I’ll start:

  • RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
  • XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
  • IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
  • Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)
  • Nyoelle@beehaw.org
    5·
    1 year ago

    Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite… how different those are.

    And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can’t easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.

    • Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      Discord servers are also closed communities which makes it impossible to search for info through search engine

      • Nyoelle@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yep. It is a bit funny, and sad to see how we are regressing, despite the technology going forward…

      • Dudewitbow@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        There are opt in bots in deveopment that allows individual servers to be indexed for search engine visibility

    • alongwaysgone@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      It’s also very hard, if not impossible in some cases to find old conversations on discord, vs forums where they’re mostly preserved for eternity.

    • knowncarbage@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m hoping Discord is passing phase I can largely ignore. I will deal with it if I need to but it seems like world of proprietary crapware.

    • kris40k@beehaw.org
      0·
      1 year ago

      trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.

      • hodgepodgehomonculus@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        undefined> trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.

        I agree wholeheartedly, Discord is great for being a live chatroom, and for chatting over voice chat with friends, for any other purpose it is awful, and I am so baffled by so many product decisions to move to Discord. I feel like its a bunch of younger kids that played with their friends on it, and it has become the Hammer they use for every communication scenario, when most things are not nails.

  • Kodachrome@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I’ve ever seen.

    • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      Microsoft Outlook, from what I’ve seen of it, is horrible compared to Thunderbird. Why anyone would use the former is beyond me. You can’t even easily see message headers, so how the hell are you supposed to know whether a message is legit?

    • Sordid@beehaw.org
      0·
      1 year ago

      Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there’s some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.

      • Kaldo@beehaw.org
        0·
        1 year ago

        That’s what I used twitter for tbh. Since everyone is on it it’s easy to follow people, get instant updates and maybe even discover something new through the people you follow and their likes. It’s really a shame it went to shit, it was the lurkers perfect tool, especially when it comes to artists or content creators.

        • Kajo [he/him] 🌈@beehaw.org
          0·
          1 year ago

          Not everyone is on twitter, but lots (all?) of Content Management Systems and blogs have a RSS feed.

          As an academic, I’m syndicated to several labs and research groups which have their own websites, but don’t care about being visible on Twitter.

  • Black616Angel@feddit.de
    2·
    1 year ago

    Forums and Wikis vs. Discord

    Yes I know, they shouldn’t serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays people communities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.

    • crius@beehaw.org
      2·
      1 year ago

      Discord is not even remotely comparable and whoever think that it is (not saying you OP) don’t understand the basics on how internet works.

      To put it simply:

      You can’t search the content of a discord server on the publicly available internet. You need to be on discord and for that, the server need to continue to exists. To top it all, things you might search are written all over the place (channels, threads, etc) and the search is clearly the search is a “chat” search, as it should be, thus terrible to actually find what you need.

  • mim@lemmy.sdf.org
    2·
    1 year ago

    Agree on RSS.

    Don’t have enough experience with XMPP.

    IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)

    Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it’s what old school forums lacked.

    • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      1 year ago

      The real problem with IRC had always been that it didn’t really scale. It’s fine for a few hundred people, but eventually shit just breaks.

    • tabbycatenthusiast@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      0·
      1 year ago

      Can you elaborate?

      I personally vastly prefer the comment tree style of conversation - I’ve been online since the bulletin board era, but I can’t find myself going back to it ever again. I find it infinitely easier to follow a conversation when all the responses are in one place.

      The communal feeling is indeed missing in news aggregators, though I’m not sure whether it’s more about the style of conversation or just me getting older and not being willing to invest time in online communities as much.

      • Thrashy@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        I spent a fair portion of my youth on unthreaded forums and I kinda miss the way that discussion could ramble and sidebar conversations would spawn within posts and weave in and out of the main topic. With threaded/tree-format forums, individual conversations are easier to follow, but you get far enough down any one branch of a conversation and it’s just two people arguing without any moderating input from the rest of the group.

        • lml@remy.city
          1·
          1 year ago

          Thanks for reminding me of that! I haven’t been around since the old old forum days, but from my time on Minecraft server Enjin forums, I definitely remember arguments going on, outside of the main discussion, and every once in awhile you’d get a ‘settle down you two’ from someone. The tree format kind of takes the ‘one big room, many conversations going on’ vibe away.

    • flatbield@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think you can put this under the Linux command line. I.E. the bash shell and the commonly installed Linux command set. Way powerful for certain things.

  • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    Not much. That’s the thing about FOSS—it keeps getting better. It is not subject to enshittification like e.g. Windows is.

  • nyan@lemmy.cafe
    1·
    1 year ago

    USENET. Replacements aren’t distributed, or make discussion group discovery difficult, or don’t have decent native desktop clients, or some combination of those.

      • nyan@lemmy.cafe
        1·
        1 year ago

        Because clients can present very different interfaces, it’s difficult to point to a single guide, but the basic principles are simple enough: get a client, point it at a server ( https://www.eternal-september.org/ provides a free one if your ISP no longer has its own, but it doesn’t carry the alt.binaries subhierarchy), download the list of available groups, subscribe to a few, read, and enjoy.

        As for which client, I use Pan, but that’s Linux-specific. For other OSs, I haven’t a clue. If you happen to use Thunderbird for email, I think it still has the necessary support.

        Keep in mind, though: USENET died in part from lack of good moderation options, so all you can do about bad actors and spam floods is block messages from those posters from being visible in your client. Moderated groups did exist, but the system basically amounted to one person having to okay every single message posted, which meant there was a single point of failure. For instance, when the moderator of rec.arts.anime.info died unexpectedly, it became impossible for anyone to post to the group.

        90% of the news hierarchy is a wasteland these days anyway—I use it mostly for monitoring some of the mailing lists from my Linux distro, which happen to have a USENET repeater. The only other area doing well is the binaries groups.

        If you’re interested in running a server, start by making sure you have a good-sized data pipe—I’m not sure what the average size of a feed is now, but ten years ago it was measured in the tens of gigabytes per day (mostly binaries).

  • mormegil@programming.dev
    1·
    1 year ago

    uMatrix browser extension. It has been marked archived by Gorhill, last release is two years old, you are supposed to just use uBlock [Origin]. However, it still (luckily) works fine and is exactly what I want. (Sure, I won’t install this for my parents.) The GUI to simply choose what you want the site to be allowed to do is perfect.