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Why decentralization doesn't work for forums (nightash.net)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 1 week ago* (5 children)

Also, is there any centralized forum that is more active than the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/Pylova/Mbin)?

It looks like there are on the order of maybe 20-30k total monthly active users of the threadiverse, though I had to cobble this together from a few sources, so if you have any solid numbers I’d love to see them.

As much drama as there is/was, the Something Awful Forums are a Web 1.0 old school centralized forum which has been around for over a quarter of a century and is still going. At their peak they had hundreds of thousands of users.

I don’t think the argument that in order to host a large forum, you need to be decentralized holds any water. I know you’re not directly making that argument but I’ve seen others make it in their replies.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    In the current world where most of the forum discussion happen on Reddit, there is little space left for another active centralized forum.

    The decentralized approach has at least the pro to offer something different (you can leave for another instance instead of depending on a single corporation for access).

    Creating another centralize Reddit brings exactly the same issues current Reddit has (enshittification), and you don't even have the userbase to make up for it. Digg 2.0 launch was messed up, but even if they managed better it would be very difficult for them to get enough traction to really compete.

    Bluesky is better that Twitter in a lot of aspect, but it stills fails to replace it, and the network effect keep bringing people back to Twitter to see "what is happening".

    Vicinus replied in the other comment for numbers.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

    In the current world where most of the forum discussion happen on Reddit, there is little space left for another active centralized forum.

    I strongly disagree, and there are tons of other centralized forums that are doing just fine. They’re not as big as Reddit but some have an order of magnitude (at least) more users than Lemmy does.

    The decentralized approach has at least the pro to offer something different (you can leave for another instance instead of depending on a single corporation for access).

    There are lots of ways to offer something different, and new upstarts have been able to gain traction by offering something different countless times in the past.

    Especially if we’re talking about a forum for the masses with a high number of users, the vast majority of those users simply don’t care about centralization vs federation.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago* (1 child)

    I was talking mostly about generalist forums. Indeed topic-specific forums are still active, but that's not something OP's forum, Reddit or the Threadiverse tries to do.

    They’re not as big as Reddit but some have an order of magnitude (at least) more users than Lemmy does.

    I just checked https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php , it shows 2,369 users logged in. A single instance like Lemmy.world has 4880 daily active users.

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