I’m looking for a study group for a specific maths textbook I’m reading

Discord math forum is too big and my queries get swamped so I don’t use it

I’d appreciate some advice on this and also how to develop my federated use of the internet

“Now”? Try 10 years ago, at the very least.

Funny thing…an internet forum group from 23 years ago is slowly reforming because everyone is sick of the same thing re:socmed

without forums or decentralized social services i wouldn’t have met my husband

Fuck Reddit, the great bastion of censorship

I’m getting two points from the article. One is addressed handily by the Fediverse, the other is not.

First the centralized (I prefer to say “urbanized”) nature of social media means a handful of companies control all the conversations. The Fediverse is a decent (though not perfect) solution to that problem, and I think everyone on here knows that.

However, the article also talks about the problems with the format of social media, not just who’s hosting the platform. On traditional forums, conversations can last for years, but on Reddit, Discord, etc. new topics quickly bury old ones, no matter how lively those old topics are. Sure, you can choose to sort by “last comment” which replicates the traditional forum presentation with topic bumping, but it’s not the default, even on Lemmy, so 90% of people won’t bother.

I get to know people on traditional forums, even miss them if they leave, but on Reddit, comments are just disembodied thoughts manifesting in the ether. That may be due to the size of the community rather than the format, though.

The worst is Discord. It doesn’t show up in search engines and somehow you have to know that is where you are “supposed” to go for help. Privacy issues aside, I am fine with discord for playing games with friends or big conventions/LAN parties, but I don’t understand why anyone would use it as a forum.

Here is a chrome extension that copies all messeges and media from a discord server you’re a part of.

In case the stuff on a server is what keeps you coming back.

plenty of pointed discourse forums out there. I agree that the search engines may be the problem. You have to know where to look.

No, enshittified search engines are only catalogging those because they’re in the AI bed with them.

Your Favorite Forum still rules.

Maybe Lemmy is a 2020s version of phpBB (the forum software, which is open source like Lemmy is). Lemmy and phpBB can both be hosted by anyone, but of course the interesting thing about Lemmy is that Lemmy servers can share their content with each other.

Forums are still alive in ultra niche communities. My favorites: Badger and Blade for wet shaving, Snuffhouse for snuff tobacco, Quantnet for quantitative finance. All of these gather way better content and users than their Reddit counterpart, which usually devolves into memes and pic of the day stuff

You should be using Lemmy instead of Reddit. It’s defederated, and it’s spread out over 600 Instances in many different countries. This way, one rich egomaniac can’t ruin it for everyone else.

I hate Discord.
The interface is clunky. They always try to sell you useless (at least for me) options. What with the users posting so many gifs?

There are tons of forums out there, the search engines just won’t show them to you. The search engines are the real problem.