Jellyfin, we are moving away from Reddit and we are pleased to announce our new forum!
The New Jellyfin Forum | Jellyfin
official twitter announcement https://twitter.com/jellyfin/status/1670589982665322496
This is great, I'm honestly glad they have their own forum on their own page as opposed to something like Discord.
I know people will be disappointed it's not on lemmy or similar, but it's for the best to be honest. Since it's a product, it's much easier to have something they fully control and can have ownership over (including who and what can be posted there). It's a great decision by them.
As much time passes I still find forums really easy to navigate through with how categorized everything is, and I do like activity bumping up threads. Although searching through like 100+ page long threads on like xda can be a pain. Still so much better than discord for being a source of information.
Ah, yes. Nothing like bumping a five year old thread for whatever reason.
Legit funniest necro I saw recently was on one of the forums in a private tracker I'm a member of.
There were about three pages of discussion. One dude is talking back and forth with another.
Thread died down as they all do.
A few weeks ago, five years after the last post, that same dude just randomly pops in to reply to the previous post with the most casual of responses.
He wasn't even inactive on the forums. Somehow he just left that specific thread for five years.
On the topic of forums, I do like them, but I find they can often feel less "casual" than reddit/Lemmy. Different etiquette, I think.
Discord goes the complete opposite direction. It's basically IRC with some more modern features. In other words, there is nothing but the chaos of a conversation that's lasted maybe an hour or so.
How people rely on it for long term stuff, I don't know.
Although searching through like 100+ page long threads on like xda can be a pain.
Until recently, one of the official ways to get support for the email app I use (FairEmail) was to post in a 1,200-page XDA Developers thread containing 24,000 posts. https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/closed-app-5-0-fairemail-fully-featured-open-source-privacy-oriented-email-app.3824168/page-1203
Still so much better than discord for being a source of information.
Discord is atrocious as an info repository. It's useful to chat and to have a way to search what's been said, but it's horrible having to search there for that one useful message amidst all the other replies if you haven't participated. And the nature of a chat makes searching blindly very time consuming.
I welcome the return of forums. What a simpler time.
I don't-
I don't miss having to register accounts on each one, answer a bunch of questions, give a birthday, give an email, do a capta.... etc...
Just for that forum to popup on haveibeenpwned.com a few months later.
Knock on wood, password managers are a thing now, and its easy to give each forum a very unique password. But- still. Don't really miss those.
Thank you! I feel like I'm the only person who lived through that time. Having everything on one site is way simpler, reddit sucks but that doesn't mean the concept does.
I do not miss having to sign up for a specific forum, wait for the email, no email, check spam folder, no email, 15 mins later email shows up in spam, go to post, "sorry you can't make a post without interacting with at least 5 other posts", post random shit on 5 other posts, finally get to post, "this question has been answered. Post archived "
Password managers have been a thing for like 20 years?
Not only do we have password managers now, we also have OIDC. I can see a situation where a service pops up with no offering other than identity management/verification, and forum-like software can accept log-ins from that service.
Yeah but that’s the old way. Today you’d sign in with one of the big accounts, or, even better, a passkey that seamlessly moves around with you.
That's a take. For sure.
I'm so excited for forums to come back, just need to make sure there is a great mobile app to handle them.
It felt so much better to engage on forums. felt a bit slower and more intentional. And signatures, the signatures! Love their choice here.
a indie game i support refuses to use a forum, only discord. i hate searching thru threads in discord when a forum would be easier.
i wish people wouldn't shun the idea of a forum just because it's a "old idea." good on the jellyfin folks for doing this.
I miss forums too. Discord has kind of taking over that role for my friends and I, but Discord makes it feel like you are posting something with everyone staring at you through a window. I hate that it notifies that you are actively typing.
Not in this day and age where me and my grandma have our own.
There are so many, you can't keep up to date with your hobbies unless you are willing to follow 50 platforms with 60 different UIs and community rules.
I prefer the aggregation of data like fediverse where we can follow topics and not platforms.
Strange they don't even mention Fediverse. It just felt too dated.
I can understand wanting to bring your discussion hub in house to avoid something like what's happened. But bringing it into essentially an old school phpBB forum is certainly, ah, a choice.
There is nothing wrong with forums, they've existed (and continue to exist) for decades. They are a great way to have information easily searchable, as well as easily post and contribute.
Just because they aren't carded like twitter or lemmy doesn't mean they are dated. Everything has it's place and every tool has a job. In this case, that place is a forum and the tool is phBB. Also, I wouldn't call it "old school" as the most recent update is from May 21, 2023.
Not everything has to be federated, and nothing is stopping anyone from creating an instance for Jellyfin ( !jellyfin@lemmy.ml ) . But for the official instance, having it hosted by them, on their hardware, that they control, it's a great choice to use a forum.
It could be argued that web forums were an answer to older system that came before it and the problems with them. Systems like Usenet and Fidonet BBS's were federated system, and web forums are actually newer than that.
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.
