Edited: I liked the reddit format over typical Forums (not reddit itself)

[xiNe]

Second this post, the reddit style listing, is easier to browse latest news of jellyfin. The old fashion forum way instead spread all information around making it harder to know what is happening lately

[Mount_Linux]

Second this post, the reddit style listing, is easier to browse latest news of jellyfin. The old fashion forum way instead spread all information around making it harder to know what is happening lately

If you go to the forum homepage, on the right hand side you will see extras, then latest posts that should bring you back to that reddit feeling. If you're on mobile, scroll to the bottom and you'll see extra's, then Latest Posts.

I did like the old forum method which has a link to 'new posts', but this should work fine instead.

[Chaphasilor]

What bugs me the most about the forum approach is the lack of visibility/discoverability. I won't be scrolling through my (Reddit) feed anymore, finding out about a new, awesome plugin by chance. I likely won't find out about it at all, or at least not for some time.
The other thing is reaching users. We've gone from 50k subscribers on Reddit to ~600 right now. I'm not seeing this number grow past 5k, and that means your custom client or whatevery project you're working on will be seen by much fewer people. And this will in turn make it far less appealing for someone to put in the work to build such a client/plugin/project. At the end, I think the community will mostly stagnate, with very little third-party development happening anymore

[wtfjacks]

I actually prefer this forum.
From front page I can see what new topics were added and what sub forum they are under.
With Reddit it was scroll, scroll, scroll.
The only plus with Reddit was doing a Google search. But even then I could wade through a dozen results and numerous
answers to find a proper answer.

The forum is new and has a different feel to it. But it also gives Mods and Admins a better way of policing it for spam or trolls.
Many thanks to the jellyfin team for creating this forum and I am sure that in a few months it will feel as comfortable as my favorite chair.

[wkbt]

I love forums. They fill a different function than reddit-style link aggregators, and more often than not, is superior when it comes to sharing information. @joshuaboniface got it right. The internet took a step backwards.

[rabblehair]

I personally prefer forums as long as they are active.

[troothdotcom]

I completely agree with you. I was never a fan of forums for this exact reason but I'll take what we can get for now. I hope a better alternative comes up or this site makes the proper changes for now I'm grateful we have this

[jimmybenkins]

Yeah, people are quick to talk about the downsides of the reddit format, but there is a large upside. I don't know what to call it, so I'll just say "passive assistance". When you ask a question on reddit, your post is going to in front of thousands of eyeballs casually scrolling their feed. They'll see your post and say "hey! I had to deal with that myself!" and help you out. Honestly, the forum format is far too sequestered and categorized for my liking.

Getting help now is going to rely on one of two things:
1. The developers themselves helping you, which is something that should be avoided for all but the most technical questions because their time is precious, or
2. The right user making a conscious decision to visit this website for some reason, and happening to look at the right corner of it at the right time (probably before they post their own cry for help about something else lol, because if you're not a developer there's no other reason to come here). At the very least, response times are going to go through the roof compared to reddit.

Honestly I get wanting to give reddit the middle finger, but there's a reason the reddit format put traditional forums on the endangered species list.

[joshuaboniface]

Yeah, people are quick to talk about the downsides of the reddit format, but there is a large upside. I don't know what to call it, so I'll just say "passive assistance". When you ask a question on reddit, your post is going to in front of thousands of eyeballs casually scrolling their feed. They'll see your post and say "hey! I had to deal with that myself!" and help you out. Honestly, the forum format is far too sequestered and categorized for my liking.

Getting help now is going to rely on one of two things:
1. The developers themselves helping you, which is something that should be avoided for all but the most technical questions because their time is precious, or
2. The right user making a conscious decision to visit this website for some reason, and happening to look at the right corner of it at the right time (probably before they post their own cry for help about something else lol, because if you're not a developer there's no other reason to come here). At the very least, response times are going to go through the roof compared to reddit.

Honestly I get wanting to give reddit the middle finger, but there's a reason the reddit format put traditional forums on the endangered species list.

My counterpoints are thus:

1. Reddit is a platform primarily driven to get people to keep scrolling (as most enshitified "platforms" on the Internet are). The fact that people just happen to stumble upon posts at random times is in fact the problem I see with Reddit-style link aggregators: as soon as you post something, it's on a news feed for what, an hour, maybe day, on a very slow subreddit maybe a week? Then it falls off the face of the "forum" forever and it will never be bumped. And if you didn't happen to get eyeballs on it then (i.e. people checking "new" and not "hot"), it would be missed. Google a problem and see how many Reddit threads without solutions turn up... I have and it's a lot. I'd consider that a major negative and something that traditional forums really got right. It follows then that...

