To be honest even for small communities I just find discord an extremely difficult format to follow., especially because search of previous conversations is an afterthought (????!???!??).

I think it is easy to miss how powerful the reddit type thread structure is among the noise of how toxic and shitty reddit itself can be. I love lemmy because I think the reddit type thread structure is in most ways a direct upgrade to message boards/forums. The problem with message boards was that as a thread gets longer the probability increases steadily to 100% that the thread will be utterly derailed by people arguing over the most trivial detail of the conversation. This seems like a weird thing to empathize, but consistently I would find a thread on a message board that felt like a goldmine of interesting information and ALWAYS I would find to my consternation that the last three pages to the thread were people arguing over some stupid fact one of the commenters used incorrectly early on in the thread to make some ancillary side point.

The Reddit structure smoothly siphons off these side conversations and allows the wisdom of the crowd to direct the focus of the conversation through upvotes and downvotes. Does the Reddit structure get petty, toxic and judgemental? Yes, but I think it still qualifies as a near direct improvement on messageboards if the objective of the messageboard is to be a curated source of expert/niche conversations. Lemmy is awesome, you can learn so much just from reading quality comments sections.

[–] helios@social.ggbox.fr 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Definitely. The comment structure is what got me into reddit in the first place. I love that Lemmy uses it as well.

[–] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yeah and it is easy to think of Lemmy as a shadow of Reddit because it is so much smaller, but even if for the foreseeable future that is highly unlikely to change, now is the first time the form of messageboard popularized by Reddit can finally grow and evolve beyond whatever limited vision the company that owns Reddit has and that is huge. We are in a new era of social media. Now anybody can experiment with tweaking the Reddit form by adding this, taking away that, changing how upvotes or downvotes work… who knows?

This is just the VERY beginning of exploring the space of social network structures like Reddit and it is going to be awesome. People don’t get excited for new social networks anymore (corporations have made them so repulsive and unhealthy) but this is a super exciting time of innovation and evolution in the different ways we bring humans together in conversations online.