Sounds like you’re asking for Lemmy.
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Ask Lemmy
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Don't leave them hanging! Where can they find this "Lemmy" that you speak of?
I understand that Lemmy can be viewed as an answer to this question, but it's not for me. I'm looking for an actual forum, with a sense of community.
The community here is small enough that I've started recognizing names.
The whole decentralization aspect of the Feidverse seems great to prevent enshittification, or to prevent a billionaire from buying and tanking the place, but I don't really see it ever appealing to normal, non tech savvy people.
I don't understand what the gripe is. You're already here. The only nuisance is picking an instance. After that, you don't need to worry about it.
Find an active, niche forum you have interest in and visit their Off-Topic section.
Yep. I spent a lot of time on ROM site forums. They all had one back in the day ~
The most active sub forums weren't about ROMs or Emulation.
The whole decentralization aspect of the Feidverse seems great to prevent enshittification, or to prevent a billionaire from buying and tanking the place, but I don't really see it ever appealing to normal, non tech savvy people.
There's nothing "tech savvy" about lemmy. It's like picking email: pick a website, signup, ..., that's it.
I totally get the tech savvy feeling. There's usually too much information and options. With email it is easier to say "pick one at random, they are all the same". Lemmy seems very different at first, you see a big list of instances, each one with it's descriptions, some of them stating ideals and visions, it feels like a more important choice than what it is.
All this even before reading anything about defederation!
Most people needs that first choice made for them and figure thing out once inside.
What is Lemmy in one sentence?
Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit, you can visit https://phtn.app/ to have a look at the content, and install an app using https://vger.app/settings/install.
The more detailed explanation
That was the very easy version. No need to understand federation, servers, or any technical jargon.
If you are still reading, it means that you want to know more about how things are running.
[email protected] for people interested in that topic
It's a community choice. Has nothing to do with "tech savvy". There are generalist communities, language orientated communities, activity orientated communities, and many more. Presenting it as a "technological choice" is just a meme at this point. It's like saying "I want to live Paris because they speak French and love the night life" vs "you know what, I like beaches more and the island life where people are more about easy living, so I'll go to Zanzibar". But people frame it as if they had to choose the city because of the altitude, soil composition, which hemisphere it is on, the greenhouse ppms, and the wetbulb temperature. And then it's repeated ad nauseam to keep the meme alive.
Stop helping Facebook and Reddit by framing it as a technological choice. It's a cultural one. "idgaf" --> take a generalist website. "I'm queer and it's important" --> LGBTQIA+ website. "bits and bytes for me please" --> technological website. "I just can't stop cumming" --> NSFW website.
Besides the active forum with an off-topic section recommendation, I've gotten the sense a lot of this style of communication has shifted from forums to group chats in whatever messaging app people are using, whether it's Discord or Whatsapp or whathaveyou.
It's unfortunate as those aren't the same style at all, but seems to be how things are now. It's part of why I wish more fediverse instances would instead operate with a site mindset and try to build distinct identities. A few do and they're much more interesting for it imo, feeling like the small community site they are in a good way.
Interesting insight. Perhaps the underlying issue is privacy. The web is public. In a world where literally everyone is on it (this was not the case in the 90s), having conversations there may just feel a bit icky for many people. You need to protect yourself with pseudonyms, you're always subconsciously censoring personal information from comments, and so on. Semi-private group chats take a lot of this pressure off. I get that.
https://forums.somethingawful.com/
..and yes it is worth the 5 bux to sign up. Keeps out the trolls/repeat offenders. There's a dark theme you can enable in user control panel once yiu have an account.
There's also a mobile app called "Awful" that's very well made.
Is probably one of the largest general traditional bulletin boards left standing that isn't dedicated to piracy like rutracker.org.
I also visit knockout.chat because it's where the Facepunch forums refugees landed after Garry killed their forum. It's not nearly as big.
Sorry, don't know any more but I'll watch this thraad for sure.
I’m looking for an actual forum, with a sense of community. The whole decentralization aspect of the Feidverse seems great to prevent enshittification, or to prevent a billionaire from buying and tanking the place, but I don’t really see it ever appealing to normal, non tech savvy people.
This seems like a non-sequitur. How does decentralization prevent a forum from being "actual" or make it appropriate only for "tech savvy" people? I don't get it.
Decentralization is an anecdotal technical detail. What you seem to be looking for are human qualities, but that question is relevant for any and all forums.
Is Something Awful still going?
It is, and I find myself going back there a lot more since I left Reddit back when the API stuff was happening. It's way more curated and moderated.
Yep, I visit them more than any site now these days.
It's usually the same people in most of the threads, so the community feeling is definitely here