I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.
You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy’s default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I’m aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the “chat” option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by “latest comment” which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.
I also notice that I don’t pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They’re just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don’t post for a while and miss them if they’re gone for too long.
EDIT: given this is my most upvoted post on here to date I’d say the answer is yes.
I feel like forums sucked too because of the lack of sorting.
They just don’t scale well to many users. Once you hit a certain number of users, without some method to sort, its just information overload.
Hell, forum threads that are too long inevitably go completely off the rails and become off topic troves.
I think there has to be a better intermediate format, like perhaps a mix of systems, but I think the main thing that makes reddit-likes suck, is their systems of governance.
Something I realized very quickly with lemmy for instance, is that its the not at all benevolent dictator positions that are the big problem. The main incentives for people choosing to spend their time in mod positions still remains to impose their will, whether that be their opinion or power over others speech.
There is something at its core which is wrong with this system at scale. It allows for mods to collect up critical masses of people before then knowing that due to that critical mass they have captive audiences where there is high friction to leave or start something else.
Lemmy has a very bandaid “solution” for this in that there can be multiple of any given community/subreddit, but they all suffer from the fact that whatever a moderator wants is what happens, and even in the worst case scenarios, that is just moved up one layer to admins, who are incentived to appear as hands off as possible on moderators, lest they get turned on by the people who “help” them.
Reddit sucks because of a lot of other profit driven reasons, but I think this is the main structural problem and lemmy shares in this.
Forums have this problem too by the way, but its just that forums are so separate and so bad at handling massive amounts of casual users, that they run into this far less.