The moderating tools on MyBB is worlds away and better than Lemmy/Kbin.
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
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.
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
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.
Totally agree, it pains me to see communities move to Discord.
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 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?
Agreed. Lowkey disappointed.
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
Even tho they didn't move to the fediverse, I'm glad they left reddit.
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.
The advantage I see with the Lemmy approach over Discord is comment longevity. At Discord your comment has little time before it falls off the radar. It's longer with Twitter, but still short. At Lemmy you get a reasonable trade-off for comment longevity and convenience. On a phpBB style forum comment longevity can be quite long, but you have to go to a dedicated site with it's own address which lacks convenience.
Some subs had existing fourms that had some loose affiliation so I've saw some migrate that way, but it is weird to make a new fourm instead of something Federated, but if it works for them so be it.
TIL about Jellyfin. Is it like Plex? Better? I assume it's solid since everyone knows about it?
It's plex but open source and without any sort of subscription. I have been using it for a couple of years and never had a problem
i never heard of it and have been using plex for years. i love that its open source. definitely checking it out. plex has been driving me nuts with all the extra crap theyve been adding. i just want my media
Does it work outside of the home network as well as plex does? Also, do you think it is worth switching if I already bought the lifetime plex pass?
Imho, it is better. Being free is an extra bonus
It's a Plex alternative, I don't know about better. IIRC it's a fork of Emby. I try both usually a couple times a year, but there's always something that gives me issue and I just stay with Plex.
Also, seems kind of silly, but the name is just dumb. Neither my wife or I want to audibly say "let's watch something on Jellyfin".
Way better!
It's great software but for me it's missing at least 1 must-have feature, being intro detection & skipping.
If you want to get into them you can run them both on the same library and just compare which you like best
There is a plugin you can install for that, but it is a bit finicky:
Like plex yes, better, well it depends. But I do use it for myself instead of plex
As long as the forums are easily searchable then this is a good move. It looks like the subreddit is in read-only mode so we haven't lost any knowledge yet. That data should be preserved elsewhere, just in case the subreddit becomes unviewable.
And they announce it on Twitter? 🙄
They announced it on their website. Why OP chose to link the tweet instead is beyond me.
It's great that they're going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don't miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse's "anyone can post there" system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, "one login to access everything" systems.
Since I'm now using a password manager I've been having less issue with creating as many accounts as needed.
But I do agree it'd be great to have a single sign on.
If you are looking for a little bit of "extra" to go with your password manager, check out firefox relay. You can create emails that forward to your real email without exposing it. They allow you to block emails entirely, or just promotions. Their paid option is like $12/year (USD) and allows unlimited masks, and allowing you to create your own relay subdomain (like (whatever I decide)@dusty.mozmail.com). It's definitely worth the relatively tiny charge for the paid version.
There is also a relay service with Cloudflare but I've not tried it out yet. But having an email like 0tK8h384jkcxas@mozmail.com saved to my password manager is no big deal.
But then you have the same centralization issue - and it's even worse, if the central authority has a fit for some reason about you, now you're locked out of many completely unrelated sites.
Federated logins are a thing! The challenge is finding one that's open and privacy-friendly. Unfortunately the widest-used ones come from entities like Google or Facebook with a marked interest in preying on user data. Mozilla used to maintain a federated system (Persona) but they discontinued it. I know Ubuntu offers one for all their services (bug trackers, forums etc.) but not sure if it's open to third party systems. Perhaps there are others worth using.
Alternatively, you can aggregate all your logins in one place across devices and browsers. Firefox Accounts are a very simple method of doing this (presuming you use Firefox everywhere), and you can choose to only sync logins rather than bookmarks, plugins etc. And of course there are other dedicated password managers, with or without online sync, open or closed source, self-hosted or private hosted etc.
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.
@narc0ticbird @c1b0 a #phpBB -like #forum software that works with #ActivityPub would be pretty sweet. Surprised that doesn't exist yet, as it'd be a perfect format to work with ActivityPub.
It does exist in a manner of speaking, closer to us than you think!
lemmyBB is Lemmy but with the UI of phpBB!
I can definitely see something like that being made as ActivityPub builds up steam
MyBB is a weird choice in 2023
MyBB is great for niche/specific content. Great moderator tools and everyone knows how to navigate a freakin' forum.
It’s got a long history of vulns due to its antiquated codebase, there are some nice alternatives with more stable codebases
Then for paid alternatives:
That said, as long as they keep MyBB up to date it should be fine
Good they left reddit, less good they aren't having an official presence on a federated platform. I no longer have any intention of creating community-specific accounts (forums or whatever) anymore so unlikely to participate.
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/
Good for them. Hopefully this will make it much easier to consolidate guides and helpful info for Jellyfin.
Having worked with both as a dev, can't really understand MyBB over phpBB. I found it much friendlier to both the users and the devs
I've tried both as a forum admin. I think it's just a matter of preference at this point. phpBB is still sporting that old compact style, which kinda makes it look dated.
