That’s a very nuanced analysis. I’ve explained it this way especially to people who describe themselves as “bad at computers”. Hey, give yourself a break, you’ve learned a lot about how to cope with windows. But this investment leads to a conservatism— they dont want to learn coping skills o a new system. The devil you know.

I’d just add that GUI is more discoverable. When faced with a terminal, what to do? Whereas with a GUI you have a menubar, some icons etc. The GUI gives a lot more hints.

In the terminal (which I love) it is more powerful once you know how to crack the lid.

I am not a big fan pf matrix but I think SchlidiChat was the one I used most successfully on android.

From what I have seen a main issue with Matrix is that the protocol can be implemented in bits and pieces. Which is perfectly fair but it leads to an inconsistent user experience. The default web clients you first use to try it out will be using strong encryption settings by default but then a lot of the mobile or native desktop clients don’t support encryption. So it’s difficult to get going finding cross platform apps that have all the desired functionality consistently between them.

In terms of the apps, I don’t think comparing matrix to lemmy is exactly fair for this reason.

that’s interesting… I guess a forum and a chat have a lot of similar attributes. The difference is in the presentation with forum being more static appearing. What would be the reason to deploy Matrix like that instead of using a purpose-build forum software? The most obvious would be not requiring a second account.

What’s PoC?

Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger.

matrix isn’t a forum. it’s a chat.

pipeline to fascism

I assume they are just harvesting email addresses unless a very small site

There are so many niche forums.

Here’s one I found a while ago when I was looking at repairing an old electric fan I found: Antique Fan Collector’s Forum.

In the way that people would always add “reddit” to their searches, try just adding “forum”.

I felt the same way every time I tried to use Twitter as I feel every time I try to use Mastodon. It’s either way too much or way too little. I prefer everything about the reddit/lemmy/threadiverse style.

How would we even be having this conversation on microblogging? A bunch of reposts, with or without comments, disconnected from each other… So much nicer to have a “subject” line and a page where every relevant comment is presented.

Can you imagine if the threadiverse was sorted that way? It would be insane and essentially unusable at scale

On lemmy there is a way to basically do this by toggling the filters at the top of the top of the front page. You can see how this looks form my instance: https://programming.dev/?dataType=Comment&listingType=All&sort=New

I’ve always assumed nobody every uses it like that. I guess if you were bored you might get lucky and see something that interested you, at least if it was limited to Local and you were on a good instance.