I Miss the Community

[PotatoMans]

This is just a short little rant about how I miss the community. I love Jellyfin but feel disconnected. After leaving reddit there is no more engagement. I'm on that site every day just to pass the time. I don't even think about coming here. I understand Jellyfin left to protest so garbage that was happening, and this is about trying to cost them advertising money. I'm in the Plex sub to see some stuff but it is just not the same. Miss you guys

[TheDreadPirate]

The forum has definitely become a place for troubleshooting only. But our Matrix/Discord chat is pretty active, including our offtopic channel. Join us there.

https://jellyfin.org/contact

[SethBacon]

Just open the subreddit again in an unofficial capacity. I answered questions all the time over there. 'But reddit adjusted their free access API limits!' What a stupid hill on which to martyr a valuable, fun community. And you guys could walk it back by clicking a checkbox but wont for pure obstinance.

[mcarlton00]

You're significantly overstating the importance of reddit's changes. The reality is that reddit as a support forum is atrocious and we were planning to mov move away from it for roughly a year before the api changes took place.

Search was borderline useless (resulting in answering the same dozen questions over and over), there were no categories to separate post types (flair was a very half assed solution to this, and barely worked), plus a handful of other annoyances. Reddit's api changes just accelerated the transition period.

[TheDreadPirate]

Below is my opinion. I am just a mod, not a core team member.

It is not just about pure principal, but that is a significant component. First, I was not on the team when that decision was made, but I do stand by it. API limits isn't the issue on its own. The Reddit API enabled various moderation tools. Limit the API and those moderation tools become expensive to use. If you did the math, it seriously wasn't cheap to maintain the same level of API activity. The other option was for moderators to spend an unsustainable amount of their personal time manually moderating.

And what if it was only about the principal? The Jellyfin Project is all about the principal. Jellyfin was forked from Emby to maintain its freedom and privacy. Freedom, privacy, individual control over their media and their data are the core tenets of Jellyfin and Reddit has made it clear they don't give a rats butt about its users.

API limits were just the last straw in a long line of decisions Reddit has made that are counter to the principals that this project stands for.

The community didn't go away. We just moved to this forum and Matrix/Discord/IRC.

[reopen_the_sub]

I just made an account on this forum to make this post. As a full disclaimer, I don't even have a reddit account (I self-host a libreddit instance which is read-only). Reddit sucks but it has users. Nobody uses this forum at all. I check this forum once a month and there's never anything here. I don't care if there were plans to move here before or not, nobody wants to use this site and it's a ghost town.

It's especially sad when there are "calls for developers" and little update posts put on the subreddit, because nobody wants to come here. The selfhosted subreddit for example has to answer a ton of questions about jellyfin, and the answers are always pretty bad. Questions from this forum never even show up at the top of Google search, only the subreddit.

This kind of behavior is unproductive and doesn't encourage engagement. This forum is going to continue to slowly drag on and on, and years later it will still never be 10% as active as the subreddit was. But hey, some people feel that they were sticking it to the man or something, who cares what the users thought. Enjoy working by yourself and checking sub forums here that haven't had any posts for weeks. Maybe someday in the future the decision will be reversed, who knows, but man what a huge waste of time this entire thing has been. Reddit the company doesn't know you exist nor do they know that you're gone, and 99% of people will refuse to make an account here and post. I hope you guys change your minds soon because it's extremely depressing to see how dead this place is. I even went as far as to switch my music library to Navidrome because at least I see active conversations taking place there.

[kaban]

I signed up to second the sentiment, I think Reddit remains a great entry point for new users, much lower barrier of entry than a forum, greater visibility, etc etc. I love the sentiment of privacy and open source but actively keeping the subreddit closed seems unnecessary to achieve those goals. Not to mention that Discord for one isn't particularly open or privacy oriented.

[Emailluka]

I really do not see the lack of interaction in this forum. On the frontpage you have the "Latest Posts" with 10+ entrys that are not older than 7hours.
So yes.. maybe there are some sub-forums that get a little fewer attention... well.. if your interested.. interact!

[reopen_the_sub]

I really do not see the lack of interaction in this forum. On the frontpage you have the "Latest Posts" with 10+ entrys that are not older than 7hours.
So yes.. maybe there are some sub-forums that get a little fewer attention... well.. if your interested.. interact!

You might not see it but most people do, and most of those people aren't seeing any jellyfin-centric conversations because they never leave reddit, which also means there are fewer potential contributors in the loop. Nothing wrong with having your own official forum, but nobody wants to be forced to come here. Plugin development feels completely dead, and go check out the android development forum sometime - completely empty after what, a year since being created? Nobody uses this place and the hyperfixation/hardheadedness/etc of whoever responsible is directly damaging the project. There's nothing "open source" about keeping a conversation space closed on purpose despite what most of the users might want.The saddest, most pathetic thing I've ever seen is posts asking for contributors and little update alerts being made on a locked subreddit, because they know that nobody would read them here.

Remember the 90-9-1 rule. 90% of users on Reddit will see a post, 9% will click the post, 1% will register or donate or whatever the post says. This forum is the 1% that happened to not only register but also stick around. I'm not even saying to shut down this forum by the way, I'm only saying that you should open up the subreddit (checking a single box) to encourage more engagement. Kodi has official forums and a subreddit, to give an example. The only reason things have been this way for so long is stubbornness and I don't see any value-added to keeping it this way.

[LambTalk]

The only reason things have been this way for so long is stubbornness and I don't see any value-added to keeping it this way.

You were given reasons why they closed the subreddit outside of the API changes. All the API changes did was speed up the timeline.

If you want a Jellyfin subreddit for user engagement, then go make one. The team have said multiple times that they are happy for community members to open their own unofficial Jellyfin subreddit, but they are not interested in maintaining Reddit as a support channel due to the challenges that come with it.