I’ll start:

  • RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
  • XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
  • IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
  • Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)
  • Nyoelle@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite… how different those are.

    And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can’t easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.

    • alongwaysgone@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      It’s also very hard, if not impossible in some cases to find old conversations on discord, vs forums where they’re mostly preserved for eternity.

    • Sordid@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there’s some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.

      • Kaldo@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        That’s what I used twitter for tbh. Since everyone is on it it’s easy to follow people, get instant updates and maybe even discover something new through the people you follow and their likes. It’s really a shame it went to shit, it was the lurkers perfect tool, especially when it comes to artists or content creators.

        • Kajo [he/him] 🌈@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Not everyone is on twitter, but lots (all?) of Content Management Systems and blogs have a RSS feed.

          As an academic, I’m syndicated to several labs and research groups which have their own websites, but don’t care about being visible on Twitter.

  • mim@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Agree on RSS.

    Don’t have enough experience with XMPP.

    IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)

    Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it’s what old school forums lacked.

    • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      The real problem with IRC had always been that it didn’t really scale. It’s fine for a few hundred people, but eventually shit just breaks.

  • Kodachrome@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I’ve ever seen.

    • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Microsoft Outlook, from what I’ve seen of it, is horrible compared to Thunderbird. Why anyone would use the former is beyond me. You can’t even easily see message headers, so how the hell are you supposed to know whether a message is legit?

  • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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    1 year ago

    USENET. Replacements aren’t distributed, or make discussion group discovery difficult, or don’t have decent native desktop clients, or some combination of those.

      • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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        1 year ago

        Because clients can present very different interfaces, it’s difficult to point to a single guide, but the basic principles are simple enough: get a client, point it at a server ( https://www.eternal-september.org/ provides a free one if your ISP no longer has its own, but it doesn’t carry the alt.binaries subhierarchy), download the list of available groups, subscribe to a few, read, and enjoy.

        As for which client, I use Pan, but that’s Linux-specific. For other OSs, I haven’t a clue. If you happen to use Thunderbird for email, I think it still has the necessary support.

        Keep in mind, though: USENET died in part from lack of good moderation options, so all you can do about bad actors and spam floods is block messages from those posters from being visible in your client. Moderated groups did exist, but the system basically amounted to one person having to okay every single message posted, which meant there was a single point of failure. For instance, when the moderator of rec.arts.anime.info died unexpectedly, it became impossible for anyone to post to the group.

        90% of the news hierarchy is a wasteland these days anyway—I use it mostly for monitoring some of the mailing lists from my Linux distro, which happen to have a USENET repeater. The only other area doing well is the binaries groups.

        If you’re interested in running a server, start by making sure you have a good-sized data pipe—I’m not sure what the average size of a feed is now, but ten years ago it was measured in the tens of gigabytes per day (mostly binaries).

  • mormegil@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    uMatrix browser extension. It has been marked archived by Gorhill, last release is two years old, you are supposed to just use uBlock [Origin]. However, it still (luckily) works fine and is exactly what I want. (Sure, I won’t install this for my parents.) The GUI to simply choose what you want the site to be allowed to do is perfect.

  • Black616Angel@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Forums and Wikis vs. Discord

    Yes I know, they shouldn’t serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays people communities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.

  • Kichae@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’ll second IRC. I don’t need my chat to be e2ee, and encryption has made Matrix a much bigger pain in the ass than it’s worth to me.

    Forums, too, though I’m a big fan of the distributed social media space. Lemmy has an experimental front-end based on phpBB, and I would love to see someone take that idea and go whole hog on it to create proper federated forums.

    • alongwaysgone@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I understand why I should care about encryption, in theory. In practice, 90% of the time, I don’t. If I’m texting my kids ‘hey where are you?’ or my husband: what do you want for dinner?’ or a friend, ‘hey, come hang out!’ - I just don’t care. And putting up with all the hassles that come with encryption via matrix… It’s just, generally, far more hassle than it’s worth, IMHO.

    • privsecfoss@feddit.dkOP
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      1 year ago

      Yes, often overlooked. And, I hear, almost impossible to selfhost these days without a degree in CS, because “we block all non big tech e-mail providers”.

      • mim@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Probably even with a CS degree.

        It’s just a hassle to maintain, and too mission critical to have it go down.

        I wonder if the same won’t happen with the fediverse, if we let some instances get too large.