For a second I thought they were launching their federated lemmy/kbin instance. With different communities, like “support”, “bugs”, “news”…
Would have been freaking awesome and a great use case for Lemmy and federarion.
Good for them anyway.
The return of phpbb, who had that on their 2023 bingo card?
They evaluated it and decided against it in favor of MyBB.
I’m sure Jellyfin considered the Fediverse but some projects like the idea of having more control of the community discussions they participate in so having a forum makes sense. I still think a Jellyfin community on Lemmy can thrive with an official forum in place.
This is probably true. Forum software is a lot more mature then Lemmy etc and probably a better overall option currently for a project like Jellyfin to operate. They just want something that works and provides the least amount of moderation overhead possible.
The moderating tools on MyBB is worlds away and better than Lemmy/Kbin.
Jellyfin is all about self hosting. I don’t see why they wouldn’t just create their own Lemmy instance if that was the concern. It wouldn’t need to be big if they limited the userbase
I thought this was an announcement they were moving to the Fediverse.
Seriously, how about they stand up a lemmy instance? That way peeps could follow their forums without having to travel to a proprietary place.
According to the footer they’re running MyBB so although it is more centralised, I wouldn’t call it proprietary.
What advantages would Lemmy have over the traditional style of forum for their use case?
The only real advantage I can see is they would be another mass of users on the fediverse, which is what we want I suppose. I mean I do want it to be populated, and if more people migrate, it ensures survival of their community. I don’t like how we have all scattered to the wind, but it’s their choice where to go
Ah, a traditional forum. Makes sense.
Since we’re talking about forums, who here is old enough to remember the IMDB message boards?
I’m old enough to remember dialing into different BBSs with my 14.4 Kbps modem.
These days my teenaged son is complaining that his 12GB Fortnite update isn’t downloading fast enough and he has to wait a whole 20 minutes.
I too remember those bygone days of the modem handshake sound. I wish all these kids would get off my lawn.
In all fairness, it probably did take less time to load messages on BBSs than it takes to update Fortnite :)
Ooooh! Look at you with yer fancy 14.4k modem! 13 year old me was pretty excited after swapping out a old 300 bps modem for a “blazingly fast” 1200 bps. BBS menus loaded almost instantly! Prodigy running on an IBM XT with 640k was almost usable!
Now all they need to do is move away from twitter.
Please note they also have a Mastodon account where they’ve made the same announcement:
https://mastodon.online/@jellyfin/110568058365759513
Let’s support the Fediverse or FOSS alternatives when we can.
right, i didn’t know they were in Mastodon
Kinda sad they didn’t settle for something like Lemmy, but at the same time happy that they realize the value of a forum and didn’t just move to Discord.
I can see the argument in favour of classic forums. Keeping everything chronological can help for certain kinds of discussion, and it’s easier to sort content by subforums in a way that doesn’t scale well with Lemmy. You’d need to create a lot of different communities to keep it all separated, which is messy.
The biggest thing forums lack is multi-threaded discussions. That said, simple chronological helps people at the bottom of the thread get assistance since it doesn’t disappear into the web of conversation, so this might also be an advantage of single-threaded forums.
Also, voting gamifies the whole experience, so people are reluctant to post in older threads since they won’t get “points”.
Finally, threads on Lemmy also don’t get bumped, so old content effectively dies. This sucks for troubleshooting since people very frequently have the exact same problem many years apart.
I feel like “release” and “discussion” threads would probably benefit from Lemmy’s structure to allow for deeper engagement in sub-conversations, but the core of their use is single-topic requests and, frankly, forums are better at that.
Finally. I’m happy to see them moving from the subreddit. It wasn’t terrible, but a forum will be better I think in the long run.
I’d actually love if companies/products/software went back to forums and other specialized means to get support. I hate when they refer to Reddit or worse, Discord.
I just now learned that something like jellyfin exists. That’s just awesome. I’m eager to try it out
It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out for them. I’m a fairly casual user of Jellyfin - not enough that I’d sign up on their forum or regularly read it, unless I specifically needed tech support. Unfortunately though that means that I might miss out on updates and if there was any (relatively easy) tech support questions I won’t see them and be able to contribute. I suspect that the pool of people they interact with is going to be substantially smaller on their forum than it was previously.
I’m surprised to hear people don’t like Discourse, I really enjoy the layout and find following threads much easier than a traditional forum. Maybe it’s because I was never really into traditional forums lol
an alternative is flarum. https://discuss.flarum.org/