I wonder why those chose mybb over discourse. I definitely prefer the latter.
I find discourse incredibly unfriendly to use. Ardour use it for their forum and it puts me off visiting.
Discourse is impossible once it gets to a certain size. Four groups trying to have four different conversations on top of each other.
I personally find it very easy to use, but to each their own! Is there any forum software you prefer?
Having never used Discourse before, I don't like that the default view is "Latest" and when you view "Categories" it only fits 1 at a time on screen for mobile, since it previews all the top posts still.
The MyBB instance Jellyfin has set up is much more user friendly if you're trying to get help with a specific thing.
People don't doom-scroll on forums like they do other social media, so I don't see the need to see all the latest "Why doesn't my Jellyfin work?" posts.
Here I am wishing they had chosen VBulletin or Invision, lol. I think it's just a case of what I'm more familiar with in terms of forums though.
I get their decision, forum software is stable, has plugins and tools to help with moderation, has been around a long time and they don't have to worry about things like LemmyNSFW or other instances they don't want the hassle of because they control all the content that shows up in a forum space.
I'm just glad it's not a fucking Discord thing.
I think vBulletin is - at best - dormant these days. I spent about 10 years on a vBulletin-powered forum before I went over to reddit... 12 years ago.
I definitely agree with them not using Lemmy. I think one centralised forum makes sense for large projects to use. Much easier to organize and manage.
Well it's a good decision. As they say, never put all your eggs in one basket, especially if you have no control over the basket.
The old saying!
It mostly comes down to personal preference honestly.
Jellyfin is open-source and more focused on your own selfhosted media. I, too, bought a Plex pass years ago and have enjoyed Plex but they've been adding a bunch of crap to their interface.
I'm big on free open-source software but I won't be biased and say that Jellyfin has some rough edges, but it works well enough for me to watch movies with my wife. Plex is a bit smoother and more production-ready for those power users that host Plex for several others.
I'd encourage you to try it out if for nothing more than exposing yourself to alternatives.
Also a Plex lifetime user. I tried jellyfin not too long ago to see what the fuss was all about. I had heard that they handled her tonemapping better.
The interface is different but more or less just as good as Plex. It's definitely more for the person that likes to dive in the details of the config of their server. For example, you need to setup your own domain for external users to connect to. It's not done automatically like on Plex.
The focus on your content vs the "free" content Plex shoves in our face is nice I must admit.
Just a question of preference. In the end I stuck it out with Plex... For now.
Plex is better overall currently imo having tried both recently. It's just simply more mature software where things just work and it has a ton more features.
Jellyfin is pretty awesome though in its own right and heading in a great direction.
Same situation
I'm happy that forums are making a come back. Missed visiting all my early forums, in my early Internet days.
I just now learned that something like jellyfin exists. That's just awesome. I'm eager to try it out
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.
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.
This reminded me announcement of Gear Grinding Games about moving from reddit... but this happen long before blackout.
Some people have luck or talent to feel the $h17 before something happen.
I know people are okay with them not integrating ActivityPub, but personally it would have meant me participating as apposed to not.
I have been eyeing jellyfin for years and easier access to their official forum would have been great.
easier access to their official forum would have been great.
What's "not easy" about it? Having to click on their website instead of your own? Having to use a usernamd and password like literally every other site you log into (use a password manager)? Needing an email address (use a throwaway or something like firefox relay).
I get that people love the latest "shiny new thing" (lemmy) but that doesn't suddenly make everything else "difficult". Also for the vast majority of people, signing up to a forum is much easier than finding an lemmy instance, figuring out how to browse other instances, figuring out the layout (being cards isn't always ideal), figuring out the (sometimes slow defintely clunky) search, etc...
In this instance, having a forum that they control, in a format that the vast majority of their userbase is used to, is the way to go. They are a company after all. So providing the best experience for their users should be quite high on their priority list, not using "latest shiny thing that's still extremely niche"
Aand that's why we need to make it easier for them so we don't scatter too much in the long run.
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.
At the same time, it might not fit them. Lemmy is a link aggregator, which seems like extra functionality that they don't really need, not when existing forum software will do what they need, while also being more stable/mature.
Not good enough of an excuse, IMO. Link aggregation is essentially a normal post with just a link to somewhere else, which you can totally do in any forum... and it is no bloat at all.
I believe the reasoning was more like "we don't want to do any federation, because the barrier of having to create a new account will free us from trolls/bots/etc".
Add in the fact they'd end up having to defederate a lot of instances due to trolls and whatnot, and it's much better that they run it on their own site. It's much better from a moderation viewpoint for them. I know people will be all upset here, but it's honestly for the best.
AskHistorians, AkScience, AMA, AskReddit, Ask*, and the myriad of semi-official support subreddits for services, games, eyc. all would like to disagree that Reddit/Lemmy is a link aggregator exclusively.
I hope mods can restrict the types of content users can post in communities in fututure.
The return of phpbb, who had that on their 2023 bingo card?
They evaluated it and decided against it in favor of MyBB.