Forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool.
Largely because the internet before the mid-2000s was a fairly decent place to be. Some of those old forums are still running, and are still way more intelligent than reddit.
But I would guess a large percentage succumbed to attacks from spammers, ddos, seo stuffers, etc, until the admins decided it wasn't worth it. Oh almost all of them had their password db hacked at some point, whether they told you or not, which pushes people to centralized services.
You say forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool, but Something Awful is still going and has always been $10.
I really don't want to be the product anymore. I would gladly pay for a good service with reasonable moderation.
I'm paying for Discord right now, even.
In practice in the present its understood that this is an uneconomical idea
Maybe its free APIs that are a zero interest rate phenomenom
No, all the alternatives are just terrible, I can't see myself using your alternative either.
One does not simply: Ban self hosters
The majority of communities centralizing into Reddit, Discord, Facebook, et al. has been a mistake and is a stupid textbook lesson of why the internet was designed as a distributed network.
You might also discover that bakeries might not want to bake swastika cakes for you, venues might not want to be let out for hosting your marches, decent advertisers might not want to run ads on your podcast, etc, etc. It's a free country, just because someone's being a monster doesn't compel me to do business with them.
This problem predates the Internet and is a strong argument against mob violence as a form of protest. For example race riots in the US invariably occur in low income black neighborhoods, and the result is a bunch of black businesses get looted and destroyed. The mob is not capable of going to where the elite are and doing real damage to them so instead they trash their own neighbors and perpetuate the cycle of oppression. Similarly the cancelers tend to participate in communities that largely share their views and then destroy those communities over minor affronts.
The context in which the GP was speaking was running a forum. I've responded to it.
You've responded by going on tangents about personal blowback for personal activities and, strangely enough, protests.
That's not the threat vector that people trying to self-host forums tend to face - and even when it is, it's not that different from regular, run-of-the-mill mill stalking/and/or/harassment/chan-board-brigading/sub-brigading that anyone running any forum, self-hosted or not has to deal with.
[1]: Largely accidentally, as they earn it through being the most "pearl-clutching"-iest community on the internet.
Worst case, with Lemmy, some server op decides to rage quit and shut down the server, and you're left in the same situation as if HN decided to just shut down without notice. In the other scenario, with Lemmy, you do the same thing you would if the same thing happened at HN: either play along or take your ball and go home.
You're right that being federated doesn't magically make people into reasonable humans. But, at least with Lemmy, you have an easy option to start up your own server if you don't like how someone is running one that you participate on.
FWIW, in the context of the fediverse where there are reportedly instances run by actual neo-Nazis, it's both wrong and confusing to label someone a fascist for instituting a policy designed to keep those people out. You can disagree with the policy, but it's particular important to choose accurate labels here.
Allowing communities to decide for themselves: Great.
Banning anyone who wants to use your supposedly open source & decentralized software from using certain words that you deem inappropriate in American English is not acceptable. Spanish people are not allowed to use the word for the color black, for example.
"Fascism" is correctly used to describe a set of far-right ultranationalistic and militaristic ideologies that are directly responsible for the deaths of millions of people. If you're going to use that label, I want to at least see overt racism if not actual calls for violence.
This example is particularly egregious because the brand of authoritarianism we're looking at is antifa, which quite literally defines itself in opposition to fascism. The far right does not have a monopoly on authoritarianism, and using the word "fascist" to describe left-wing authoritarianism gives up rhetorical ground that you don't want to sacrifice.
And what you are saying is a stretch.
Or is that your intention?
So that cat is kinda out of the bag.
Currently I'm looking at lemmy.ml. It has its issues, but they removed the hardcoded "slur filter" awhile back, and the UI is imo reasonable for non-technical users. Bonus points for being decentralized.
I think getting this particular community onto a private Discourse server would be a heavy lift, and I'm not eager to add a server for 10k DAU's to my AWS bill. Imo Discord is a non-starter, for a variety of reasons.
It's unfortunate that no substantial competitor to reddit is currently available. I would really like to see an alternative for those of us with niche communities. And it would be doubly great if reddit.com kept all the "outrage porn" that hits their front page, which seems to be what they're optimizing for anyway.
For as many years as so many of us have been watching reddit's continual decline, it seems like a site that hosts small communities and offers similar functionality should have arisen by now. I think there are a lot of moderator-types such as myself who value the opportunity to serve our respective communities and would be happy to send a few dollars a month to a site that offered reddit-style forum hosting in order to provide a place online for people to gather and exchange information.
It's going to be really hard for them to grow a real userbase as long as it's bottlenecked that way.
where will you go?