this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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You are relying on some random people being around to serve as your search engine. Cmon. You can do the same thing here with megathreads and wikis. Hell you can also ask around on megathreads and people will link you. Nothing you describe here is unique to forums.
The same happened in forums. Even in forums with megathreads like these, people asked the same question again and again. This is a matter of culture, not of software. You just happened to find a forum with a good culture and assumed it's the result of the software.
Just build that community here and you have the same results AND federation with other topics if needed.
Also I lowkey find the expectation that you rely on people with thousands of bookmarks to be around to point you to a page in one gigathread to be quite disturbing.
Let's say you find a month old discussion with a reply to a question you've got but you have further questions, here's the major difference.
On Reddit/Lemmy you have two options, you reply to that same discussion and only the person you replied to knows you replied, no one comes to help OR you create a new discussion leading to the knowledge on that subject being split up between two discussions, meaning that the next person who has the same issue will probably find that first thread and repeat the same process.
On an old school forum you just reply to the original discussion, it gets bumped up, everyone sees that you have further questions, no need for a new discussion, all knowledge is in the same place, next person who needs an answer to that question now finds all the info they need in the same place, no need to ask further questions of the issue is resolved, if it isn't they just bump that thread and more knowledge is added.
Megathreads are locked at the top and people see new replies only if they bother looking. Nested comments mean that you need to go through all branches to check what's new (hell, nested comments leads to people repeating the same thing as others,in the same thread, at the same time without realizing it because the same discussion is happening simultaneously in multiple branches!). Wikis are just a third party solution without any discussion happening and where only the people who bother editing the Wiki (or that are allowed to) add to it (which isn't as easy as just writing a message on a forum).
Edit: Just want to say that I agree with you on something though, having to rely on other users can be a pain on forums but that's mostly a forum internal search engine issue that has always been an issue...
Let's say you find a year old discussion, you don't bother to read 120 pages, so you just ask your question at the end. If you're lucky enough not to be in a forum that won't flame you for necroing and not searching, you're given a link to a page. You visit that page but don't find the answer. Then ask again. Maybe this time you get a correct link, or maybe you get flamed this time.
See how it's easy to make hypotheticals? Not to disrespect your preferences, but this approach is downright inane. What you'e describing is working despite the software, not because of it. As others mentioned in this thread, you get the exact opposite reactions to another forum about automobiles.
You know what is superior to this? Having a lemmy community about this one motorcycle model, with an FAQ or wiki on the side. People can ask a question as a new thread, and guess what, people can link them to a previously answered thread, just like they would link them to a specific page in your gigathread. Nothing functionally changes here. The lack of threading or sorting by new comments doesn't change the experience. It's the willingness to be nice to newbies that matters.
What you're describing is simply changing a lemmy community into a single thread in a bbforum. It is an objectively worse scenario.
In lemmy you start with a generic topic. Say, automobiles. If it starts getting too busy, you start two new communities, cars and motorcycles, if those get too busy, you expand to brands and models. Each of them nicely organized and easily searchable by titles.
What I see here is a community that coalesced around an old forum software and did the best it could. Unlike most others, it happened to have the right people to make the best of it and find a working system with what they got. But again, it's not the software, it's the people, which is proven by so many similar communities in similar software just failing miserable instead.
I would argue that this community would work much better with a software much better suited for it.