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?
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)
Is there some kind of “so, you’re on a small instance,
Captain America advisors on the subject of the Fediverse? Now that would be on-point.
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.
The GameFAQs boards are still quite active as well, as long as you’re willing to put up with neckbeards and bronies.
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.
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.
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.
