Why do people think they need these big centralized authoritarian "communities" on the internet? In the late 90's and early 2000's we ran PHP forums from our parents houses.
On reddit, I can click the "random" button and immediately discover a community that I can already post in. Do I want to talk on r/entrepreneur, or r/galaxytab (the actual two first subreddits that "random" took me to just now)? I can do that right now, and while there I also see the orangered envelope telling me I got replies to comments I made on r/zelda (also a true story of what happened when I just clicked "random").
As someone in the film industry, I lean very heavily DVXuser, Cinema5D, and Gear Source. Three different sites with three different cultures and ways of doing things. I really like them and they are great resources, but frankly, I find myself on Reddit most of the time anyway because it’s just easier to get the information I need from a variety of communities all in one spot.
This is not a big deal for you, it's the biggest deal for me. I refuse to make any other registrations unless absolutely necessary (healthcare/hospital website etc). If your website asks me for a password, I don't care enough to register.
We good import certain "branches" into our BBSes, respond, and then at night we dialed up the nearest BBS or system and exchanged our messages. Sooner or later the entire collection was exchanged, and everyone was up to date. Not just that, you could slice off a piece and then splice it back in (FidoNet), and it still worked!
You can have a discussion in comp.compression and lo, people would discuss only compression! You wanted to chat about something off the wall? You can find it under the alt. branch, and lo people talked off the wall stuff!
There is nothing new under the sun.
The centralized experience doesn't hurt either. It's just easier enough to search for a subreddit on Reddit, than it is to scour through Google search results for a forum topic.
Having said that, by the same token I really don't quite understand why some modern decentralized or federated alternatives haven't taken off more. The tech is there, some of the options I've seen are pretty good or at least promising, but it feels like often there's some social angle that gets in the way (simple critical mass, branding/positioning, complete lack of enough moderation to at least get something off the ground, etc). It seems to me a decentralized or federated system is a good fit for Reddit-style network structures, with lots of smaller nodes and community membership patterns that are relatively circumscribed for most people.
>A Lemmy frontend based on phpBB 3.3.
>Flagship instance for lemmyBB