2. Reddit/link aggregators is not conducive to long-term help. Because things fall off the face of the forum in a short period, you need a robust search to find anything. Reddit's search was and continues to be pretty abysmal. Sure, Google indexes it, but Google will also index this forum, so the point is moot there. Internally, it's terrible. I've yet to see exactly how good MyBB's search is, but if it sucks, it could be improved, because myBB is FLOSS and self-hosted (we could run a bleeding edge version if we wanted to). In contrast Reddit doesn't care and will just never get around to it because of (1), history is not important to them, the next big thing to drive views is.

3. In contrast, a forum is a long-term repository of knowledge. The forum moves at a slower pace because it's long form, ensuring that new questions stay visible for quite some time. New replies bump a thread, making it visible again. The search can turn up a thread, and discussion can (should) be kept in that one thread for others to find. None of that can happen on a link aggregator without resubmitting and hoping the reddit lottery helps.

4. The decried "segmentation" is a feature, not a bug. Classifying things is important. One thing we really did not like about Reddit was its lack of classification. For instance, a huge complaint we had is that people never knew about cool new plugins. Why? Because someone would make a post about their cool new plugin, it would get a few hundred upvotes, sit on the page for a day, and then fall into the abyss (1 again). So people had to keep making "cool new plugin list" threads. Except then that would fall off the page after a few days at most, and then the cycle would repeat. Instead, here, there's a "Plugins" forum. If you're interested in plugins, you can check that forum for the information you need and it isn't mix in with numerous other topics cluttering up the feed and pushing it off the bottom.

5. Downvotes/upvotes. I may be biased, but I've had so many good questions downvoted before anyone ever saw it (why? who the fuck knows, just Redditors being Redditors I guess). A forum does not have downvotes, people do not get to decide to "silence" someones thread because of their own biases or prejudices (actual moderation notwithstanding). This is a personal thing for me, but I'm absolutely sure I'm not alone there. Downvotes are cancer on good discussion. Upvotes are not much better, since 50 people trivially upvoting something that "feels right" can lead to the same issue in reverse.

6. The "only developers will look" thing was always the case. The only thing Reddit had going for it was, as you say, a large active userbase. Without it, it would be just the same. Well, in 3 weeks our forum is almost at 1000 registered users, and if only 10% are regularly active, that's still a lot of people who can help. The best way to help here is to be what you want to see: be active and help others so that they might pay it forward and help someone else, building a robust, reliable community. Sure you might not get an answer in 30 minutes, but you will almost certainly get an answer eventually (assuming the question can be comprehended and has a meaningful answer, at least). But that leads me to...

7. Oh boy this one may get me some flak, but: the fact that Reddit was a giant site filled with casual users who could meander between subreddits at will meant that help was often, shall we say, shallow and substandard. Sure, sometimes someone might give you the right answer, but it was just as likely someone would give you the *wrong* answer. And you had absolutely no way of knowing which was which.. We actually had a big issue with lots of people recommending some very substandard and potentially "dangerous" configurations of Jellyfin because they were the "hip" things to recommend on /r/homelab or /r/selfhosting but that were not applicable to what Jellyfin does (hint: Cloudflare in front of your Jellyfin is really stupid, doesn't help anything, and violates Cloudflare's TOS; don't do it). Didn't stop those people from dropping those "knowledge bombs" in /r/jellyfin 20 times a day though. By having a closed ecosystem of our own forum, that very barrier to entry acts as a sieve to hopefully keep people knowledgeable about just our software talking about our software, not what the trend is elsewhere. And a reputation system, user levels (based on post count), and more expansive moderation (which we could have added to Reddit and were planning to soon, before the debacle) help ensure it stays useful. Lastly, since (5) downvotes aren't here, it isn't a popularity contest: people can actually debate the merits of their solution without being downvote-bombed or upvote-bombed.

8. Now, I will agree with one thing: the tree comment format was useful sometimes. It lends itself to branching conversations, while a forum structure lends itself to linear conversations. Some things are better with branching conversations, but I've rarely seen support, troubleshooting, or development discussions be as productive with such a structure as it is with a linear structure, and those things are what this forum is for.

All that said, I think link aggregators still have a place. And we do have a presence on Lemmy too. But we always wanted another forum to be a slower paced, more long-lived locale for such discussions, and this is it. Reddit dying and our own mass mod exodus just pushed it to the forefront.

[timeslip1974]

theres certainly a lack of posts/interest since comming over to the forum which can never be a good thing when it comes to getting people over to the software. Has noone considered just using Lemmy as opposed to Reddit ? Certainly stands better with the open source nature of the project