinion it has nothing to do with being federated, but with bad design decisions. Sometimes even intended “to moderate”. But that is a different story. I did not speak about federated services.
It is an unwritten law that centralized platforms become worse over time at some point. Even if there is that one example you can show that never becomes intentional worse, it just proofs the common case. Decentralization prevents this by delivering alternatives. But if Reddit and Discord ate all forums (Discord is not even able to do real forums stuff), where is the alternative if things go wrong? That is the issue. And I don’t know a single centralized case where things did not go wrong in long term.
It seems to require signup to add/make a network ‘node’ but I have used an established instance to try it out. it is sort of like reddit, though the non-reddit-scrape posts get far less engagement than the reddit ones which bring the reddit comments. It is a try at something new but is niche and original content on the instance I have tried out seems echo-chamberish.
I’m not sure what the Pipi & Tina forum would be. But, in my opinion, most of those suffer from “groupthink” … which combined with the lack of downvoting, usually results in “moderation”.
Furthermore, there are a lot of missing forums:
Where do you have something as active and as useful as the DIY subreddit?
Or, it turns out I’m traveling to Portugal, and the portugal subreddit is a better source of “unknown unknown” information than any other place I’ve found.
Hiking: It’s hard to find a good long-hike forum outside of reddit (e.g. places to learn about hikes like SF2T (Santa Fe to Taos) or The Big SEKI Loop or The Colorado Trail or the Idaho Centennial Trail). There are websites for more/detailed info, but you don’t know to search for them without a forum discussion. And if you have a question, the reddit forums are indispensable: /r/thruhiking, /r/ultralight, /r/backpacking . I will say, though, that Gemini/AI’s are pretty good.
There is definitely some truth to that. One tactic I have learned is to follow a ton of communities, as some of them are dead while others are very active. I never really used reddit other than to find some obscure piece of information so I have no reference for what is considered to be good engagement.
The only way that engagement level will change is to contribute as well, whether content or comments. I have posted memes that were simply upvoted while others have sparked a lot of conversation.
I feel like the trend is also generational. Typing on a KB is easy for even long walls of text. Back in the day there was USENET or nothing, maybe local hobby clubs or amateur radio nets for an interest topic but for most of humanity you checked out a book from the library, how many even tried to access microfilm or microfiche and surf that resource? THere are plenty in the gen-z era who only use a computer at work and surf everything on a phone, good luck banging out forum responses on that. There was a short period in human history where first academics had USENET before every interest topic website incorporated a forum, then digg, discord, and reddit took the arduous responsibility to manage forums from websites and centralized it; then either they burned down the library along with AI botting or the people lost interest to engagement psyche PhDs who hack the population for insta navel gazing and driving elections. see aso Sarah Wynn-Williams - Careless People ISBN 978-125039123-0
Stop