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?
Mastodon is much more this way than Lemmy, in my experience. I honestly don’t know too many Lemmy communities that are that way, but kbin / mbin will let you interact with Mastodon users on a chat basis in addition to Lemmy communities.
Usenet still exists, and there are tons of old fashioned forums online, some of them good. Lemmy has its attractions but it is trying to be Reddit and maybe succeeding a little too well.
I have thought for a while that the next “reddit” should be usenet with a client having advanced filtering, local scoring, etc. Maybe where the client reports to/reads from a shared spam database.
nodebb and discourse are working on activitypub support. See https://crag.social/@devnull/111732273308478221
Many instances have a chat community. Some examples: !chat@beehaw.org !chat@lemmy.one !chat@iusearchlinux.fyi !chat@midwest.social !general@lemmy.today !chat@lemmy.world
I dont mean a chat/conversation-specific community, I mean a collection of communities that are more people interacting than links being posted.
Especially for hobby, parenting, philosophy, politics, technical discussions, etc.
For hobbies, depends, but there is the general pinned post in !knitting@lemmy.world which list a lot of crafting communities: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/842186
For parenting: !parenting@lemmy.world
Politics, you should be able to find a lot by searching that word into https://lemmyverse.net/
Finance? !finance@lemmy.ml
The thing is that people tend to post links as you can’t really force people to post if they don’t want to (or if they critical mass isn’t there). I’m guilty of that in the !parenting@lemmy.world for instance, as I don’t have kids yet, I can only but post articles.
Maybe the instance I’m on is wonky, because I can’t even find those communities - I just get the “top”/”default” type communities ala reddit: technology, news, etc, which are all linked mass media articles.
Honestly do you have any examples of this happening here on Lemmy? Lemmy is not Reddit.
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?
More policy and culture than implementation. Rarely see pages of links to mass media sites on your average phpBB, though.
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)
tildes.net might be what you are looking for.
but right now it’s invitation only
It’s been invite-only for all five and a half years I’ve been there so I wouldn’t expect that to ever change. Fortunately it’s really easy to get an invite code. Just post in the official subreddit and the mods or another user will give you a code. It’s just enough of a minor roadblock that it helps filter out bad actors.
Personally I prefer Lemmy. But if you’re like OP and looking for conversation focused alternatives tildes is worth joining.
I guess this feature request would help you?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3809
So communities could disallow link posts
The opposite of that request, yes.
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?
Ah, I read the requestor as wanting to disallow body text.
You can try us if you are interested hilariouschaos.com
I heard that this is the new project from exploding-heads, is it correct?
No.
HC is its own thing, and its purpose is for fun. Whatever fun means to you as long as it’s not illegal.
The primary reason HC was created is for the purpose of having fun.
For some, posting political shit is ‘fun’, so you will see some political posts.
We are pretty strongly adamant about not having a political bias in our instances.
So we don’t care if you post left or right shit. Upvotes and down votes are there for a reason and our community can decide what they like and don’t like with those functions.
We do not take posts down or ban users based on our own personal ideologies.
There will be no favoring of either political side. Right and left are allowed.
I think this is why people have that assumption.
