It seems like any platform that features link aggregation is soon overrun by bots and self-promoters trying to drive traffic, and pages and pages of link posts versus pages and pages of people talking.
Are there any lemmy instances or other defederated networks that focus on Q&A, niche communities, and people conversing, instead?
Some forums are still reasonably active. I use Whirlpool fairly regularly. Mostly tech related, but has lots of other sections too.
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/
If you search around you can find others.
This thread is a great example of the big downside of being on a smaller instance: OP was seemingly unaware and unable to subscribe to many cool communities and was stuck with the “defaults”.
Perhaps admins and mods of smaller instances could be doing more to educate their users about how to find stuff in the wider Threadiverse?
When we had the big migration last year everyone quickly learned how to search for a community, how you had to do it twice for it to show up etc. But now it’s no longer a common topic of conversation so newer users don’t realise, and to make matters worse every single mobile app seems to handle search differently.
Is there some kind of “so, you’re on a small instance, here’s what that means” type of resource already hanging around somewhere?
(OP, get yourself on lemmyverse.net/communities)
It’s pretty heavily curated, but it’s where I go for non-bot discussion on any variety of topics. Sorted hierarchically, and they keep out the riff raff pretty actively.
I originally wanted to join tildes, but I never could get an invite. so I just kinda abandoned it and moved to lemmy instead.
they seem to go more with a walled garden approach and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that kind of environment. but I’m sure it works well for those who participate.
I always thought there was no big difference between link aggregators and forums, and that the first is more an extension of the other, at least it felt like it in my experience. What would you say really sets them apart?
I guess this feature request would help you?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3809
So communities could disallow link posts
sorry what do you mean?
the feature request is suggesting the ability to disallow link posts, as well as the ability to disallow text posts
Ability to disallow certain kinds of posts (text posts/link posts) in specific communities
Currently it is not possible to disallow using the text field or URL field in specific communities.
Similarly one could imagine a setting to disallow using the URL field, for example in a conversation-only community.
which did you want?
