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.
True but the downside is exposure and footfall. Subreddits work well as people can dip into them easily from elsewhere in Reddit, both new users and regular contributors can keep an eye from their feeds.
A forum is on it's own and only people out looking specifically for the forum or who know about Jellyfin will go looking for it, and it won't pop up in people's feeds. The Internet used to be littered with forums, but social media is the very reason they fell out of fashion.
But users have also created a Jellyfin community on Lemmy: jellyfin@lemmy.ml
Yeah, but at the same time Reddit is kind of an awaful place for getting tech support for things like this. It's great for general discussion, but as a mod you have no real power to do things like move support requests from "general" and into a space where it will be highly visible by those willing to lend support.
Forums are better for community management than link aggregators along every axis except for footfall.
forums is all around an infinitely better solution for support and discussions on specific tech and interest. It's also more searchable and less ephemeral. At least reddit and fediverse is better then ephemeral solutions like discord.
I find the biggest problem with Lemmy and these federated apps is that search engine indexing kinda sucks right now. They get pushed so far down the bottom of the results, you only really see them when you search site:lemmy.ml or whatever.
I believe this was a good decision. Hopefully in the future search engine indexing will improve. Otherwise I can't see Lemmy being as useful as Reddit.
It makes sense for fediverse instances to have very low SEO (search engine ranking) as the content is split up across many different websites and domains.
It's also very annoying to crosslink content on the fediverse. So there is far fewer links between discussions. The network graph is way less interconnected, and that hurts search indexing.
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
Yup, "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Lemmy and the Fediverse are great, but they aren't the end all, be all solution to online content.
Lemmy and KBin are cool and all, but VERY rough around the edges so I wouldn't expect large projects or communities not directly related to then to adopt either. Keep in mind for most of these projects, they picked Reddit because the users were already there and the software was relatively polished. These are both things that many of us users are interested in improving, but that projects with communities aren't going to want to use until theyre already more advances than they are right now